Flag Day was several days ago and The Fourth of July is not far behind. My mother, sister and I are going North to visit Lake Huron at Alpena and the big bridge between peninsulas at Mackinac. Before Labor Day dawns on the United States, I will be in another country working as a missionary. It was not long ago that I was on my grandmother’s couch, watching a Memorial Day special on the battle of Gettysburg and studying the reenacted patriotic acts of Americans fighting Americans—the men in grey who fought for economic strength versus those in blue who fought for the freedom of men and the unification of the land. Neither line was wanting for men of character and conviction who loved this country above safety and family.
I lost the patriotic stirrings of my youth and I probe, pacing my apartment, for an eloquent way to explain why I do not want them back. Patriotism’s close association with war is not helpful. As a boy, I was moved to tears by the sepia images of brave men sacrificing themselves, playing like a newsreel in my imagination. A decade hence, a schoolmate of mine returned from Iraq with a serious case of PTSD that he ‘caught’ the moment his truck exploded and splattered friends’ entrails onto his face. The heroics of the silver screen era were long ago tinted red by more realistic portrayals but I believe even those images have not lost their power, whether it is determination embodied as the flag is raised on Iwo Jima or determination, again, when the flag is planted on our Moon. Someone might get the buzz watching “Saving Private Ryan” or “Apollo 13” (thanks, Tom Hanks).
Rhetorically speaking, the key phrases are worn from too much nationalistic wordsmithing. JFK promised the USA would be on the Moon before the 60s were finished. Among several iconic sound bites, he left us “Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country,” a stirring piece of Americana that is also a device. There was no less pride or dedication from the citizens of Imperial Japan—to the contrary, there is a collectivist sentiment in it; ‘Do not be concerned with your own desires, determine what you can do for the nation’, or perhaps another nation. Adolf Hitler “liberated” Poland as he spurred the Third Reich across Europe. Stalin’s Soviet Union “liberated” them again. Finally, the Poles liberated Poland. Decades later, a group of desperate Al Qaeda members hijacked aircraft and crashed them into New York City buildings. Why? My guess is that they believed it was to help free souls from worldly corruption. The United States brought the most powerful military forces in the world to their homeland in the name of “enduring freedom”. I have deleted as many examples from this paragraph as are left behind. The point is that the words are just a fresh coat of paint on a given agenda: take resources from China, ethnically cleanse Europe, score points for Jihad, establish presence in the Middle East. Still, I cannot say that “liberty and justice for all” are not important, even if battling tyranny sometimes looks suspiciously like being tyrannical.
I wondered if my patriotism could be cut down by the actual lapses in liberty and justice. Hundreds of broken treaties with native peoples litter the United States’ history; that alone is enough to shame me. Our economy was at one time built upon slaves, then upon freed slaves exploited as tenant farmers. Thousands of Japanese Americans were put into concentration camps so that white people could feel more comfortable. Women still have trouble getting equitable pay in this country. I could go on without even leaving our borders. To be honest, though, I can overlook all of that. I knew all of those things at sixteen and still managed to convince myself that our nation’s mistakes were in the past. At the end, I believed my country would make restitution to the best of its abilities.
What irks me about American patriotism is the insistence that this is the best nation in the world: an addiction to the superlative. It reminds me of small-minded little boys arguing about whose Dad is the best. “My Dad has the biggest guns” “My Dad is the toughest” “My Dad buys me more stuff” “My Dad is the smartest and the nicest” Patriotism, after all, comes from the prefix “patri”, from the Latin “pater”, meaning father . That is why I have declared so bitterly that I am not patriotic and hope never to be. If our country has become the fatherland, then ours is a rich, manipulative father who gives lavishly and then expects unquestioning loyalty, like a mob boss. Our Dad is the one all the other Dads quietly hate but have to tolerate because he has clout. Our Dad buys cheap medical insurance and maxes-out his credit card on flashy, dangerous toys. Our Dad drives his SUV around the neighborhood, giving unsolicited advice. Some of the other Dads complain but most quietly wait for the bank to foreclose on him. At a bar in Belize, some locals laughingly criticized the United States’ people for electing an obvious fool like George W. Bush. I was helpless—Americans are too much like Yankee fans: our country overspends on strong arms every year and we love them for being the ‘best’. Those Belizeans are like Cubs fans: their country is theirs and that is all that matters. They do not need to be the ‘best’ to stay proud.
Entrenched in these thoughts on grandma’s couch, again, I found an unwelcome epiphany. Playing on the television was a Harrison Ford film where he plays a police officer; Brad Pitt plays his Irish houseguest, who we discover is an Irish Republican Army operative. Pitt’s character demolishes a group of gangsters in order to collect several crates of missiles to smuggle back to Ireland. On his way to New York Harbor, he has to shoot Ford’s partner to evade capture. Meanwhile, Ford refuses to help a British agent locate him, choosing to track him personally. As the film draws to a close, Ford boards the hijacked fishing vessel and insists that Pitt turn the boat around before “more innocent people die”. In my mind I knew that was right but in my heart I felt like he should go with him. In the end, the Irish American Cop shoots the IRA man. I was disappointed. Something in me wanted him to return to Ireland and blow-up some buildings.
It was my sense of patriotism. Though it may be wrong, this raw brand of Irish patriotism resonates in me.
I pushed cognitively against the thought but it pushed back much harder. When I took my stance on the Israeli conflict at a church conference I acted as if I were merely disgusted with the Israeli government yet, I admit now, I was also refusing to be disgusted with the Palestinian Liberation Organization. It makes me wince to hear them called “terrorists” when they are clearly trying to oust a foreign occupancy—like Poles in Poland, Irish in Ireland or Indians in India. I am a sympathizer. The image of an Arab boy throwing rocks at soldiers carries a familiar meme and I, in spite of myself, carry its receptor. I admire the rebels, not invaders, occupiers or even loyalists; the Royalists of our Revolutionary period must have believed that it was ‘best’ to remain part of the British empire. They were excellent patriots (God, King and Country!) but history books revere the trouble-makers who did not want to pay their tea tax. Our “founders” had even less right than the IRA and PLO to claim the land as their own, yet I remain a fan of their rebels’ patriotism. The more I think about that, the more I begin to believe that my discontent and nasty criticism for the United States actually brings me closer to the spirit that created this country. The United States that we celebrate does not share enough features with the canonized one.
If you want to see a film that makes me feel more patriotic than any other, watch a Jim Carrey movie called The Majestic; the final courtroom scene clearly places the ideological America against the historical one and allows the legend of our nation to win in a convincing way. He might not change the entire course of American history but he does marry the girl and live happily ever after.
