The Four Freedoms for the Twenty-First Century

I got a mailing from my Congressman today, composed of a column he published in a newspaper somewhere.  The subject line was "America: Worth Fighting For."

It begins with the standard blather about ordinary Americans having cookouts with their families on the Fourth, and how my Congressman hung out with veterans who fought to keep our country free before returning to Washington DC where there are apparently no veterans; and then a Thomas Paine quotation: "What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly; it is dearness only that gives everything its value."  (I wonder if my right-wing Republican Congressman knows what a radical anti-Christian Paine was.)

Our country has always been fought for, and we must ensure it is always worth fighting for. Every generation of Americans has bravely faced threats from abroad and challenges from within. Today, our troops are fighting for peace in the face of terror, and back home we are grappling with how to ensure the next century is an American one. Our men and women in uniform put their lives on the line every day in the name of the very words we celebrate today: “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”

This boilerplate posing is so familiar that one hardly pays it any attention.  But it's a tissue of pernicious lies.  Notice, for example, "how to ensure the next century is an American one."  Almost certainly that's an anti-immigrant dogwhistle, though it could also be about economic competition with China.  Maybe both.  The real internal "challenge" comes from the racist Right, and the wealthy oligarchs who believe that they should run the country and the world.

It's false that every generation of Americans "has bravely faced threats from abroad."  The United States has been an aggressor at least often as it had to defend itself, and since the end of World War II we have not fought a single war of self-defense.  The same goes for the claim that "our troops are fighting for peace in the face of terror": our endless war is a war for domination of the entire world.

Which doesn't mean that there aren't things about America that are "worth fighting for."  If we were attacked from without, defense would be completely proper.  Defense, even retaliation, was not out of place after the September 11 attacks; the wretched irony is that Bush chose to retaliate against everybody except the attackers.

In that light, we should remember that the American continents were worth fighting for, for the pre-Columbian peoples; Korea was worth fighting for, for Koreans; Vietnam was worth fighting for, for Vietnamese; Cuba was worth fighting for, for Cubans; Palestine is worth fighting for, for Palestinians; Afghanistan is worth fighting for, for Afghans; Iraqis thought that Iraq was worth fighting for; if it comes to that, Iranians and Venezuelans and Koreans once again will hold their countries worth fighting for.  But this can't be admitted by patriots: there is only one country worth fighting for, as far as they can recognize.  They are indignant when the citizens of another country defend it against a US invasion.  If you really want the ratification of Americans' love of country, however, you have to grant the validity of other peoples' love of theirs.

In a broader sense of "fight," many Americans have fought for Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness: abolitionists, runaway slaves, opponents of US wars of aggression, the Civil Rights Movement, the defenders of civil liberties, working people, women, gay men and lesbians and transgender people -- everyone that people like my Congressman would rather forget about, and certainly have no interest in celebrating on the Fourth.

What followed made my eyes bug out:

That’s why, in Congress, I work every day to ensure our country’s policies reflect the values that our men and women in uniform are fighting for:

    freedom to spend your hard-earned paycheck for your family, not give it all to the government;
    the opportunity to turn an idea into a Fortune 500 company, not be limited by government overreach;
    the freedom to think differently from your neighbor without persecution or stigma;
    a doctor-patient relationship without the government signing your prescription.

Essentially, it is the ability of every American to pursue their American dream.

Today, on the Fourth of July, I’m reminded that our American values, the freedom and independence we declared 243 years ago, are always worth fighting for.

This, I presume, is the right-wing Hoosier version of FDR's Four Freedoms.  Yeah, that's what Tom Paine cared about: his right to pay no taxes on his Fortune 500 company.  That's what the Second World War was about, the freedom to be a Nazi without persecution or stigma.  And that's what our men and women are fighting for today: the right to go bankrupt from medical bills, assuming you can afford a doctor-patient relationship in the first place.... Since solid majorities of Americans, even Republicans, want a government-run healthcare system and higher taxes on the rich, my Congressman has to be delusional.  But he doesn't stand alone: the Democratic Party leadership shares his delusions, no less than the Republican elites.  Joe Biden would be happy to reach across the aisle to him.  There must be something hallucinogenic in the swampy water of Washington, D.C.

Imagine There's No Countries

A regular reader of this blog wrote in e-mail that yesterday's post and the work of another blogger had "demolished any tiny shred of patriotism and hero worship left."  I think his remark was somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but hey, I'm always happy to be of service.

The media fuss over a Malian (undocumented) immigrant who climbed a Paris apartment building to rescue a four-year-old child reminds me just how skeptical I am about "heroes."  I think that Mamoudou Gassama probably qualifies as a hero if anyone does, but of course you can't stop there: he's a superhero and the media have dubbed him Spiderman (though Spiderman wouldn't have climbed, he'd have swung up on his web in one go).  French President Macron promised Gassama that he will be fast-tracked for naturalized citizenship, so of course the media are reporting that Gassama is already "made a citizen."  And so on.

One trouble I see with the concept of the Hero is that it reduces a person to a geometrical point, and almost no one will bear the kind of scrutiny a point receives.  First, though I hope I'll be proven wrong, I predict that Gassama will turn out to be less than a perfect role model in some way (if being black and a Muslim weren't enough); maybe he'll turn out to have a criminal record in Mali, maybe there'll be drugs or domestic abuse or something of the kind, and the media and the French government will turn on him as quickly and easily as they fawn on him now.  Second, maybe he'll turn out to be a total Boy Scout, but his squeaky clean perfection will be used as a club to beat every other undocumented immigrant in France and elsewhere because they aren't superheroes, just ordinary schmoes looking for a better life away from poverty or violence.  Heroes are like saints: the concept is constructed to foster unrealistic expectations of the hero/saint, who can then be trashed gleefully when he or she turns out to be human after all, and serves to deprecate real human beings.  The best hero or saint, of course, is a dead one, a plaster idol who can be merchandised, a brand beyond criticism or question.

