I've often wondered what the Hell they meant, those bumper stickers on the rear windows of the Fords, Chevys and Dodges as they sped perilously close to me, a longhaired high school senior hitching my way east on route #202.
"America, Love it or Leave It!"
It was 1970 and I was on my way to my draft board in Portland, Maine, to convince the WW2 vets that I was a Concientious Objector. The dudes in the pickups w/the gun racks were pissed. Their idea of a loyal American was someone who did not dissent from government propaganda while I figured dissent was patriotic and inspired crucial debate. And even a cursory examination of the then full-on Vietnam debacle ran counter to the government blather...
Silly me. I hadn't come from an authoritarian family in which "Daddy knows best" and questioning that authority was practically Marxist. I hadn't come from a church in which the minister or priest explained my relationship to God. I hadn't gone to a school where a vapid parochial history was jammed down my throat. I was lucky. I had listened to the voices of Thoreau, George Fox, and Karl Marx, among others. I took my self-education seriously and determined that americans in general were deliberately under-educated. But by whom and why?
In fact, I had come from a long tradition of non-traditional New England curmudgeons. Forty years later, still aghast at the elitists ruining my country and my all too compliant fellow citizens going sheepishly along on the road to perdition, I have to wonder, "Why?"
What is it about americans that we can imagine ourselves to be smart, independent thinkers in charge of our individual destiny when in reality we are low-information authoritarian worshippers subjected to sucessful lifetime propaganda that would make the editors of Pravda blush?
One answer is Big Daddyism. A broken idea of fatherhood. An authoritarian notion of fatherhood. An emasculation of real men and a substitution of the macho man. To me, a real Father is present and accounted for, is not AWOL, physically or emotionally. He hopefully apologizes regularly and models that process of learning where facts trump beliefs. Every question deserves a debate, each opinion requires a legitimate defense, power-tripping is a sign of weakness and nonviolence a sign of strength. Dialog, debate and communicate.
We have instead a taciturn fiction of a John Wayne kind of Dad who is a hollow man manufactured by Hollywood. This is old news, but the yearning for a real Dad by other young men is a current event. Young men go to war to find fathers. They become addicts for lack of fathers. They become misogynistic, antagonistic and poor fathers themselves for lack of a coherent model.
Men with bad bumper stickers had bad fathers, sorry, it's that simple.