The Rise of Nationalism

I don't think that nation states were invented on purpose, I think they kind of evolved. Before there were nation states there were empires, before there were empires there were city states, and before there were city states there was tribal feudalism. The natural drift seems to be from small organizations to larger organizations although, when one of the larger organizations crashes, the drift can go the other way for awhile. When that happens, we consider it a step backwards, as in: "When the Roman Empire went down, Europe reverted to feudalism." I seem to remember learning something in school about the rise of nationalism, but I don't remember when that happened. I'm pretty sure, though, that it didn't happen suddenly all at once.

What happened in the U.S. doesn't exactly fit the model. Here there was a fragment of the British Empire that split off and went it's own way. There still was a British Empire, but 13 of its colonies had become sovereign states and immediately joined together to form a federal union. Britain continued to have an empire until after World War II, when they let all their other colonies go because they had become more trouble than they were worth. As the U.S. annexed territory it was starting to look like an empire, but then the territories became states one by one, and there was no one left to rule but each other. As I said in my last blog, most people think of he U.S. as a mighty nation, but it's not really, at least not according to Fred Sears' definition of a nation. Too bad old Fred isn't here now so we could ask him about it. If he's still alive he must be around a hundred years old, but some people are still reasonably sharp at that age.

I agree with Ken that fandom and patriotism are somewhat similar. I read somewhere that competitive sports originated as practice training for warfare.

I was just kidding about the Smith & Wesson stock. It did seem for awhile that, every time Obama made a speech about gun control, Smith & Wesson Stock went up, but that could have been just a coincidence. I made a similar joke about Obama being responsible for the two consecutive hard winters we had after he was elected the first time. I figured that, if people could blame W. Bush for Hurricane Katrina, why can't I blame Obama for those two hard winters? After all, he did promise to do something about global warming if he was elected. It occurred to me that might make a good bumper sticker: "Vote Republican - Bring back global warming", but I never followed up on it, and now it's too late.

I read that thing about the cookies, but I didn't pay it any mind. If there are any cookies attached to our blog, we didn't put them there, so it's not our responsibility to inform anybody about them.