On
Patriotism
3/3/07
One morning
last week,
over my
banana and bran muffin
(that’s right, banana and bran muffin, not Krispy Kreme
topped with bacon and
chased with a Mountain Dew), I caught a commercial for that
night’s Deal
or No Deal.
It was touted as an
“all-American” Deal
or No
Deal,
and aside from the fact
that the contestant pictured was wearing a gaudy stars-and-stripes
button-down, I’m not sure what the fuck that meant.
And I’m still not sure, because I
didn’t watch the show. Maybe
there were a couple of Marines in the
audience. Maybe the
Banker guy was
wearing an Uncle-Sam hat.
If someone dressed
as
Andrew
Jackson had burst into the
Banker’s darkened office and kicked his ass, then that would
have made for a
truly “all-American” Deal
or No Deal — but I’m reasonably certain that this did not
happen.
I'm
Andrew Jackson.
Woooo. I am for real.
Remember
the last
paragraph?
Good. Then
now would be the time
to tell you that, aside from being funny, it did two things.
Firstly,
it referenced Jackson’s
1832 veto of the charter renewal of the Second Bank of the United
States.
Secondly,
it served to split the readers of this
essay into two groups.
The first group
consists
of
people who didn’t get the joke
until I explained it, were pissed off that I made the getting of a
joke
dependent on obscure historical trivia, and subsequently labeled me an
“elitist”
brimming with “fancy book learning” who is
primarily concerned with “showing
off how smart I am.” The
second group
consists of people who did
get the
joke, but are appalled that I referenced Andrew Jackson in a
complimentary
way, seeing as how he owned slaves, hated Indians, thought war was
cool, etc.
The first group is
called
Conservatives, and the second is
called Liberals. Both
of their reactions
to the joke were equally stupid, for reasons that will be explained
over the
course of this essay.
But, in addition to
being
stupid, both reactions were
also — in their own ways — patriotic. The
conservative reaction
despised the smug
exclusivity of the act of needling outsiders from within a sphere of
knowledge
to which most people, for whatever reason, don’t have access. The
liberal reaction
despised the apparent
celebration of a demagogic President who was, in other ways, equally
smug and
exclusionary. Both
reactions spring from
readers who have internalized the inherently American principle
dictating that
people privileged by historical accident should not be tolerated in
their
attempts to lord it over others. Though
the two reactions are — currently — cultural opposites,
they are also different
versions of the same thing.
Each reaction
encapsulates something that its respective
reactors applaud the progress of, and dream for the
continuance of,
whenever
they see anything that seems to them to signify America. For
some, apparently, a
starts-and-stripes
shirt on a game-show contestant achieves this — Deal
or No Deal wouldn’t
make commercials like that if
it didn’t
boost ratings — while for others, such a display approaches the
parodic.
And this is the
problem
with
symbols in general. Display
one on your shirt, or your
commercial, or both, and your audience will take it to mean whatever
they wish
it to mean. Tell
them what you
think it means, and
they will either
agree or disagree, but in either case this obliterates the necessity of
the
symbol itself. You
only need a symbol
when the idea it stands for is busy doing something else.
When people ask me
whether I'm for or against
flag-burning, I always say the same thing: that I am for
burning the flag for a good
reason, and against
burning it for
a bad
reason. This
response may seem to be dodging
the question, but it isn’t — it’s
refocusing the question into a more productive
one: what would or would not constitute a good reason to burn
the flag? If
you aren’t
having a conversation about
this, then you’re only having a conversation about the
action, instead of the
idea, and that’s pointless. There
are,
of course, some who wish to pass a Constitutional Amendment against
flag
burning — which, I guess, implies that they would never admit
of there being a
viable reason to do so. If
pressed,
though, even they would have to concede the possibility
of the government someday
doing
something so odious that any reasonable person would consider burning
the flag
in protest to be a viable option.
The
question itself is meaningless; it's like asking whether you
are for or
against punching people — the only possible answer is that it
depends on what the
person did. Yes,
some people have a much
longer list
than others of actions
that merit a punch in the face, but the fact remains.
Everybody knows
that
Samuel
Johnson called patriotism “the
last refuge of scoundrels” (or at least knows the expression
itself, if not who
said it — sorry about the fancy book learning again).
