|
WHOSE LAND IS IT, ANWAY?
Reflections
on Patriotism
Sam Smith
A SHORTER VERSION OF THIS ARTICLE APPEARS
IN YES MAGAZINE
This land is your land
This land is my land
From California to the New York island
From the redwood forest to the Gulf Stream waters
This land was made for you and me
-- Woody Guthrie
Before
September 11, patriotism wasn't doing all that well. You might
have noticed it at the ballpark, as the "Star Spangled Banner"
was turned into a novelty number and the guy next to you continued
munching on his hot dog as you stood at attention. Less obvious,
however, was that in the media and the nation's talk it just
didn't seem to matter that much.
One reason was that learning about
the country and its values had been widely displaced in school
by things like driver, drug, and sex education. Social studies,
history, and civic education were in decline as we taught our
kids how to behave as individuals rather than how to be part
of a community.
Immigrants didn't get much help
either, as neither of the two great acculturating institutions
of the past - the church and the political machines - held the
influence they once had.
Richard Croker, a tough 19th century
county boss of Tammany Hall, had grown almost lyrical when he
spoke of his party's duty to immigrants:
"They do not speak our language,
they do not know our laws, they are the raw material with which
we have to build up the state . . . There is no denying the service
which Tammany has rendered to the republic. There is no such
organization for taking hold of the untrained, friendless man
and converting him into a citizen. Who else would do it if we
did not? . . . [Tammany] looks after them for the sake of their
vote, grafts them upon the Republic, makes citizens of them."
Alexander B. Callow Jr. of the University
of California has written that Boston pol Martin Lomansey even
met every new immigrant ship and "helped the newcomers find
lodging or guided them to relatives. James Michael Curley set
up nationalization classes to prepare newcomers for the citizenship
examination . . . Friendly judges, anticipating election day,
converted their courts into naturalization mills, grinding out
a thousand new Americans a day. . . . Flags were waved, prose
turned purple, celebrations were wild on national holidays. .
. . Patriotism became a means for the newcomer to prove himself
worthy."
But there was a darker side, one
that often comes to the fore when patriotism is prominent: "Enemies
of the organization and reformers in general were identified
as opponents of true patriotism and American ideals." Like
other isms, patriotism is easily driven more by hatred of the
Other than by positive love of one's own. This is why Osama bin
Laden, the KKK, and various movements of American nationalism
have typically recruited from among society's weakest and most
insecure.
Today, immigrants, like other Americans,
are far more likely to learn their civics from TV - the main
source of news of three-quarters of the public - than from a
ward boss, priest, or teacher. The results make Tammany Hall
look good. For example, a 1998 poll found that while three-quarters
of all teenagers knew the zip code for Beverly Hills, only 25%
could name the city in which the Constitution was written. Ninety
percent could identify Tim Allen as the star of "Home Improvement"
but only 2% knew that William Rehnquist was the Chief Justice.
And it's not getting better; just recently the Boston Globe reported
that MTV has begun playing excerpts of videos because when they
play the whole thing - all three and a half minutes - ratings
start to go down.
It is worth noting that those pols
who "grafted immigrants upon the Republic" were all
Democrats. They saw no conflict between their love of country
and an economic populism so radical it would ban them from today's
C-SPAN. To them, the palaces of the Morgans and Carneigies were
not the same as the place called America. Americans had not yet
been indoctrinated into the false notion that the revolution
was fought to let corporations do whatever they want. And Democrats
had not yet turned over bragging rights for faith, family, and
home to the right wing.
Consider these words from a Democratic
President Woodrow Wilson, speaking to a group of newly naturalized
citizens: "You have just taken an oath of allegiance to
the United States. Of allegiance to whom? Of allegiance to no
one, unless it be God. Certainly not of allegiance to those who
temporarily represent this great government. You have taken an
oath of allegiance to a great ideal, to a great body of principles,
to a great hope of the human race."
By the end of the century, our presidents
saw it differently. Bill Clinton told a 1995 Michigan State University
commencement shortly after the Oklahoma City bombing, "There's
nothing patriotic about hating your government or pretending
you can hate your government but love your country." And
in a few years, George Bush's attorney general would imply that
even criticizing government policy was unpatriotic.
