Amor patriae
I have a column in the current Free Inquiry and it’s one of the non-paywalled items this time.
It’s about Trump’s patriotism theater. It was fun to write.
Even if we can figure out exactly what we’re being ordered to love, it’s not actually the case that we’re legally obliged to do so. We’re not required to feel amorous toward “it” as a condition of being allowed to go on living here as citizens. We’re not made to undergo regular “love it” inspections to gauge whether our affection levels are above the red line. We don’t have to send monthly reports on our patriopassion on pain of expulsion. If we were born here, we get to live here, no questions asked. If we become citizens, same deal: we get to live here.
Granted there have been some feints toward the idea in the past. The House Un-American Activities Committee was a kind of “Do you really love us?” exercise, but even then, the outcome was not expulsion from the country. The Civil War was a serious attempt at divorce, and from that we got the anxieties about allegiance that led to the wretched custom of making children swear a solemn oath every school day as if we were hoping to create a robot army. But even then, allegiance is not the same as love.
It is true that adults who immigrate here do have to undergo a ceremony in which they renounce previous loyalty and shift it to this one. But that’s once; when it’s done it’s done. The government doesn’t phone the new citizens every day to ask, “Do you still love me? Do you really love me? What do you love about me most? Why were you making eyes at that other country yesterday?”
Dulce et decorum est, yeah?
Trump may dress it up as “patriotism”, but it is in fact Ethno-nationalism.
I am currently reading Frank Dikötter’s How To Be A Dictator: The Cult of Personality in the Twentieth Century.
After Trump’s rise, I had hoped that Americans would see their error, that the system would be self-correcting, and he would be gone after a four-year interregnum. That now seems a forlorn hope.
As I read the first chapter, on Mussolini, I kept thinking I was turning in to my father, seeing ghosts and shadows, drawing lines where none existed. But the parallels are too strong. As with “BoJo”, too many people see Trump as merely a fool, a grasper, with nary a thought in mind. I doubt he is as intelligent as Mussolini, but he knows how to play a crowd, how to fan the flams of adoration for His Mighty Self, and isolate and destroy those who would challenge him.
Please America, wake up from this nightmare before it is too late. Use every legal and moral tool at your disposal to remove this cancer from your society or you WILL find yourselves having to retake power at the point of a gun.
Robot army, you say? That sounds awesome…
Watching kids of various ages over the years, it strikes me that they start the pledge way too early for it to be effective. You have kindergarteners chanting words they don’t really understand, then by the time they get old enough to realize what they’re saying it’s just rote to them and they don’t pay it any attention.
Now if they waited until at least mid-teens and made them start saying it, with implicit or explicit punishment for not doing so, then you might get a real reaction (stronger buy-in or rejection). But as it currently stands, it’s just more chanting of the words by that point.
Probably what gets through the rote at all is “with liberty and justice for all”, which is not a bad ideal. “One nation under God” also strikes a chord with many, which is…not as good (albeit historically amusing since it wrecks the original “one nation, indivisible” point).
Getting to the main paint, Trump’s flag-molesting patriotism is repulsive, as is the attitude that nobody should question the US, that it’s the Greatest Country on Earth in every category and that should never be criticized, etc.
A patriotism where we have a feeling that we’re all in this together, that we should help each other out and try to improve this country when it falls short, is another matter.
On the contrary. Having students say the words before they can understand them is far more “effective” for the purpose on engendering blind obedience.