I've often been asked angrily by hero-worshipers who've idols I've slighted if I have any heroes, or even anyone I admire.  There's a big difference between having a hero and admiring someone.  As I've written before, there are many people I admire; that doesn't mean I'm unaware of their flawed humanity, or that I care.  Mamoudou Gassama's heroism in climbing a building to save a child would not be diminished if he turned out to be very seriously flawed; but it also would not excuse those flaws.  The hero-worshiper stumbles on this point.  Any flaws must be denied, and if they can't be denied they must be minimized, explained away, and forgotten as soon as possible.  I don't worship anyone or anything, though I confess that when I was younger I could be pushed into a defensive posture about people I admired; I think I've learned better over the years.

So, for a relatively easy example, I admire Bree Newsome, who climbed a South Carolina statehouse flagpole to take down a Confederate flag that was flying on it.  That took some courage.  But she's a religious nut, and has said numerous things that I disagree with.  I feel no big dissonance about this, partly because I've never met her and probably never will.  But if I did, the admiration I feel for her courageous act in Charlotte wouldn't deter me from disagreeing if she said something I thought needed to be disagreed with.  It's not an either/or thing, and it speaks badly for those who think it is.

As for patriotism, I've had many entertaining and instructive exchanges about it over the years.  One of my go-to catchphrases is that patriotism is the first refuge of scoundrels.  The more I argue with liberals who want to preserve or reclaim the term, the more I'm sure it's an empty word and has no positive uses.  My progressive Diversity Manager Friend, for example, has denounced the NFL's decision to punish athletes who take a knee as protest before football games as unpatriotic, the real un-patriotism.  He has declared that patriotism isn't coercive, doesn't involve forcing people to sing the anthem or genuflect to the flag, so the NFL bosses are the ones who are really unpatriotic.  One could play the No True Patriot game, I suppose, which is the only way his claims make any kind of sense.  It seems to me that, in standard culture-of-therapy fashion, he's trying to reduce patriotism to an individual trait, the way that the born-gay claim isolates homosexuality as a geometrical point in the psyche of the homosexual, or bigotry as hatred harbored in the hater's heart.

But all these are social, cultural phenomena first, and individual traits as a distant second.  Patriotism too is the product of a system, situated in an imagined community called the nation.  Further, my friend's own actions show that while a True Patriot sitting alone may not be coercive, the moment he comes into conflict with others, the demand for patriotism and the accusation of un-patriotism are meant to reward and punish others.  My friend doesn't have the political or economic power to punish the NFL directly, but he hopes to shame them, and to encourage others to shame and coerce them into changing their policy.  Fine with me; I think that coercion is not itself a bad thing, that sometimes we must coerce people to stop their harmful behavior.  But we shouldn't deceive ourselves about what we're doing when we do so.  

Further, he wants to coerce the NFL in the name of America, in the name of True Patriotism, and there I part company with him.  The key point is that he undermines his own assertions about the non-coercive nature of patriotism, a word whose history is written in blood and terror.  I suppose that given time and much care, the word could be detached from its history and made wholly positive, though I doubt it, but that history must never be forgotten, and that is what I think my friend (and the many like him) is trying to do.

Am I saying, then, that no one should love America or any other country?  Far from it; I'm very tolerant of people's fetishes and kinks, as long as no one gets hurt.  Maybe I can draw a useful distinction and say that love is one thing, infatuation another.  But call it what you will, when you choose not to see the flaws in your beloved, when you become indignant that others don't share your tunnel vision, then you've crossed the line and are perpetuating the cycle of abuse.  And all too often, love of one's own country slides over into justifying the subordination of other countries.

If I don't like it here, then why don't I leave?  Someone is sure to ask that.  But I do like it here.  I know that compared even to many other Americans, I'm very well off.  I don't see why that should stop me from criticizing my country, and it is mine no less than anyone else's.  As Corey Robin wrote and I agreed a few days ago, we must share this country with each other.  But that necessity doesn't mean that I shouldn't object when my country harms the citizens of other countries, or some American citizens harm other American citizens.  The whole function of patriotism, I contend, is to distract us from making our country better.

The Land of the Skree and the Home of the Slave

It has been entertaining to watch the controversy surrounding Colin Kaepernick, the NFL quarterback who refused to stand for the National Anthem.  After seeing the predictable frothing reaction by white racist jingoes, I'm half-inclined to agree with Donald Trump that Political Correctness is killing America: Kaepernick was just speaking his mind, telling it like it is, refusing to let Political Correctness stifle his thought and opinions, and all these whiny Social Justice Warriors got their delicate sensibilities in a bunch.  They want professional sports to be a Safe Space, and they'll accept no trigger warnings -- they want total conformity to the Politically Correct thought police.

This morning I met a friend for lunch at a bar, which of course had a TV tuned to ESPN.  The big question of the segment was Rodney Harrison's celebrity-style apology for claiming that Kaepernick is not black.  I say "celebrity-style" because, as is typical of the genre, Harrison's apology groveled without actually saying something or even acknowledging that, or why he was wrong -- he just hadn't meant to offend or hurt anybody.  A self-identified "Caucasian person" on the panel of commentators, also predictably, lamented that Harrison shouldn't be "humiliated" for making an honest mistake.  The other commentators did better, though.

