It's less chic to make this criticism than it once was, but back in the Vietnam era, displays of patriotism lost their luster for many Americans. Patriotism got mixed up with the worship of using force for its own sake. It was as if in the War of Independence, the culture had "switched sides": the kinds of feelings we had about the country had switched from fighting to defend certain unalienable Rights, and to the raw military power of the troops that the British had dispatched to put down the rebellion in the Americas.
Liberals and progressives of a previous generation did not have this conflict in the same way.
It's time we helped the country understand what true patriotism is -- to take back the word, and the concept. To "take patriotism back" from the Red Coats who have trivialized love of country, and made it something contemptible.
What is a patriotism worthy of us, and worthy of the country, on the flip.
Probably as good a place to start as any is the fake controversy over comments Michelle Obama made early on in last year's presidential campaign, when she said:
Speaking in Milwaukee, Wisconsin today, would-be First Lady Michelle Obama said, "for the first time in my adult life I am proud of my country because it feels like hope is finally making a comeback."
The way in which this comment was deliberately misunderstood tells a lot about how the concept of patriotism has been debased. Because most of us understood exactly what Michelle meant, as she expanded later a day or so later:
Obama said she's the daughter of a South Side Chicago shiftworker who managed to send both her and her brother to Princeton. "Nowhere but in America could my story be possible," she said. "I am proud of my country, without a doubt."
She said the statement that's drawn fire was about "pride in the political process. People are just engaged in this election in a way we haven't seen in a long time." As for why she's being attacked, she said that "I fill up some space" in the 24-hour news cycle.
Her "challenge," Obama said, is that "I wear my heart on my sleeve, just like all of you guys. When you put your heart out there, there's a level of passion ... and it's a risk that you take." But she says she's not worried because the more people get to know her and her family, "it'll be clear who I am and what I care about."
And very clear it is. Most of us understand Michelle's patriotism -- and a deep and very sincere patriotism is exactly what this is -- without much explanation or expansion. It's what Roger Ebert called in a 1984 review of Moscow On The Hudson, "patrotism... with a liberal ... heart":
MOSCOW ON THE HUDSON is the kind of movie that Paul Mazursky does especially well. It's a comedy that finds most of its laughs in the close observations of human behavior, and that finds its story in a contemporary subject Mazursky has some thoughts about. In that, it's like his earlier films AN UNMARRIED WOMAN (women's liberation), HARRY AND TONTO (growing old), BLUME IN LOVE (marriage in the age of doing your own thing), and BOB & CAROL & TED & ALICE (encounter groups). It is also a rarity, a patriotic film that has a liberal, rather than a conservative, heart. It made me feel good to be an American, and good that Vladimir Ivanoff was going to be one, too.
The patriotism Ebert refers to is a kind of patriotism that is especially American -- that revels in and marvels at the uniquely inclusive character of American nationality. A patriotism that subsumes the experience of very different people, who chose to become Americans, either by coming here voluntarily, or by choosing to see themselves as part of the American project in spite of their initial experiences here, as is true of Africans brought here against their will and enslaved, or the Native peoples for whom the European presence was imposed by force. Their experience, their family history, and their cultures have also become an integral part of what it means to be American, and pride in that personal history and struggle has become another piece of what it means to love this country, and to care for its fate, even with its faults and imperfections. It's a love of country that is inclusive, and for which xenophobia and racism can have no part. From Ebert's review:
The movie opens with his life in Moscow, a city of overcrowded apartments, bureaucratic red tape, long lines for consumer goods, secret pleasures like jazz records, and shortages so acute that toilet paper has turned into a currency of its own. The early scenes are eerily convincing, partly because Williams plays them in Russian. This isn't one of those movies where everybody somehow speaks English. The turning point of the movie occurs in Bloomingdale's, as so many turning points do, and Ivanoff makes two friends right there on the spot: Witherspoon, the black security guard (Cleavant Derricks), and Lucia, the Italian salesclerk (Maria Conchita Alonso).
They're a tip-off to an interesting casting decision by Mazursky, who populates his movie almost entirely with ethnic and racial minorities. In addition to the black and the Italian, there's a Korean taxi driver, a Cuban lawyer, a Chinese anchorwoman, all of them reminders that all of us, except for American Indians, came from somewhere else. Ivanoff moves in with the security guard's family, which greatly resembles the one he left behind in Moscow, right down to the pious grandfather.
This is the patriotism of Emma Lazarus's poem, inscribed on the base of the Statue of Liberty, close to where the ancestors of many us first arrived to the US:
The New Colossus
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"
—Emma Lazarus, 1883
Here's to the patriotism that many of us feel so deeply, and that draws so many of us to sites like this one.