Patriotism and the 4th of July

As far as loving our country--as in the people, the mountains, the rivers, our neighborhoods and cities, our culture, and even some of the shining parts of our history (the Declaration of Independence stands out, as does the 2008 election)--it becomes a very easy thing to feel patriotic.

It would be easy to dismiss America as the land of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck, and I suppose that, yes, it is their country, too. But this is also the country of FDR, Barack Obama, Martin Luther King, Emma Goldman, and Cesar Chavez, jazz music, baseball, California, New York City, the Statue of Liberty, rock and roll, rap music, and The Boss. Millions and millions of immigrants from all over the world, who speak thousands of different languages and have come here at great cost to participate in our society can attest that this is a great country. Not perfect, but certainly great. Not the only great place to live or to be from, but one that those of us who are, can be proud of.

I was born here and plan to live my whole life here, and so will just about every person I love. I LOVE America is this sense. It's our home.

Sometimes those who operate our government are total a-holes (okay, pretty often actually), and use their positions of power to exploit the labors and resources of our country for absolute evil. That should not cause us to doubt all of the other things that make this country great. To celebrate the 4th of July, I'm posting some quotes from some prominent American dissidents and their (positive) comments about patriotism and America. Hopefully, these can clarify where I'm coming from.

Tom Morello:
"I am enormously proud to be an American. I would say that the things that our corporate-controlled government has done at best are shameful and at worst genocidal-but there's an incredible and a permanent culture of resistance in this country that I'm very proud to be a part of. It's not the tradition of slave-owning founding fathers, it's the tradition of the Frederick Douglasses, the Underground Railroads, the Chief Josephs, the Joe Hills, and the Huey P. Newtons. There's so much to be proud of when you're American that's hidden from you. The incredible courage and bravery of the union organizers in the late 1800's and early 1900's-that's amazing. People of get tricked into going overseas and fighting Uncle Sam's Wall Street wars, but these are people who knew what they were fighting for here at home. I think that that's so much more courageous and brave."

Noam Chomsky:
"To begin with, we have to be more clear about what we mean by patriotic feelings. For a time when I was in high school, I cheered for the school athletic teams. That's a form of patriotism — group loyalty. It can take pernicious forms, but in itself it can be quite harmless, maybe even positive. At the national level, what "patriotism" means depends on how we view the society. Those with deep totalitarian commitments identify the state with the society, its people, and its culture...
"For the totalitarian, "patriotism" means support for the state and its policies, perhaps with twitters of protest on grounds that they might fail or cost us too much. For those whose instincts are democratic rather than totalitarian, "patriotism" means commitment to the welfare and improvement of the society, its people, its culture. That's a natural sentiment and one that can be quite positive. It's one all serious activists share, I presume; otherwise why take the trouble to do what we do?"


Howard Zinn:
"Patriotism to me means doing what you think your country should be doing. Patriotism means supporting your government when you think it's doing right, opposing your government when you think it's doing wrong. Patriotism to me means really what the Declaration of Independence suggests. And that is that government is an artificial entity...
"So to me patriotism in its best sense means thinking about the people in the country, the principles for which the country stands for, and it requires opposing the government when the government violates those principles.
"So today, for instance, the highest act of patriotism, I suggest, would be opposing the war in Iraq and calling for a withdrawal of troops from Iraq. Simply because everything about the war violates the fundamental principles of equality, life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, not just for Americans, but for people in another part of the world. So, yes, patriotism today requires citizens to be active on many, many different fronts to oppose government policies on the war, government policies that have taken trillions of dollars from this country's treasury and used it for war and militarism. That's what patriotism would require today."



Cornel West:
"We have to pay debt to the sources of our being. That includes mom and dad. That includes the community that shaped you. That includes the nation that both protects you as well as gives you some sense of possibility. And for religious folk, of course, it includes God. Now, the problem is there has to be some Socratic energy in one’s piety. Piety ought to be inseparable from critical thinking, but the critical thinking is parasitic on who one is and where one starts. And who one is and where one starts has to do with what has shaped you from womb to tomb. Part of the hollowness and shallowness of some of modern thinking is to think that somehow one gives birth to oneself and therefore one has no debt to anybody who came before—as if you can have a language all by itself, as if you could actually raise yourself from zero to five, and so forth and so on. So that I look at my beautiful daughter and I give her all the love that I can and as she gets older, she is going to feel a certain kind of relation to me. In the end, she may characterize that as a debt that she feels to me because of the love that I gave her. I think that’s appropriate. I don’t do it for that reason, but I think that’s appropriate. I certainly feel that with my parents and I feel that with my neighborhood. I feel that with my Black church. I feel that with the nation and I also feel that with my intellectual ancestors. I think I have a deep debt to Chekhov and a deep debt to Coltrane. I have a deep debt to Hilary Putnam and Stanley Cavell, and these people who were so very kind to me. That doesn’t mean I uncritically accept what they have to say. I wrestle with them, but I’m thinking of a kind of critical, Socratic patriotism. Let’s call it that."


Ani Difranco:
(from "Grand Canyon")
i love my country
by which i mean i am indebted joyfully
to all the people throughout its history
who have fought the government to make it right

Happy 4th of July!