But I have a question. The cartoon above got a lot of traffic among liberals and progressives a few years back, when Brendan Eich, Alec Baldwin, Duck Dynasty and some other people got in trouble over some antigay and racist remarks and actions. The point was that as long as the government isn't censoring them, it's okay for them to be fired, to lose their contracts with their media overlords, and for millions of people to throw virtual caca at them on the Intertoobz -- because it's only censorship if the government does it. Corporations and other private entities are not bound by the First Amendment. This can be argued, and it was.

So here's my question: why does this cartoon not apply to Colin Kaepernick? Or does it? Should the NFL show Colin Kaepernick the door for being (as he is, in many people's opinion, though not in mine) an asshole, whose bullshit they don't want to have to listen to?  I have no particular opinion myself, I'm just curious to know what other people think.  It seems to me that this case confirms my oft-stated belief that freedom of speech almost always comes down to which asshole and which bullshit is on the block.

Judgment for Thee, But Not for Me

I've noticed that some of the same people who reacted to the Charleston shootings by waving the Confederate battle flag and whining that their "heritage" was being slandered, are now waving around the Stars and Stripes.  Whatever else you can say about it, there's a contradiction there.  The Confederacy sought to tear apart the Union; for those who now try to defend the CSA to claim that they support the Union is absurd hypocrisy, to put it gently.  If I were a jingo of their stripe, I could rant that they are spitting on the fine young men who gave their lives to preserve the Union against the Confederate rebellion and treason -- not too strong a word in this case, since the Confederacy was a declared enemy of the United States, so defending and supporting it is giving aid and comfort to an enemy -- a defeated one, true, but one that has never ceased to continue the rebellion ever since it was defeated.

Even pretending to take such a stance makes me giggle uncomfortably, so I don't take it very far.  I have been hammering at one person in particular who's been simultaneously posting memes that flaunt the battle rag and memes that posture moistly about Our Flag.  Unfortunately I didn't make notes on everyone I know who posted pro-Confederate material so I could hammer on all of them; this person has just had the bad sense and bad faith to go on doing it.  You can't serve two masters, I've told her, wondering if she'd get the biblical allusion.  Since she's a Christian who also posts religious memes, I doubt she does.

To celebrate the Fourth of July, the programmers on our local community radio station have been choosing songs that reflect the occasion.  One of the best, to my mind, was the one who played Jello Biafra's version of "Love Me, I'm a Liberal" this morning.  This afternoon, a guest DJ announced that he'd googled "cool patriotic songs" for the upcoming set.  One of these was "The Bumper of My SUV" by the country singer Chely Wright.  In one sense I'd never heard it before; in another sense, I'd heard it thousands of times before.

I've got a bright red sticker on the back of my car
Says United States Marines
And yesterday a lady in a mini-van held up a middle finger at me
Does she think she knows what I stand for
Or the things that I believe
Just by looking at a sticker for the U.S. Marines
On the bumper of my SUV

... But I guess I wanna know where she's been
Before she judges and gestures to me
'Cause she don't like my sticker for the U.S. Marines
On the bumper of my SUV

So I hope that lady in her mini-van
Turns on her radio and hears this from me
As she picks up her kids from their private school
And drives home safely on our city streets
Or to the building where her church group meets
Yeah, that's why I've got a sticker for the U.S. Marines
On the bumper of my SUV

The first question I had as the words whimpered past me was whether this incident had actually happened; Wright says it did, in mid-2003 right after Bush's criminal invasion of Iraq, and that the woman "screamed 'Your war is wrong. You're a baby killer.'" You can never go wrong vilifying and defaming opponents of The War, as the inventors of the "hippies spat on Vietnam veterans" myth knew.  But suppose some woman did flip a bird at Chely Wright and call her a baby killer because of her bumper sticker.  One of the recurring memes that annoy me most are those which accuse others of being judgmental, like this one:

No doubt the people who judge these whiners also have reasons why they do the things they do, and why they are who they are.  It might be that whoever made this meme, and those who share it, couldn't handle half of what their judges have dealt with.  I'd have to hear both sides, and then cross-examine them, as I'd love to do with Chely Wright and Our Lady of the Finger.

Chely Wright, if she were willing to walk a mile in another's shoes and see the world through her eyes, might find that the woman in the mini-van had what she considered very good reasons to be angry at people with US Marine bumperstickers on their SUVs.  Maybe the woman had lost relatives or friends in other US wars of aggression.  Maybe she had spent time in countries that had been devastated by US violence, trying to help our victims there.  Or maybe not: maybe she just had sufficient empathy to be upset by the suffering Wright's military relatives had inflicted on innocent people far away.  I would not give the finger to Wright, or anyone else with such bumper stickers on their vehicle, but I don't know what drove the woman to express her anger that way.  Neither does Chely Wright; I doubt she knows that the woman sends her children to a private school, or what kind of church group she belongs to.

I know more about Wright, since she proceeds to tell more about herself and reveals her own bad faith.  She's been to Iraq, she says, and to Hiroshima and the DMZ.