How had loyalty to government come
to replace loyalty to ideals, place, and people in the pantheon
of patriotism? In part because the American elite had decided
that nations no longer mattered all that much. It was government
we needed to honor lest our parochialism interfere with corporate
multi-nationalism. In 1992, Strobe Talbott had written in Time
Magazine, "Within the next hundred years . . . nationhood
as we know it will be obsolete; all states will recognize a single,
global authority . . . All countries are basically social arrangements,
accommodations to changing circumstances. No matter how permanent
and even sacred they may seem at any one time, in fact they are
all artificial and temporary."
Talbott was expressing a centrist
consensus later confirmed by that Washington favorite, Francis
Fukuyama: "Globalization will not be reversed." And
by Vaclav Havel, approvingly quoted in the New York Review of
Books referring to nations as "cultlike entities charged
with emotion."
It was not just a matter of words.
No assault on American sovereignty has been more successful than
that carried out in recent years by the globalization movement,
using such mechanisms as NAFTA and the WTO. That which, over
the course of our history, the British, Mexicans, Confederates,
Spanish, Germans and Japanese had been unable to do was now being
accomplished by a handful of lawyers armed only with cell phones,
fax machines and the support of politicians willing to trade
their country's nationhood for another campaign contribution.
And it wasn't just happening to
America. By the 1990s, about half the top economies of the world
were not nations, but corporations. Trade had replaced ideology
as the engine of foreign affairs. Politics, nationhood and the
idea of place itself was being supplanted by a huge, amorphous
international corporate culture that ruled not by force but by
market share. This culture, in the words of French writer Jacques
Attali, sought an "ideologically homogenous market where
life will be organized around common consumer desires."
o
Yet now, suddenly, we speak of patriotism
again. Why did so many need the Viagra of violence to demonstrate
love for their land? Where was this love when NAFTA and the World
Trade Organization were being forced down our throats? Where
was it as corporations raped our waters and forests and infected
our crops? Where was it when the young took to the streets to
defend old American values against a new world order? And where
was this love of America during the long "war" on drugs
as a growing number of politicians, police, and financial institutions
served as allies to the drug lords?
It now feels odd to this Vietnam
era vet, whose great-great-great fought with his four brothers
in the Revolution and whose parents both lost brothers in World
War I, to be lectured on patriotism by those who until the morning
of September 11 had evinced so little interest in loyalty to
any larger entity than themselves and their careers.
To be sure, the sudden rise in patriotic
self-branding is not entirely a spontaneous reaction to the tragic
events. It has also been the direct result of intense government
and corporate propaganda capitalizing on these events and on
a long-cultivated shift by which Americans have been reduced
to being spectators and consumers, rather than actual citizens,
of their government. We have been taught to cheer rather than
act, to wear logos rather than think, and to purchase rather
than control and influence. At a moment calling for the most
rational vision and thought, our leaders - from the White House
to CNN - have instead chosen to turn this tragedy into a Super
Bowl of national affairs in which our only assignment as Americans
is to choose the right team and cheer it on.
This is a dirty business that does
a huge disservice to the country they purport to honor. Remember:
these are the people who, in the months before September, not
only were assuring us that our future lay in giving up our national
independence for the greater good of a corporate-dominated global
culture, but who arrested our young people who dared suggest
this was not right, and who ridiculed anyone who spoke with feeling
of the need to protect America's sovereignty on behalf of its
workers, its environment, and its civil liberties.
These people have further failed
us by creating a world so filled with hatred for our land. They
have failed us by not protecting us against the consequences.
They have failed us by selling out our interests to the highest
multinational bidder. And now they fail us again, by presuming
that they know how best to love this land and imputing disloyalty
to those who doubt them. They are in no position to say who is
a good American. While we pledge allegiance to the republic for
which America stands, we do not have to pledge allegiance to
the empire and its failed policies for which America is now suffering.
There are few finer, albeit painful, expressions of loyalty than
to tell a friend, a spouse, a child, or a parent that what they
are doing may be dangerous or wrong. If our country is about
to run into the street without looking, there is absolutely nothing
disloyal about crying, "Stop!"
Besides, true patriotism is an act
of love, not hate. It is service not revenge, contributions not
cheers, participation not prohibition, and debate not salutes.
To find the real America buried
in our hearts, we have to turn off the amps of propaganda and
hype, the reverb and distortion of our fears and failures, and
listen to the country unplugged. Some of the best things can
only be heard when everything else is still.
