I can't recall where I found this piece in the run-up to the 2004 election... I've had deep reservations about the long term prospects of Nationalism, as I believe that in many ways it is like religeon, more a source of division than unity. My thoughts about the misuse and misunderstanding of what "Patriotism" really are have been so well covered by Jed, that I could only weaken it with my own thoughts... comment on this one PLEASE!!!
by Jed Alexander
Patriotism makes people stupid. I don’t have statistics on this, it’s not scientific but purely anecdotal; put a flag in someone’s hand or affix it to their windshield and their IQ drops like mercury in a thermometer, like an egg timer rolling back the minutes. In the presence of such an unrelenting daily barrage of effusive patriotic demonstration, I feel the fog building in my head like a thick, testosterone musk, and I must retreat as soon as possible to the womb of my flagless apartment to retrieve all that remains of my ability to reason. Dubya, despite recent, blind support, is still a dumb guy with a sense of morality better suited to an elementary school playground than to world politics. We’re having a war and our adversary is—an abstraction? It’s a War on Terror, which is as close to monsters under the bed as we’ve come in this country since McCarthyism and the communist bugbears. Terrorism, terrorizing, it’s all so terrifically terrifying that no one seems to have actually defined the concept. When we were having a war on—a thing, not an organization, or government, or individual, but a thing—at the end of the last century, at least we’d narrowed it down to something that we could objectify. Reagan’s White House staged implicit metaphorical combat against substances proclaimed to be illegal by U.S. law—at least that’s what I understood The War on Drugs to be about, as much as it could be understood, assuming it wasn’t a War on Cough Syrup. But having a War on Terror is like having a War on Sadness. For Freedom. Because we love America, and—everything it represents? But what does it represent? And, more importantly, what do all those flags represent, that people seem to feel so strongly about that they’re willing to give up IQ points for its advocacy?
Separation of Church and State Except When Applied to Pledges of Allegiance and U.S. Currency
The original Pledge of Allegiance was published in the Boston-based Youth’s Companion in 1923 for students to repeat in honor of Columbus Day. It went like this: "I pledge allegiance to my Flag and the Republic for which it stands—one nation indivisible—with liberty and justice for all." Notice the absence of “under God.” President Eisenhower signed the amendment adding “under God” in 1953, thus rendering the pledge unconstitutional. In Eisenhower’s words, "In this way we are reaffirming the transcendence of religious faith in America's heritage and future; in this way we shall constantly strengthen those spiritual weapons which forever will be our country's most powerful resource in peace and war."
Notice two key phrases here, “religious faith” and “spiritual weapons.” By requiring this Pledge to be recited in all public schools and proclaiming it to be an affirmation of religious faith, it became a contradiction to the Constitution’s original mandate for a separation of church and state. In 1955, Eisenhower signed a law further requiring that all currency display the motto "In God We Trust” (some coins prior to 1955 had displayed this motto, but not paper money, and certainly not all currency). "Spiritual weapons” is, in some ways, an even more frightening abstraction than a War on Terror. The phrase suggests that religious practice was a way to combat our Cold War adversaries, reinforcing the idea of religion as patriotism. Worse, it added a strange aura of violence to religion, with the odd and perhaps unintended implication that you could somehow pray your enemies into submission. So what are you pledging allegiance to when you recite the Pledge? The Pledge itself is a contradiction in what it claims to be pledging allegiance to. If you were really allied to what the flag represents, assuming the flag represents, in some part, the Constitution, then you couldn’t, in good conscience, recite such a pledge. It would be unpatriotic. Also notice that you are pledging to the republic for which it stands. Not the democracy but the republic. What’s a republic?
re·pub·lic - n. A political order in which the supreme power lies in a body of citizens who are entitled to vote for officers and representatives responsible to them.
Not to be confused with:
de·moc·ra·cy - n. pl. de·moc·ra·cies Government by the people, exercised either directly or through elected representatives.
American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language. 4th ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000.
Note the difference: A government in which “the supreme power lies in a body of citizens” as opposed to a government “by the people.” The “body of citizens” in this case consists of members of the Electoral College. Members of the Electoral College are nominated by their respective parties at state party conventions or by a vote of the party's central committee, in their respective states. The Electoral votes determine the presidency, not the popular vote, theoretically—even if the popular vote demonstrates a contrary opinion. Do you know all of this already? Good. American government is sometimes so absurdly complex, with it’s House Majority Whips and filibusters, that I, for one, have a hard time keeping it all straight. If you know this already just think of it as a summary of facts presented in order to prove a point.
Do You Love America, America?