Yes, I do have questions
I get to ask them because I'm free
That's why I've got a sticker for the U.S. Marines
On the bumper of my SUV

If Chely Wright is "free," it's not because of any war the US has fought since 1945.  All of them were wars of aggression, against countries and people who had not actually attacked the US.  And in fact she (along with all the rest of us) is less free because of George W. Bush's wars, which were used to increase already intolerable government surveillance of all citizens, to make sure we don't hold or express unacceptable political stances.  That's standard operating procedure for wars: the government uses the national peril as an excuse to curtail civil liberties, and the current war, which is intended to last forever, is no exception. 

Wright sings, "But that doesn't mean that I want war / I'm not Republican or Democrat."  What does party affiliation have to do with it?  Both parties want war, though like Wright they deny it.  The question to put to partisans and to self-proclaimed non-partisans like Chely Wright is: What wars have you ever opposed, and did you oppose them on principle or because a President of the wrong party was in office?  Opposing war, or specific wars, on principle, is totally uncool; so is objecting because of the suffering Our Boys and Girls will bring to innocent civilians in the country we attack.  If all Wright can do is talk about her allegiance to the people she knows, then give me Natalie Maines, even if she's "vulgarly anti-war." 

I don't know nearly enough to judge the woman who yelled at Chely Wright, though on the face of it I think she acted without knowing enough about Wright.  But Wright has told the world more about herself (and I'm not talking about her 2010 coming out as lesbian): she's vulgarly pro-war, and I feel no discomfort about judging her for that.  "A gay American hero"?  Hell, no.

His High Mightiness, the President of the United States and Protector of Their Liberties

It's July 4th, and patriotism is on the menu. Various of my Teabag-symp Facebook friends have been posting the predictable viral status messages that 99 percent won't have the guts to repost!

Everybody, let's do this (and NBC - this one's for you!) ....We should flood Facebook with this...."I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands: one nation under G O D, indivisible, with Liberty and Justice for all". RE-POST IF YOU THINK GOD, OUR COUNTRY, OUR FLAG, AND OUR MILITARY DESERVE RESPECT!!!! Let's just see how many AMERICANS will re-post

And:

The American flag does not fly because the wind moves past it. The American flag flies from the last breath of each military member who has died protecting it. American soldiers don't fight because they hate what's in front of them...they fight because they love what's behind them. Re-Post this if you support our troops!

So that's what Our Troops are up to, protecting the flag? I thought they were supposed to be protecting our country and defending our freedom -- the freedom to shut up and do what we're told.

This morning a DJ on our community radio station played Randy Newman's "A Few Words in Defense of Our Country," describing it as being critical (but not too critical) of America, which I guess is true, but ... I dunno. At his best, Newman's beyond praise; but he's rarely been at his best in the past thirty years. I'd heard "A Few Words" several times, mostly in video clips of him playing it alone, just his voice and piano, and I think it bothered me because most of his best songs involve an unreliable narrator: someone who, as Newman puts it, knows less about himself than we know about him. I took for granted that in this song, Newman was mainly speaking in his own voice, but when the DJ played the studio version from Harps and Angels, I wondered. The music gave the context, a country ballad with strings, pedal steel, and Floyd-Cramerish piano, and I tried to hear the narrator as one of one of Newman's Southerners -- even one from Good Old Boys, forty years older and somewhat mellowed out. The song worked a bit better that way, but not much. I think Newman is speaking (or singing) in his own voice here, and the trouble is that a nice moderate, reasonable guy isn't as interesting as a bigot; but the point of his best satire is that his bigots, slavers, and other crazies see themselves as nice, moderate reasonable guys.

Still, for the Fourth of July I'd rather offer this Newman standard, which made his PBS audience gasp:



And in honor of the Founders, a couple of bits from Roger D. Hodge's The Mendacity of Hope: Barack Obama and the Betrayal of American Liberalism (HarperCollins, 2010):

It might seem odd that there is nothing in the Constitution about banks, since banks were a common subject of political controversy, as was the question of money. As it happens, banks were popular inside the convention but extremely unpopular outside it; leaving banks out of the document can be seen as a tactical maneuver, to eliminate a potential obstacle to ratification. …

Once the new government was formed – after squabbling over whether President Washington should be addressed as “Your Highness,” “Your Excellency,” or “His High Mightiness, the President of the United States and Protector of Their Liberties,” a dispute that consumed John Adams and appalled Madison – the debate over the chartering of the United States Bank divided Congress into bitter camps [106].

and

The Whigs were no less corrupt than the Jacksonians, as Daniel Webster’s famous note to Nicholas Biddle, the president of the U.S. Bank, makes clear. Webster’s candor was magnificent: “I believe my retainer has not been renewed or refreshed as usual,” he wrote to Biddle. “If it be wished that my relation to the Bank should be continued, it may be well to send me the usual retainers” [164].

A Great Day to Be Indigenous

There was outrage in Native American circles (and others) recently when it was learned that the mission to take out Osama Bin Laden was codenamed "Operation Geronimo."

BoingBoing reported:

Even the NYT's account would appear to have inaccuracies now: They report that "Geronimo" was code name for bin Laden, but CNN cites an administration official later clarifying that this was the code name for the operation, not the man himself.

Oh, well! That's all right then. But it didn't appease the administration's critics. An LA Times op-ed agreed:

Present-day Native American leaders have rightly objected to the implied comparison between Geronimo and Bin Laden. As Jeff Houser, chairman of the Fort Sill Apache Tribe noted in a letter to President Obama, "to equate Geronimo … with Osama bin Laden, a mass murderer and cowardly terrorist, is painful and offensive to our tribe and to all native Americans." No religious fundamentalist, Geronimo never sought to create an all-encompassing caliphate. Rather, he simply wanted to be left alone.