What most
don’t realize,
however, is that this was not a comment about patriotism,
but rather one about scoundrels. It
means that
people who cannot justify their ideas — or
themselves — by any other methods will
rely at the last gasp upon emotional appeals to group unity. If
emotional appeals to group unity were all that patriotism ever
consisted of,
then this famous quote would
serve
equally well as a comment about patriotism — but this is not
the case.
Or, at least, it
shouldn’t be. Back
when I had a (shitty)
job going door-to-door collecting funds for an organization that
assisted
schools in impoverished areas, I eventually noticed something (in
addition to
the fact that the job sucked, which I noticed immediately). I
noticed that the surest
indicator of the
fact that going up to a particular house was a waste of time was an
American
flag hung beside the door. It
meant that
the person who lived there was a Conservative who was at
least going to slam the door in my face, and possibly make
fun
of me for a minute first before doing so.
Now,
this was
the use of the
American flag primarily as an indicator of group unity — the
group in question
being upper-middle-class suburbanites who don’t particularly
care about whether
poor kids have decent schools. If
the
group in question had been simply Americans
— as
the flag was designed to suggest — then that would have included
the poor kids. But
the former version of patriotism appeals to Conservatives more than the
latter. The
Republican Senatorial
candidate from the state I lived in at the time even had
campaign commercials
that made fun of door-to-door charity workers, depicting them all as
ditzy
teenagers who smoked a lot of pot.
Granted, I did
in fact smoke a lot of
pot at the time, but still, that doesn’t
mean building better schools for poor kids is a bad thing.
So is this just an
essay
that’s pissed off about how
conservative ideas of “patriotism” are
ass-backwards? No. There
are already a
million essays like that on the
web, and I’m sick
of them. This essay
is just as — if not more — pissed
off at Liberals for simply
handing off a monopoly on patriotism to the Conservatives.
I don’t know
how
many of you have seen it, but there’s this
great cartoon in syndication on Sunday mornings called Liberty’s
Kids that’s about the
Revolutionary War. Yes,
it’s for
kids, and yes, it’s basically an
animated history lesson, but it’s still a great cartoon. I
wish it had been on
when I was a kid.
One day, a friend
of mine came over while I was watching it.
She
laughed, rolled her eyes, and asked “Why
do you watch that conservative
cartoon?”
And this is a
problem.
This
is a problem because Liberty’s
Kids isn’t by any
means conservative. Yes,
the Founders are
characters in it, but
they’re portrayed as humans,
not as Gods, with personal failings and foibles included. There
are important women
characters,
important Black characters, and the French are included as valuable
allies
rather than written out of the story completely. In short,
it’s pretty much as
liberal a cartoon as you could possibly make about the Revolutionary
War, and
still have it actually be about the actual Revolutionary War with any
degree of
historical accuracy. If
my friend had
called it “that lame
cartoon,” I
guess that’d be fine, because I guess any attempt to
“make learning fun”
does technically qualify as “lame.”
But
she didn’t call it “lame” — she
called it conservative.
Why?
It
can’t be
because of the “learning”
angle — after all, learning
equals school,
and everybody knows
that school
is liberal. So I
guess it’s because
the show is about, you know, the Revolutionary War and America
and stuff, and because, despite the positive women characters, Black
characters, French
characters, etc., it still dares to come down on the side that
“the Revolutionary
War and America
and stuff” are, you know, good
things.
I only
want to have to
say
this once, and after that, I
would really appreciate it if the issue were settled for all time: THAT’S
NOT CONSERVATIVE. LIKING AMERICA IS NOT CONSERVATIVE.
THAT'S JUST WHAT THE CONSERVATIVES WANT YOU TO SAY.
CAN YOU PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE STOP SAYING THE
MOST COUNTERPRODUCTIVE THING YOU COULD POSSIBLY SAY?
Thanks. Glad we
could
get that cleared up.
But despite the
fact
that we
just got that cleared up and
it’s not a problem anymore, let’s keep talking
about it — you know, as
if it were
still a problem, just for
shits and giggles.
America
is inherently an experiment in liberalism.
