Where Has My Patriotism Gone?
Mon Jul 04, 2005 at 01:58:06 PM PDT
Note: I've decided to change my screen name to my real name, Jonathan Schwartz. Mainly, because the pseudoname thing just isn't me. I prefer it if people know the real me. Also, I've long since started to feel that a screen that mixed Socrates and Decartes was a little on the presumptious side.
Cross-posted from Moral Questions Weblog.
I'm sitting here right now while, literally, there is one of the biggest Fourth of July parades on the west coast going by my window, and I am amazed at how repulsed I am. Where has my patriotism gone? I can remember that I once truly believed in America, and I that believed in the values it stood for. Well, I still believe in the values, but I'm not sure I believe in America anymore.
A lot of this, I think is more or less Biblical. The Bible has a great deal of warnings in it about the sorrows and responsibilities that accompany knowledge. In one place in Proverbs, the Rabbi writes that "with great learning comes great sorrow." The ancient rabbinical skepticism of knowledge accrued as an end in itself, has wide ranging implications for our own postmodern society, but that subject is far beyond the scope of this post. My point is that so long as you only pay attention to what America says it believes in, and don't serious look at how America has consistently failed to exemplify those beliefs as a nation, it is relatively easy to maintain your patriotism and love of country. But, unfortunately, the closer you look at America, the more events like Independance Day start to look like exercises in hypocrisy and ignorance.
The eeriest parts of the whole thing for me is that the section of America that is most overtly patriotic is the part that has weakest grasp of the liberal values that America is supposed to be founded on and who in fact aren't very interested in seeing them fully applied. What it seems to come down to for them, is simply an exercise in nationalism: some whitewashed celebration of the middle class, Anglo-Saxon, and Protestant society of the American Dream. The liberal values are paid rhetorical tribute, but only so long as they don't get in the way of the Dream.
Now that Radical Conservatives are running the country, that half hearted commitment to America's values is becoming more and more up front and obvious. We are currently digging a grave for our selves in Iraq because radical conservative criticism of our once independent media has intimidated it into giving the administration a free pass for its idiotic adventure. And with Bush waving the bloody shirt from 9/11, the "loyal opposition" wasn't much help, either.
The Radical Conservatives have also made a cottage industry of peddling gay-baiting, doing their best to scare social conservatives into believing that their idealized and immaculate American culture is unattainable if gays are given equal civil rights and protections in their relationships. Now, as we look down the barrel of what may be one of the most bitter and divisive Supreme Court nominations in our nation's history, the radicals talk of nothing but principles like "strict constructionism" and "original intent"--principles which if fully applied would roll back 150 years of jurisprudence that protects the rights of minorities and women.
Anyway, to say I'm a little disappointed in my country this Fourth of July is an understatement. And I can't say I have a lot of hope right now, either. But one thing you have to give America credit for is that it keeps at it. It doesn't give up on those values, as much as it seems to come short of them. And that, if nothing else, is something to celebrate.
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