And they don't even know how offensive it is

A new single written by Barry "More than a Woman" Gibb for Barbra "Talk-to-the-Nose-Cause-the-Brain-ain't-Working" Streisand to sing on her new anti-American anti-Iraq-reconstruction album is entitled "Stranger in a Strange Land." Now, I know he didn't come up with the phrase – it comes from Exodus – but those words will always be associated with Robert A. Heinlein, the überpatriotic "dean of modern science fiction." (They can probably be excused for not knowing that; I doubt either of them has ever heard of RAH.)

Why would Heinlein be furious to see his title appropriated by the Hate-America-First crowd? Here's part of what he said in an address at the Naval Academy 32 years ago:

Today, in the United States, it is popular among self-styled "intellectuals" to sneer at patriotism. They seem to think that it is axiomatic that any civilized man is a pacifist, and they treat the military profession with contempt. "Warmongers" – "Imperialists" – "Hired killers in uniform" – you have all heard such sneers and you will hear them again. One of their favorite quotations is: "Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel."

What they never mention is that the man who made that sneering remark was a fat, gluttonous slob who was pursued all his life by a pathological fear of death.

I propose to prove that [the] baboon on watch [to warn his herd of danger] is morally superior to that fat poltroon who made that wisecrack.

Patriotism is the most practical of all human characteristics.

But in the present decadent atmosphere patriots are often too shy to talk about it – as if it were something shameful or an irrational weakness.

But patriotism is NOT sentimental nonsense. Nor something dreamed up by demagogues. Patriotism is as necessary a part of man's evolutionary equipment as are his eyes, as useful to the race as eyes are to the individual.

A man who is NOT patriotic is an evolutionary dead end. This is not sentiment but the hardest of logic.

Read the whole thing here. Make sure you read all the way to the story at end. If you can finish without a lump in your throat, you're a tougher man than I am.

At the time Heinlein spoke those words in 1973, America was learning the hard way the consequences of a hobbled and despised soldiery. Yet these buffoons, these paid performers, actually believe that they are morally superior to the hardnosed, patriotic men who bear the painful duty of ordering young men into danger. They joggle the elbows of the generals, because they are smugly certain that the cure for all human ills lies in buying their CDs and watching their movies. No, Babs and Barry, there are human situations that cannot be sung away, and every note you warble to demoralize our nation may result in another dead soldier. An army that is continually second-guessed is an army destined for body bags.