Brooks on Civic Religion: The Shorter

Photo by Yong Kim for Philadelphia Inquirer, used for today's Brooks column. The Times caption (not the Inquirer's) reads: "Some members of the Woodrow Wilson High School football team in Camden, N.J., knelt during the national anthem last Saturday," where "some" means "at least one fewer than all". Could Brooks be writing his own captions? I can't imagine any normal person would have done that.

Shorter David Brooks, "The Uses of Patriotism", September 16 2016:

America's high school football teams need to stand up and sing the national anthem before the game rather than kneeling in silence in emulation of 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick. Because if they don't they are violating the Commandments of our Civic Religion, as Martin Luther King understood, which is all about our radical hope and desire for change and social justice and furious penchant for criticizing our society, so if you do something so rude you'll bring a terrible curse and God will hate us and Donald Trump's nationalism, which is the dark opposite of America's traditional universal nationalism, will win.  

Not everybody in his audience thought America's traditional universal nationalism was all that universal.

Read this twice looking for "slavery," but did not see it. Weird. https://t.co/op1SoQoXQT

— Derek Willis (@derekwillis) September 16, 2016

Cross-posted at The Rectification of Names.