There are lots of different ways
to think about America. Some people like to call America a "nation
of laws," but that sounds like we just spend our days obeying
regulations - the sort of place only an attorney could love.
Other people think of America as
a government, or as a geographical subdivision, which is fair
enough but fails to give the real flavor of the place or explain
the strong feelings many Americans have for their land.
But it is also a triptych of environment,
people, and ideals
An
Environment
An environment is more than a place;
it is a condition, it is sustenance, it is shelter, it is a thousand
invisible threads tying us to that which lies way out there.
The natural habitat of America long
overwhelmed anything that could be built by mere humans, a fact
that shaped our character and our culture. It has, to be sure,
created oddities: we have become the most ecologically wasteful
of nations yet have given the world some of its finest environmental
writings. We have preserved some of the world's great natural
spaces, but only after virtually exterminating those who lived
there. The grandeur of our land has at times made us profligate,
at other times humble and religious. We are deeply romantic about
the wilderness yet have been ruthless in its exploitation.
In the past one hundred years or
so we have learned how to replace nature with systems, technology,
machines and institutions. For a long time it seemed to work.
It appeared that America had a lifetime pass to progress. That
Americans could do even better than nature.
But a few decades ago, things started
to go awry. Our cities began to disintegrate. Families broke
up with startling frequency. Real income slid and jobs drifted
overseas. The environment became less a cornucopia and more a
problem. Our non-natural systems no longer seemed as wonderful
as they once had.
As these artificial systems failed
us, some Americans began returning to natural ones, finding in
them a wisdom and sustenance the constructed systems could not
provide. Farmers rediscovered non-chemical ways to protect their
crops. Communities and businesses began to recycle and seek self-sufficiency.
Individuals began downshifting their consumption and lifestyles.
And planners discovered long-ignored benefits in treading more
softly on the earth.
Even after two hundred years of
frequent and massive mistreatment, the American environment is
still vital enough to welcome us back, asking only that this
time we play by its rules. Its message is simple: that we do
not have to belong to artificial systems; we can belong to the
land itself.
A People
We can also define ourselves as
a people. Because of the variety of our backgrounds, it is not,
however, a primeval past or cultural similarity that binds us
but rather a shared present and future.
Sometimes -- such as in times of
massive disaster -- we act on this communality. We suddenly and
without instruction mobilize ourselves to help those miles away,
recognizing for a few days or a few months that they are also
one of us. We do the same thing when we're having fun; at a concert
or a festival we feel a bond with everyone sharing the same experience.
And when an admired leader dies, we grieve together.
As with the environment, though,
we are inconsistent. America remains one of the most favored
destinations for those seeking freedom and a better life, yet
the newcomer often finds hostility as well as freedom, discrimination
as well as opportunity.
In the end, it is not the culture
from which we came but the one each of us is helping to create
that will matter. It is our common fate rather than our disparate
pasts that will ultimately describe, redeem, or destroy us.
Ideals
What we take for granted -- that
a nation and a people should be organized around a set of principles
-- was once considered revolutionary and even today remains remarkable.
It also takes a lot of work and a lot of argument. But it is
one of the things that best defines America.
As with our personal ideals, our
country has repeatedly failed to live up to what it proclaims.
But while we may not always practice what we preach, at least
we do not preach what we practice. The mere existence of our
principles and the willingness of large numbers of Americans
to work for them gives the country a special character.
In short, America is not the answer;
it is only a good place to look for the answer. America has never
been perfect; it's just been a place where it was easier to fix
things that were broken. The ability to repair ourselves has
long been one of our great characteristics as a people and a
nation.
Each of us can express love for
America in their own way. The Green may do so through care of
our environment. The libertarian or anarchist may do so by preserving
our faith in liberty. The progressive or socialist may do it
by insisting that America's promise of social justice be fulfilled.
The conservative may do it by preserving the good. The deeply
religious may do it through personal witness. The oppressed may
do it through protest and leading us towards our ideals. The
cop may do it through upholding the laws of the land - including
the most important one, the Constitution. The artist may paint
it, the musician sing about it, the teacher teach it.
Most of all, being an American means
nobody gets to tell you how best to be an American. As Woodie
Guthrie pointed out, this land may be your land, but it is mine
as well. |