(Geronimo as Greta Garbo -- I like it.) I'm not defending the mission's title, I only want to suggest that Native American critics should treat it as a salutary reminder of the history that they seem to be trying to forget as fiercely as any other Americans. The op-ed drew on an article by Karl Jacoby, a history professor at Brown University, who wrote:

The appropriation of Indian labels is particularly unseemly given the reality of today's military. Native Americans have one of the highest per capita enlistment rates in the military of any ethnic group. Powwows often begin with the entering of an honor guard, composed of military veterans who carry the U.S. and tribal flags. At the San Carlos Apache Reservation in Arizona, where Geronimo was confined in the 1870s and '80s, the tribal government maintains a billboard proudly listing all the San Carlos Apaches serving in the military.

It's no wonder that Indian peoples feel their sacrifices have been dishonored by the labeling of our worst enemy as Geronimo and that they themselves have been treated as other than real Americans. As Guyaalé's great-grandson, Joseph Geronimo, noted recently, using the name in the operation to kill Bin Laden was a "slap in the face." His ancestor, after all, "was more American than anybody else."

Kaplan acknowledges "the 1939 movie 'Geronimo,' (a film advertised at the time as featuring images of 'war-maddened savages terrorizing the West')". Whatever the reality of Geronimo's career, that's how he was long seen in white American culture. The US military still uses the term "Indian country" to refer to "enemy territory"; the usage is apparently of Vietnam-war vintage, but survives in Iraq. (A Marine general's use of the term in 2003 also aroused controversy and hand-wringing.) In the American military imaginary, they're still fighting the Indian wars.

The Indian wars are reckoned to have ended with the capture of Geronimo in 1886, though, so I guess it's not too surprising that many Native Americans now want to see and present themselves as patriotic Americans. But I can only go along with that wish so far. If Native Americans want to overlook their past sufferings at the hands of the US Government they are now so proud to serve, so be it; it's their choice. There's another inseparable side of that story, though: it means supporting, endorsing, and participating in the present crimes of the US. Which is not okay.

This morning I was listening to the Native American music program on my local community radio station. Today's installment was dedicated to Memorial Day, and between songs I vaguely heard references to "defending our country." Then they played a song called "She's My Hero", by Radmilla Cody, a tribute to Lori Piestewa, described on Cody's label's website as "the first Native woman to die in the Iraq war". (Well, no. "Native" in Iraq would mean "Iraqi," and I'm sure that many native Iraqi women were victims of our invasion before Piestewa was killed. This is another indication why "Native" is not a suitable label for the pre-Columbian peoples of the Americas. But that's another issue.) I listened more closely to the words as the song played:

Her name was Lori
synonymous with Glory
she answered her country's call
she did it for us all
Oh the woman warrior
she's my hero

The price that she paid
the sacrifice she made
There's peace all around us
embraces all Americans
Oh the woman warrior
she's my hero

The CD's liner notes describe Piestewa as "the first Native American woman warrior to die in battle protecting the freedom of her people and the United States of America." So few words, so many lies. Piestewa wasn't a warrior, she was (according to Wikipedia) "a member of the army's 507th Army Maintenance Company, a support unit of clerks, cooks, and repair personnel." An Iraqi in an analogous position could have ended up in Abu Ghraib or Bagram.

Far from "protecting the freedom of her people and the United States of America", Piestewa was a participant in an illegal and horrific war of aggression against people who had not attacked the US. Even if she was, according to Jessica Lynch (who was injured in the same ambush -- remember her?), "the true hero" of the debacle, and even if Lynch named her daughter "Dakota Ann" (?) in Piestewa's honor, and even if "Her death led to a rare joint prayer gathering between members of the Hopi and Navajo tribes, which have had a centuries-old rivalry," what she was doing in Iraq should not be whitewashed. It had better be possible to sympathize with her and her family's loss without obscuring this reality. I am sorry Piestewa died, but she didn't do it "for us all." Not for me, and not for you either.

"There's peace all around us"? The song and the program's content were especially outrageous coming on the heels of this (via) defense of America and our freedoms:

For the second time in three days, a night raid in eastern Afghanistan by NATO forces resulted in the death of a child, setting off protests on Saturday that turned violent and ended in the death of a second boy. . . .

"American forces did an operation and mistakenly killed a fourth-grade student; he had gone to sleep in his field and had a shotgun next to him," [the district's governor, Abdul Khalid]. said. "People keep shotguns with them for hunting, not for any other purposes," Mr. Khalid said.

As Glenn Greenwald commented,

Just imagine the accumulated hatred from having things like this happen day after day, week after week, year after year, for a full decade now, with no end in sight -- broadcast all over the region. It's literally impossible to convey in words the level of bloodthirsty fury and demands for vengeance that would arise if a foreign army were inside the U.S. killing innocent American children even a handful of times, let alone continuously for a full decade.

When I hear about women warriors (or any others) proudly hearing their country's call and defending us all, I can only think of "heroic" exploits like that one. There've been so many.

My Country, Right or Far-Right

It occurred to me again today that, much as they like to pretend to be patriots, right-wingers really hate the US government. It was RWA1's latest antics on Facebook that reminded me of this: he linked an article at the Washington Examiner, which laments that

Boeing is not free to make its jets at the factory of its choosing, according to the National Labor Relations Board -- it must make them in Washington state, using union labor.