It
was founded on liberal principles and won its
existence at the cost
of a liberal war, to the extent that there can possibly be such a thing
as a
liberal war. Every
great American has
been a liberal, if defined in relation to the issues of their day. America
is and has been a great country to the extent that it is liberal and,
when less
great than it could be, it is less great in proportion to its being
less
liberal than it could be. Only
an idiot
would ever argue against any of this.
So
why is it conservative
to display
an
American flag, or watch a cartoon about the Revolutionary War, and liberal
to make fun of doing these
things?
The short and
entertaining
answer is that nearly everyone in
the country is stupid. The
long and
less-entertaining answer, presented in as truncated a form as possible
without
being inaccurate, is as follows:
Our contemporary battle
lines
of liberal
and conservative
were drawn in the 1960s and have very little to do with the
preexisting
definitions of those terms. Throughout
the previous history of America, liberal
meant pursuing equal rights and economic security for as many people as
possible and supporting the strengthening of the Federal government to
the
extent necessary to secure and subsequently ensure these things (okay,
Jefferson was a states-rightser, so the last thing has only been true
of the
American left since Madison — fine, but remember that the last
thing only
involves a disagreement over how best to achieve the goals, and is not
itself
one of the goals). Fast-forward
through
a ton of victories for the little guy, and you arrive at the
1950s, which
saw the explosion of suburbanism.
Thanks
to a century-and-a-half of victories for liberalism, there was finally
an
enormous middle class that not only didn’t have to worry
about starving to
death, but didn’t even have to work 18-hour days in some
fucked-up factory to
maintain this security.
But people who grow up
without
having to worry about
starving to death start to notice other shit.
And,
based on the other shit that got noticed, our
mental picture of the
1950s went from being the great victory of liberalism to the very
essence of
conservatism. The
suburban explosion
went from being about a huge segment of the population finally being
able to
make decent lives for themselves, to being about “white
flight” and racism. The
suburban family went from being about the
fact that these decent lives could be sustained on a single income, to
being
about the fact that the single income was the man’s whereas
the woman was
expected to stay home vacuuming in high heels.
Bourgeois
went
from being the
prize that the left has historically fought to extend to increasing
amounts of
people, to being an insult used against those who do not have a
sufficient
number of tattoos and piercings. The
left became torn between defining itself contra
that which is conservative, and defining itself contra
that which is “lame.” The
word teenager
did not
exist before the 1950s, and now teenagers, of both the literal and
spiritual
varieties, are the arbiters of civilization.
Okay,
point taken, but you could still sustain a
middle-class
family
on a single income.
Once
again: this is not
a
conservative critique of
liberalism — it is a liberal critique of liberalism, based on
the fact that the
current liberal self-definition of liberalism is helping the
conservatives.
The
proof of this can be
seen everywhere: young people are turning conservative because it is
uncool to
learn enough about politics to become liberal; the gay-marriage debate
could
have been won by now if it hadn’t taken so long for gay
people to admit that
they wanted something as lame as marriage rights; Black males are
declining to
attend college because educated Blacks are seen as sell-outs by their
communities of origin (I am taking this on the authority of Chris
Rock, so if
you disagree, take it up with Chris Rock); feminism could have won by
now if it
had concentrated on getting women into elected office instead of on
stupid shit
like getting pissed at men who open the door for you (I refer you to
Western
European nations where women are way more successful in political and
corporate
life despite the fact that it is still acceptable to whistle at them on
the
street); and, of course, liberals don’t hang American flags
on their front porches,
and they refuse to watch a cartoon about the Revolutionary War even if it is
a
really awesome cartoon.
Don’t get me wrong. We
realize that racism, sexism, etc. were/are
serious problems, and I’m not suggesting that less attention should have been
paid to them at the
time, or that addressing them now needs to “take a
backseat” to any particular
other thing. Addressing
them was the
logical next move and the right thing to do. I’m
only trying to do something about
the confusion caused by the manner
in which they were addressed, so that we can move forward. The
confusion came about
because of the fact
that young people who wanted to try and fix these things in the 1960s
weren’t
able to do so by joining any particular political
party — problems of social
inequality weren’t being caused by the right or the left, but
were simply the
property of “the establishment.” So
the
only way to address them was by identifying yourself not as right or as
left,
but only as young.
