For patriot dream that sees beyond the years

I could be wrong, I could be right

There’s a lot going on politically, but everyone knows that. I guess there’s going to be “a lot going on politically” for the foreseeable future. I talk rarely about the upside of that, focusing mainly about the downside, probably because the upside is an almost indiscernibly slow expansion of the American people’s consciousness — I don’t mean in the hippie sense, or maybe I do; in any event it has to do with more people discovering why it’s better to be a mensch than an asshole. Whereas the downside is more overt, in fact it stares us in the face every day.

I was paradigm-shifted a little this weekend when I came across a little gathering in a local pocket park I hadn’t noticed before called Congressional Medal of Honor Park. Its centerpiece is a small plinth monument honoring two servicemen from Maryland who were thus honored for their heroism in what was called The Great War — one who “rescued a fellow pilot by landing his seaplane on a small body of water near Pola, Austria,” another who “was killed in action during the Meuse-Argonne offensive while silencing an enemy machine gun nest.” Ensign Charles Hammann and Private Henry G. Costin, their names were.

When this monument was dedicated in 1939, as the world began its descent into another war, a thousand people turned up; at the ceremony I happened upon, on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 2023, there were a few dozen, standing quietly as guest speakers came and went from a podium set in front of it. I got there late and missed the Anthem and the reading of Isaiah’s plowshares bit, but heard the voices raised in O God Our Help In Ages Past, and a young fellow with a British accent reading “In Flanders Fields,” and a minister, heavy and robed, reading the strange, Jobian 90^th Psalm that inspired Watts’ hymn (“Make us glad for as many days as you have afflicted us, for as many years as we have seen trouble/ May your deeds be shown to your servants, your splendor to their children”). We all said the Lord’s Prayer.

There is a lot about memory and war one could extract from the event, but I was set to thinking about patriotism. The gathering was religious for sure, and the order of service was liturgical, the readings and songs given not as performances but solemnly and without fuss as elements of a rite. But though God was in it, the honor, I perceived, was for the men who had died and what they had died for. Not that the cause as such was celebrated — what only weird skeptics felt about the war then is now accepted wisdom. What the little group honored was the devotion that brought these men to the battle and to death, and that devotion was to their country.

Once those of us who didn’t like the direction in which our country was headed felt obliged to add that it was the misdirection we opposed rather than the country. Some of you may remember the old “save it or lose it” rejoinder to “love it or leave it.” A lot of the helplessness liberals felt in pushing against tides of popular opinion came from getting hit by conservative snipers with accusations of anti-Americanism when it was actually we who carried Liberty’s torch.

In the Iraq era we said “dissent is patriotic.” Rightwingers used that phrase in mockery when the Democrats got back into power and they bitched about it, and they still portray their goons’ assault on the U.S. Capitol as patriotic protest (and compare it to the George Floyd protests which, you must know, burned the cities to the ground).

There was always another strain to dissent, though: The conviction that our enemies were wrong in principle but not wrong to claim the patriotic mantle because America itself was made to provide cover for exactly that kind of mendacity and mischief. It’s hard to ignore now, especially, as the U.S. accedes to and funds Israel’s massacres of civilians not because it finds our obstreperous ally to be in the right but because they’re our client state and that’s the way the game is played.  

But even without that, it’s a strain lately to hang onto one’s patriotism, particularly as dark elements of our history keep escaping from suppression (which of course is why the goons try so hard to stuff them back). A lot of us who knew people had done terrible things in the name of America have come to admit that, historically, America has been more disposed to back the scumbags than disown them — that a lot of the mischief we considered perversions of the Dream actually go back to its Founding.

That makes some of us greybeards sheepish and defensive, and we have to ask: Was patriotism itself a mistake? Did we deceive ourselves? Did we project the American problem onto an out-group of monsters so we would never have to acknowledge that the problem was us?

It’s a big question to which I have no big answer. I will say this: The best argument for the validity of American patriotism is the way Americans respond to the bad news about themselves. There’s a lot of reaction and revanchism, but there’s also evidence that many, maybe most (or at least getting there), are absorbing the information. The recent voter pushback on not only abortion but also book-banning and transphobia is striking because it resembles the issue-driven waves that usually favor reactionary causes — but it’s now going the other way. It’s almost as if large numbers of voters decided the bad idea of America was not what they wanted America to be.

In fact, maybe what’s mistaken is our idea of patriotism itself. The polls that show younger Americans less inclined than previous generations to “patriotism” (or so the toplines say) may be asking the question wrong. Maybe when the kids say they’re not “extremely proud” of their country, they mean they see clearly what’s wrong with it and decline to endorse. Me, I’d consider someone who looked at this bullshit and said they were proud of it to be less patriotic.

This idea of patriotism would have been incomprehensible to the soldiers of the Great War — but, then, so would be nearly everything else about the America in which we live now. Maybe we have to take that into account even as we pay them tribute. Maybe what we know to be fair and right and just doesn’t resemble America at present, and vice versa, but it will be tested, and we’ll find out soon enough whether, when we are righteous, we are also patriots.