As it happens, I'd just read another article on the same story, by Andrew Leonard at Salon. The National Labor Relations Board had ruled against Boeing's move to South Carolina, a "right-to-work" state, to avoid the kind of strikes it had faced in its Washington plant. Leonard quotes a New York Times article on the case:

Boeing executives had publicly said they were making the move to avoid the kind of strikes the airplane maker had repeatedly faced in Washington; Lafe Solomon, the labor board's acting general counsel, said the company's motive constituted illegal retaliation against workers for exercising their right to strike ...

Mr. Solomon, who has worked for board members of both parties, said this case was straightforward: Boeing had retaliated against workers for exercising their federally protected right to strike. "They had a consistent message that they were doing this to punish their employees for having struck and having the power to strike in the future," he said. "I can't not issue a complaint in the face of such evidence."

It tells you something about today's corporate arrogance, nurtured through years of pro-business administrations, that Boeing executives thought they'd be safe making such open declarations about their reasons for the move. Against the Washington Examiner's writer, I'd say it was Boeing, not the NLRB, that "overreached." The case isn't settled, though, and it will be interesting to see how it turns out.

But back to RWA1, whose comment on the story was: "Uncle Sugar giveth and Uncle Sugar taketh away." The implication being that, because Boeing executives and employees had not only donated to Obama's campaign, but the company has benefited from federal subsidies and loans, they are reaping what they sowed. As the Examiner writer put it, "And Boeing has pocketed even more taxpayer loot under Obama than it did under George W. Bush." (Maybe he thinks that the Bush administration would never "'use public office to make winners into losers and losers into winners' and 'bend, break and make the law to help their friends and punish their enemies." He's quoting an Examiner "colleague" on the special wickedness of the Obama administration there.) If they had not collaborated with the State and helped a Socialist into the Oval Office, Boeing could have violated federal labor law with impunity. I mean, it's so unfair! Corporations are supposed to be above the law! It's in the Constitution, along with "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness"!

Let me remind my readers that I don't pretend to be a patriot; nor do I think there's anything wrong with hating America. RWA1 and others of his ilk do. Ronald Reagan, for example, notoriously declared that the most frightening words in the language are "I'm from the government, and I'm here to help." Of course, when disaster strikes, the same right-wingers are first in line demanding to be frightened with government help. And you'd better not criticize a Republican President (unless, just unless you're a Republican yourself): the cult of personality around Reagan and George W. Bush belies the conservative claims to distrust government. (RWA1, like many other American rightists, believes that Julian Assange of Wikileaks should be executed -- perhaps summarily -- for treason, even though Assange is not an American citizen and owes this country no loyalty. I'd be surprised if I hadn't already noticed that many Americans think that "patriotism" means loyalty to the United States, no matter what country you happen to be from.)

The same conservatives are infuriated at any recognition of imperfection in the US government's conduct, unless it's conduct they dislike; I'm near the end of History on Trial now, and its account of right-wingers' insistence that school history classes avoid anything that reflects badly on the US and its past government officials was another inspiration for this post. The authors quote a letter printed in the November 8, 1994 issue of the Wall Street Journal, attacking the standards for American history classes:

The first [letter], by Balint Vazonyi, senior fellow at the Potomac Foundation, likened the standards to "an amnesia-inducing drug to be administered on a national scale without hypodermic needles." The standards writers, wrote Vasonyi, had taken a page out of the book "developed in the councils of the Bolshevik and Nazi parties and successfully deployed on the youth of the Third Reich and the Soviet Empire. The recipe called for schools that dispense not knowledge but a compendium of selected events, personalities and interpretations. More important, knowledge was eliminated of such events and personalities as were deemed to have no usefulness by the ideologues of the Nazi or Bolshevik party (which also gave us the concept of political correctness) ... [188-9].

The remarkable thing about this rant is that it perfectly describes the demands of the right-wing ideologues who were attacking the history standards: they wanted students to be taught a compendium of selected events, personalities and interpretations (Columbus, the Pilgrim Fathers, our glorious Revolution, the Founding Fathers, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the glorious march to the Pacific, etc.) while eliminating events and personalities as were deemed to have no usefulness by the ideologues of the Republican party (the Injuns, the slaves, Harriet Tubman, the Seneca Falls women's suffrage convention of 1848, working people that nobody has ever heard of). I'm being just a wee bit unfair there -- some well-known Democrats, like Arthur Schlesinger Jr., have made the same complaint, demanding that American history classes should leave white American children feeling good about themselves, presumably on the assumption that their self-esteem would trickle down to children of color. Or something.

As I say, I'm not a patriot, and I certainly don't object to criticism either of the United States, of its government, or of the officials in that government. I am bemused by the doublethink of my right-wing fellow citizens, their ability to demand abject adoration of America and its government from everyone else while making hatred of its government a basic postulate of their own political discourse. I believe that this doublethink, and the cognitive dissonance it entails, may explain some of their fury when anyone else fails to genuflect before America -- or when they simply suspect someone else of insufficient reverence before the idol of the American State. (Balint Vazonyi's letter, quoted above, is a textbook case.)

At the same time, I'm conscious of analogous tensions in my own stance toward my country, my government -- hell, toward my species. I'll try to write more about this before too long.