So the U.S. has a tendency to be more democratic than many other nations, though we’re by no means a true or absolute democracy. In fact, real communism, not to be confused with socialism or Stalinism or Maoism, but actual communism—communes, kibbutzim, communities that are more micro-governed—tend to be closer to true democracies than large bodies of government. And we have a tendency towards allowing greater freedoms than many other nations do, however you choose to define freedom. But we still live in a very stratified, class-conscious society in which, depending on where you grew up, or your family’s economic or educational background, freedom isn’t always an evenly-rationed commodity. What does it mean to “love America?” When you say that you “love America,” you might as well be saying that you “love the equator.” But who’s to say that you can’t love geographical phenomena? Far be it from me to deny you your amorous feelings toward land formations. Hey, I love America too. Well, most of it. And then the flag; it’s never meant one thing, or meant the same thing to any one person or nation. It’s a very weighty symbol to lug around—too much baggage for me to stand behind in any consistent way. My feelings about the flag change constantly. Right now they lean heavily towards annoyance, so I tend to prefer my environment flag-free. My problem is that most people just wave it around thoughtlessly, not willing to wade past a certain depth to discover what the thing really represents. So much thoughtlessness brandished with so much aggressive bravado can be a dangerous thing.
September 11 Post Script: the Bulldozer of Fate
Post September 11, there were two mind-numbing and brain-deadening phrases echoed by individuals and throughout the media in response to a question that will never have an easy or simple answer: Why did they do it? The moony-like answers that were typically repeated seemed to reveal a collective regression to our earliest childhood responses to fear, and in some cases, to those of our hominid and Neanderthal ancestors, many of whom seem to have recently become my neighbors. These two phrases were: “They did it because we love freedom,” and “evil.” Yes. simply, “evil.”
What is “evil” anyway? Once again we are confronted with elementary school playground morality, now reinforced by the likes of Dan Rather and the “liberal” media. Since when was the media so “liberal” all of the sudden? MSNBC? AOL Time Warner? These guys are not exactly great bastions of liberty. Their primary motivation is to sell stuff. If anything in a news broadcast compromises this in anything more than a marginal way, do you really think they’d air it? *This includes the influence of advertising from other corporations, who own other corporations, etc. And don’t let 60 Minutes fool you. They go after the little fish, someone who AOL Time Warner doesn’t own, or who is otherwise expendable. It just wouldn’t make any sense for them to cut their own throats, so they compromise. Are they impartial, or without editorial bias? Hmm, using the big “E” word repeatedly in a single news broadcast to demonize a group of individuals, without even questioning their motivation sounds a little suspect to me. If exploiting the labor and resources of less powerful nations with less powerful corporate sponsorship isn’t evil, then there’s no such thing as evil, which, fundamentally, there isn’t. Multinational corporations have no moral compass, just a bottom line. It’s an absence of morality, not malevolence that compels them to act in the ways that they do. Not to say that malevolence doesn’t exist, just that it’s not an absolute. There is no such thing as absolute evil, or absolute virtue. Even if there were, it would just be too easy. Too dismissive. Once you’ve proclaimed someone or something to be evil, you’ve given up your option to delve any further into the question. Evil is beyond understanding. There’s no practical way to apply the concept, so it always remains conveniently elusive, conveniently outside of everyday experience—conveniently somebody else’s problem.
As for “loving freedom” and this assertion that somebody might just have a problem with that, this just further attests to the alien-ness of the motivations of someone we’ve decided to call “evil.” It’s just beyond our comprehension, so why bother trying? Who can figure evil? So what’s freedom? And what’s it mean to love freedom? Is it capitalism? Is it wealth (or the capacity to accumulate wealth)? Is that freedom or decadence? I’d imagine a lot of Maoists and Taliban would consider the way we live as decadent as we might consider a guy with a stretch limousine and solid gold bathtub. Neither of us is necessarily any more or less free for the stuff that we own. Is it freedom of speech and assembly? You can scream as loud as you want in this country about as much as you want, but that doesn’t mean what you have to say will end up on the six o’clock news, especially if MSNBC, Time Warner AOL, Arthur Daniels, Midlin, or Amgen have anything to say about it. But then if your name is Tim Forbes or Ross Perot…
Ok, so in some ways, we may have a tendency toward having more freedoms than the citizens of many other nations. Our average standard of living is considerably higher, for a nation as large as ours, especially when it comes to having our basic needs met (food, shelter, clothing, and medical care). Assuming that, by virtue of our citizenship, we’re all contributors to this great nation of ours in a way that certainly feels democratic, (however it may not be), if you’re a proud contributor then you’re willing to take on all the more responsibility for our country’s bullying and exploitation of our neighbor nations, aren’t you? If you’re a true patriotic citizen? I think that we’re supporting the right actions, for the wrong reasons. Of course bombing the shit out of Afghanistan is the most patriotic thing we can do. Not because of terrorism, or the Taliban, or Osama bin Laden, but because that’s just what we do, and do best. It’s Manifest Destiny in action. So please, let’s dispense with these highly suspect arguments about “loving freedom” and “evil” and so on, and get right to the meat of the matter. If you can’t supply us with oil, cheap electronics, Nikes, and designer clothing, then let the bulldozer of fate bury you alive in the ditch of obsolescence. God bless America.
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