The
problem with this is, you can’t really
retain young
as a political
identity
for very long. These
people grew up a
little and became the left of the 1970s, but then they all went nuts
and voted
for Reagan for some reason. When
this
happened, a giant vacuum was created, and by the time everybody
finished
flopping around, no-one knew what the fuck liberal
meant anymore, except for the facts that racism and sexism are bad, and
“cool”
things are good.
This is why the 1990s
became
the decade of identity
politics. And this
is what ended up
fucking the left so hard that George W. Bush happened, and here we
are: in a
society where a clothing store owned by a Conservative can sell
t-shirts that
say “Voting is for Old People” to liberal
teenagers, and it
totally works.
Voting, after all, was
thought
up by Dead White Males. The
current generation of young Americans has
been presented with the choice of seeing the Founders either as
demigods
inerrant in every way (especially, for some reason, about shit they
didn’t even
believe and clearly would have been totally against, like the idea that
America
should be a Christian theocracy), or as hypocritical slave-owning
bastards.
Neither view of them is
particularly accurate, or particularly
productive. The
Founders were geniuses
of political and social philosophy, some more so than others, but they
were also personally flawed in many ways (except for Franklin, who was
perfect). But
this isn’t the
issue. In fact,
back-and-forth
conversations that focus on the Founders as people are the whole
problem. They are
important insofar as they came up
with ideas — their good ideas were good, and their bad ideas
were bad. That
should be simple enough, but identity
politics has made it impossible even to talk about good ideas and bad
ideas
anymore. Ideas must
now be white
ideas, Black
ideas, male
ideas, straight
or gay
ideas, and so on. The
post-’60s left will not admit of objective truth, which, as I’ve said before,
is a pretty fucking bad strategy, considering that the left is actually
objectively right about most things and could do a good job of
pressing this
advantage if it would just stop fucking itself up with stupid shit.
Once again:
the
’60s
were not a mistake. They
were
unavoidable. The
fucking Civil War was
probably unavoidable too, but that doesn’t mean we
didn’t have to clean up
afterwards. That’s
what Reconstruction
was. And future
generations will
probably end up seeing the fifty years straddling the turn of the 21st
Century as the Reconstruction
that
followed the 1960s. After
the Civil War,
the Northern Republicans (remember that the Republicans were the good
guys
then) were divided between those who wanted to keep punishing the
“rebels” and
those who wanted to get the idea of “the rebels”
out of the nation’s mind as
quickly as possible. Abe
Lincoln was of
the latter mindset — but, unfortunately, he got shotted ing da
heed.
Now, we have the
opposite
problem. After the
1960s, the rebels were
victorious — at least in the sense that, for many people, the
left has become
synonymous with the counterculture.
And
because of that, young people now grow up with inter-counterculture
skirmishes
being their top priority: but, if you are older than 14, it is retarded
to
argue about Goths vs. Hippies, because both Goths and Hippies are parts
of the
left, or are supposed to be. And
whether
you’re a Goth or a Hippie, the odds are that your teacher is
more liberal than
you anyway, despite the fact that homework is not fun.
We
can’t keep punishing “the
establishment,” because there is no establishment to punish. There
is only America — big,
lame, boring America
that you have to learn about in books.
Speaking of books,
that
reminds me that we didn’t want
to finish the essay without mentioning to the Conservatives that their
whole
animus against “fancy book learning” is fucking
retarded too. Seriously. I’ve
been
screamed at about patriotism
by people and then asked them to name the five freedoms guaranteed by
the
First Amendment, and they can’t do it. I’ve
been screamed at about patriotism
by people who think that Pearl
Harbor
happened during Vietnam. And
then when I correct
them, they call me an
elitist snob. Seriously,
we’ve got the
internet now. There’s
nothing elitist
about fucking Wikipediaing some shit you don’t know about.
In fact,
that’s where I’ll close off on the whole
patriotism thing. If
you ever meet me,
and you want to scream at me about patriotism, I’m going to ask
you to recite the
Gettysburg Address. If
you can do it, I’ll listen to you. Come
on, it’s only
like a paragraph long. It’s
real good,
and you can memorize it in the time it would take you to watch a TV
show.
Deal or no deal?
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