Where the Wild Things Are

Open Salon features some strange stuff, often several months past its sell-by date, but some garbage is timeless, y'know? Like this piece denouncing the burning of books, reacting to the threatened Koran-burning last fall, by a "former advertising and marketing executive and winner of over 50 advertising awards for excellence, ... an unpaid Senior Advisor on John Kerry's 2004 Presidential Campaign... [and a] blogger, activist, Democratic Strategist on MSNBC and FOX News and founder of Common Sense NMS." As you'd expect from such a person, his post was bogus from the title on, which he repeated in the main text. "Americans Don't Burn Books"? I suppose this is an example of the "No True Scotsman" tactic, because of course, Americans often have burned books, though nowadays it's simpler just to pulp them. The blogger's extended tantrum is, by the way, an example of the very magical thinking that underlies burning books or flags or effigies: that the burned object is a poppet, and by burning it you burn the person it stands for. (This is often associated with "voodoo dolls", but poppets are European magic, as American as apple pie.)

Then there was this one, "Political Propaganda Has Defined Patriotism." Patriotism often goes along with the poppet-magic mentality, and it has always been associated with propaganda. (Remember Samuel Johnson's quip that patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels -- the unsavory aspects of patriotism are not exactly a new discovery.) The post begins by invoking the "Nazi's" (a plural was presumably meant but the possessive was written) and the popular legend about the Big Lie, blithely ignoring, oh, say, Parson Weems, "The Star-Spangled Banner," and "Cry 'God for Harry, England, and Saint George!'" According to the blogger, Paul Joseph Goebbels wrote that "The most brilliant propagandist technique… must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over and over." (Except that Goebbels didn't write that, it was Hitler. Details, details.) Then she writes, "Over the past two years, many of the very techniques Goebbels employed have been used to mobilize a discontent and fearful America." You'd have to call that liberal propaganda defining patriotism, because it's the kind of big lie that was a staple of liberal discourse under Bush, like Molly Ivins's 2007 lament, "What happened to the nation that never tortured? The nation that wasn't supposed to start wars of choice? The nation that respected human rights and life? A nation that from the beginning was against tyranny?" The US was never such a nation, any more than it was the kind of nation depicted in Reaganite propaganda (white people living behind picket fences in small towns, self-reliant and beholden to no one, especially government bureaucrats). So this post is a textbook example of what it pretends to denounce.

Most recently I stumbled on this post. The title was promising: "I'm an Atheist, Ask Me How." Except that the blogger doesn't know how. She begins:

I can hardly believe that Christianity is still so prevalent in this, the year of our Lord, 2010. It’s fucking bizarre that an organization advocating homophobia and misogyny is so globally cherished.

Starting from the atheist premise that there is no god, the answer should be obvious: an organization advocating homophobia and misogyny is globally cherished because homophobia and misogyny are globally cherished. To oversimplify somewhat, since there is no god, religious doctrines and dicta must be invented by people. Religions are collective constructions, so they don't need to be consistent or reasonable. Someone who for political reasons has a voice gets to insist that this or that bit goes into the stew. If enough people agree with him, his bit will be embraced and cherished and trumpeted by most believers. If not, his bit will be tactfully reinterpreted, or paid respectful lip service and ignored. Consider Mark 10:25, "It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God." It's as securely scriptural as Leviticus 18:22, in fact it's a teaching of Jesus, but you won't find most Christians putting a lot of store by it.

Or consider Jesus' prohibition of divorce, Mark 10:11. Even in the New Testament this teaching is diluted by Matthew, who shows Jesus giving a loophole for someone with an adulterous spouse. Conservative Christians hung on to it in the US until fairly recently, but by the time the divorced and remarried Ronald Reagan became a presidential contender, they were ready to shove this Christian teaching down the slippery slope. And now, homosexuals are demanding the "right to marry," and it's Reagan's fault.

I don't know why misogyny and homophobia are so popular, but they are, and if they weren't, it wouldn't be possible for religion to exploit them. And the blogger knows this, because she also says, "There is no God, Heaven, or Hell, all religion is man-made, and you are not morally superior because of your faith." See that? "All religion is man-made."

Further, where traditional religion fades, other, newer authorities take up these attitudes and run with them. Secular science's first take on homosexuality and women was straightforwardly reactionary: Homosexuals were not sinners, but they were sick, and could be cured. Women needed to stop trying to usurp the place of men, such as universities (hard study would render women sterile and eventually drive them mad), and should stay at home tending the children, as Evolution intended. Women who continued to rebel in this manner were clearly mannish and might even try to love each other (see homosexuality), would wear suits and smoke cigars, and civilization would perish as the contagion spread.

But this was all in the past, I hear you say, and we are more enlightened now! Perhaps, or perhaps not. Not until 1973 did the American Psychiatric Association remove homosexuality from its official list of disorders, and not for another couple of decades did it reject therapeutic attempts to "cure" us, though there had always been good evidence that such attempts were ineffective and mainly succeeded at making the patients miserable. As for gender, there are still plenty of scientists pushing a biological determinist line, that boys like guns and girls like dolls, and despite the critical flaws in their evidence and their claims, they still have no trouble getting funding for their research or publicity for their claims. The corporate media give them all the exposure they could wish, and the line is that only backward, biased feminists and leftists quibble with these secure, unbiased scientific findings. The case of race is similar.

The problem isn't science, or even religion; it's what the philosopher Walter Kaufmann named "decidophobia," the fear of fateful decisions. Neither science or religion can make our decisions for us. And that is frightening, as Kaufmann acknowledged. Most people evidently want to believe that there is a solid, certain place where they can stand, and absolute principles by which to make their moral choices. Atheists tend to choose different ones than theists, but they seem to be no less likely to pretend to know more than they know.

