Patriotics
David Baker (1954- )
Yesterday a little girl got slapped to death by her daddy,
out of work, alcoholic, and estranged two towns down river.
America, it's hard to get your attention politely.
America, the beautiful night is about to blow up
and the cop who brought the man down with a shot to the chops
is shaking hands, dribbling chaw across his sweaty shirt,
and pointing cars across the courthouse grass to park.
It's the Big One one more time, July the 4th,
our country's perfect holiday, so direct a metaphor for war,
we shoot off bombs, launch rockets from Drano cans,
spray the streets and neighbors' yards with the machine-gun crack
of fireworks, with rebel yells and beer. In short, we celebrate.
It's hard to believe. But so help the soul of Thomas Paine,
the entire county must be here--the acned faces of neglect,
the halter-tops and ties, the bellies, badges, beehives,
jacked-up cowboy boots, yes, the back-up singers of democracy
all gathered to brighten in unambiguous delight
when we attack the calm and pointless sky. With terrifying vigor
the whistle-stop across the river will lob its smaller arsenal
halfway back again. Some may be moved to tears.
We'll clean up fast, drive home slow, and tomorrow
get back to work, those of us with jobs, convicting the others
in the back rooms of our courts and malls--yet what
will be left of that one poor child, veteran of no war
but her family's own? The comfort of a welfare plot,
a stalk of wilting prayers? Our fathers' dreams come true as
nightmare.
So the first bomb blasts and echoes through the streets and shrubs:
red, white, and blue sparks shower down, a plague
of patriotic bugs. Our thousand eyeballs burn aglow like punks.
America, I'd swear I don't believe in you, but here I am,
and here you are, and here we stand again, agape.
(From Like Thunder: Poets Respond to Violence in America, edited by Virgil Suárez and Ryan G. Van Cleave, published by the University of Iowa Press. Copyright © 2002 by Virgil Suárez and Ryan G. Van Cleave.)
Patriotism and the 4th of July from a new perspective? Just what is devotion and support for one's country? What does it entail? What does it demand of us?
The poet David Baker says of his poem: “I find the 4th of July to be our most revolting holiday, a national celebration of military might and warfare. I'm sorry. I feel grateful for my liberties and the sacrifices of others, but I am horrified by war and our country's own peculiar zeal for domination.”
Is is our duty to comply to this old saw "America: Love It or Leave It"?
The phrase “America, Love It or Leave It” has a pedigree dating back at least to the McCarthy Era.
I personally have heard people use this slogan since it hit its peak of popularity in the 1960s during the Vietnam War. New York City construction workers shouted it during their violent Hard Hat riot against anti-war protestors in 1970, just four days after the Kent State massacre. It implies that a true citizen or patriot must support everything done by America, or not be an American.
The truth is "America: Love It or Leave It" exemplifies the "either-or" fallacy, also known as false dilemma or false dichotomy, like another '50s/'60s slogan, the anti-Communist "Better dead than red."
The fallacy is employed as persuasive technique in which an argument is constructed so as to imply the necessity of choosing one of only two alternatives. It ignores the possibility that (a) the alternatives may not be mutually exclusive and (b) there may be other equally viable alternatives.
For those who employ the slogan, the reality of their intended meaning is quite simple.
“Anyone who disagrees with me about the policies of this country must not love it. Conversely, anyone who agrees with me is a patriot who loves their country.”
Implications are also evident: “What I’m really saying when I say love it or leave it is: Agree with me or go away, your opinion is not valid. I’m right, you’re wrong. And, I want anyone who doesn’t agree with me to pack up and leave the country.”
This conservative mindset is that the federal government and America, the country, are one and the same. Therefore, when someone criticizes the federal government, conservatives immediately conclude that the critic is attacking America, hates his country, and is ungrateful for what the federal government and the country have supposedly done for him or her.
Patriotism to the American right clearly means participating in the symbolic rituals of patriotism (pledging allegiance, singing the national anthem) with avid reverence. It means placing your country’s interests above global interests. “Above all, though, it means not criticizing your country, and especially not publicly. My country, right or wrong; America, love it or leave it,” says author and contributing editor to Commonweal Magazine Rand Richards Cooper.
(Rand Richards Cooper. “Love It or Leave It?” Commonweal Magazine. November 12, 2018.)
Of course, a critic of the government can rightly conclude the following: “I love my country as much as you, Mr. Conservative. I’m working very hard to make America a better place. It's a great place in many ways, but it’s not perfect, and I’m doing my best to improve it. And that is the most patriotic thing someone can ever do.”
Rand Richards Cooper explains …
“Ours is a patriotism that rejects the insistence on America as uniquely righteous, substituting instead an understanding of a country that, like each of its citizens, is fallible; that needs reminding of the matchless ideals against which it can be measured, and to which it should be held accountable. This is not disloyal: it is the opposite of disloyal …
“Over the past several decades, liberals have, for the most part, ceded the issue of patriotism to the right. They shouldn’t. They – we – shouldn’t let a narrowly prescriptive mode of country love preempt and disparage other, more constructive modes. We should all be emboldened in our patriotism by the prospect of holding our country to its highest ideals, trying to help it be the very best version of itself, as the woman in Iowa adroitly said.”
(Rand Richards Cooper. “Love It or Leave It?” Commonweal Magazine. November 12, 2018.)
Raising Its Ugly Head Again
Today’s right-wing patriotism is a variation on the old theme of “Love it or leave it.” Consider the reaction to Colin Kaepernick's protest while taking a knee during the National Anthem.
Or how about what happened in March 2012? Before Rick Santorum was introduced at a revivalist-type church service in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Baptist pastor Dennis Terry revived the timeworn trope, "America: Love It or Leave It." He said that those who don't believe that America "was founded as a Christian nation" ought to "get out!" In case it wasn't clear precisely who should be sent packing, he added, "We don't worship Buddha, we don't worship Mohammad, we don't worship Allah!"
Do you remember July 2019 when a Virginia church put up a new sign after President Trump’s attacks against a group of minority, progressive congresswomen and remarks that the so-called “squad” is “free to leave” if they want to?
“America: Love it or Leave It,” read the sign outside Friendship Baptist Church in Appomattox, Virginia. The sign came after President Trump tweeted Sunday that Democratic Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.), Ayanna Pressley (Mass.), Rashida Tlaib (Mich.) and Ilhan Omar (Minn.) should “go back” to their home countries, prompting widespread backlash.
Then, also in July 2019, a crowd chanting "Send her back!" – send Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), an American citizen, back to her birthplace in Somalia – at President Trump's rally in North Carolina. Trump himself integrated the phrase in his censure. "You know what, if they don't love it," he said of the congresswomen, "tell 'em to leave it." The scene at the rally resembled nothing so much as the "Two Minutes Hate" of George Orwell's 1984.
"'A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current,' Orwell said of his fictional mob …
“'The rage that one felt during the Two Minutes Hate,' he wrote, 'was an abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to another like the flame of a blowlamp.' The anger of Trump loyalists is similarly supple, constantly redirected from one target to another, each one cast as an enemy of 'real America,' which coincidentally looks just like them.”
(Bonnie Kristian. “We're no longer in Brave New World. We're back in 1984.” The Week. July 19, 2019.)
“America: love it or leave it” conveys – particularly to people of color – that this is not our home. It implies “How dare you come into my home and criticize it?”
Trump and his white nationalist cronies drape themselves in patriotism. They are the perfect megaphone for this skewed version of love for America. The protesting football players “should leave,” he says repeatedly. Journalists, with their critical questions, are “enemies of the people.” Democrats who don’t applaud his State of the Union address are “treasonous” and “un-American.” And on and on.
(Rand Richards Cooper. “Love It or Leave It?” Commonweal Magazine. November 12, 2018.)
"Love it or leave it" is dysfunctional. It is a way to dismiss ideas people don't like instead of debating them on their merits. Now conservative anti-Americanism pays lip service to love of country: Its proponents declare themselves the true patriots, describing their enemies as the nation’s betrayers. They believe these traitors include election administrators to the Capitol Police. Many blindly buy into conspiracy theories such as rigged elections and January 6 riots caused by left-wing protesters “trying to make Trump look bad.”
The only America they love is the one that exists in their heads. The real America of 2021 fills them with dissatisfaction, scorn, and White fragility.
Exactly how did the “love it or leave it” fallacy gain such new support and rival its heyday of the 60s and 70s? During his initial campaign and presidency, Trump tapped into this sentiment by explicitly dividing the country into good Americans that supported him and his people and bad ones that did not. It is the old false dichotomy deja vu – another attempt to kill diversity and stamp out viable alternatives.
"'My country, right or wrong,' is a thing that no patriot would think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying, 'My mother, drunk or sober' … The proper sort of love of country will always esteem the most candid counselor the best. Love is drawn to truth by the unerring magnetism of agony; it gives no pleasure to the lover to see ten doctors dancing with vociferous optimism round a death-bed."
– G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936) Ch. 16: “A Defense of Patriotism”
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