Indian Country

I'm listening to Earthsongs, a program of Native American music that airs each Sunday morning on our local community radio station. (There's also a locally-produced program an hour earlier, which is now run by the Native American student organization at the university. I've been listening to both of these for several years now.) This week's guest is the Muskogee poet Joy Harjo, my almost exact contemporary, whose work I've encountered here and there over the years. I liked the first books of hers I read, She Had Some Horses and The Woman Who Fell from the Sky, but the third, A Map to the Next World, was full of pomposity, racial stereotyping, and bad writing. Harjo is also a musician, with several albums out, and on the program she sang, unaccompanied, a new song she was working on. It included the following line:

Remember that a nation is a person with a soul ...

This is fascist nationalist crap, and I'm using "fascist" carefully and deliberately. A nation is an invented abstraction, an "imagined community" as the political theorist Benedict Anderson famously dubbed it. The corporate (from the Latin word for 'body') concept of nationhood (or of any group of people, like a religion) is highly dangerous and must at best be balanced by an emphasis on the individual members of the body; otherwise individuals become mere cells to be brushed off like dandruff when they're no longer needed. It can't even be defended as a specifically Native cultural heritage, since it has been a feature of modern European nationalism as well, which reached its epitome in blood-and-soil fascism in Europe and elsewhere.

Harjo then explained to the host of Earthsongs:

We were a hundred percent of the people in what is now America, and now we're one percent.

Hey, Joy, I know what you mean -- that's why so many Euro-Americans are worried about our demographics, what will happen to our gene pool if we let in too many "immigrants" -- we remember what happened to you guys when you let illegal immigrants swarm onto your shores! No doubt the first wave of people who came into the western hemisphere tens of thousands of years ago felt the same way about the later waves of foreigners, though we'll never know. (One of the benefits of oral, traditional culture is that it erases the past into an eternal present.) Harjo referred to other minorities in the US, such as Asian-Americans, but I don't think she's really thought about what she said today.

In saying this, I am neither denying nor minimizing the genocide of the American Indian by European invaders. But even accepting the largest estimates of the pre-Columbian population of the western hemisphere, the floods of Europeans and others from the eastern hemisphere who then bred like rabbits are also responsible in large part for the fact that Indians are no longer one hundred percent of the population here. Harjo is veering into nativism here.

Which may have something to do with the increase I've noticed of a familiar style of American patriotism among Native American artists and speakers over the past several years, an insistent claim to be, like, Americans. The latter, to an anti-essentialist like me is just fine, as an appropriation of the invaders' label. (I wish I really believed that was the intention behind the tendency.) The patriotism part, not so much. It's like the "gay American" trope in which the Human Rights Campaign advised Jim McGreevy to drape himself when he was in political trouble. (Patriotism is, as always, the first refuge of scoundrels.) The Cree singer Buffy Sainte-Marie, for instance, famous for her songs attacking the European invasion of the Americas and its consequences (which led to her being blacklisted by the Johnson and Nixon administrations), has recorded "America the Beautiful" for her new album. She wrote some new verses for it, and told Amy Goodman the other day on Democracy Now!,

It’s about America the country, not America the nation state. It’s about the real America that so many people, regardless of their political associations, really feel in their hearts—you know, this beautiful, beautiful place. So, it’s yet another take on “America the Beautiful.” People seem to enjoy it.

Of course, America is not a country, and never was. It's a large landmass which had many peoples, languages, cultures in it before the European invasion; the United States of America is just one country among many, and it's an annoyance to people in those other countries to see their existence disappear when "America" refers only to the big bully of the upper portion. Earlier in the same interview, Sainte-Marie referred carefully to "the North American public," but now she forgot that there's a lot more to the America than the USA. (Even speaking of "the North American public," perhaps because she was born in Canada and still has ties there, seems to lump in Mexico, which has a different history. Ethnocentrism is hard to avoid, even for the indigenous.)

But I digress. Back to Joy Harjo, who also said on Earthsongs:

We have a lot of veterans, people going over there to defend our country.

It's true, and should not be forgotten, that American Indians have contributed substantially to the body count of the American war machine, much as other oppressed groups have done, to the present day. But I guess I have to keep repeating, American forces "over there" in Iraq and Afghanistan are not "defending our country" -- they are attacking other countries. I wonder if Harjo talked the same way during the Vietnam era? (Subject for future research.) I don't see how anyone can deplore the US treatment of the Indians while being so complacent about US aggression against other peoples.

(image credit)

The First Refuge Of Scoundrels

Roy Edroso had an interesting post last Thursday, in which he tried to find his patriotism. Hm, I know I left it here somewhere…

We are surrounded by conservatives who insist that they love America, and describe it as a horrible place where the unfortunate deserve only the back of the hand of power, which must be maintained by endless wars. After a bellyful of their patriotism I sometimes begin to doubt my own. Maybe they're right, I begin to think: maybe the ugly America they celebrate is the real America, and I have only deluded myself that it was something better.

Oh, here it is, under the couch:

The American people are often ridiculous and sometimes do horrible things, and I have turned my wrath on a broad array of our native fixers, crackers, dupes, dopes, and scumbags. But they are still my people. I too want more than I could possibly deserve, chafe at well-meant and even reasonable restrictions, and prefer a good time to a Great Awakening. And in the last ditch I'll take my stand with our credit-, pleasure-, and freedom-addicted folk against our would-be saviors.

I’ve seen liberals play this game numerous times over the years. Sometimes it was about reclaiming the flag – that one goes back way before September 11, 2001, to the days of the flag stickers, about the size of a 3x5 index card, that turned up in cars in the late 60s. Liberals and even a few leftists fretted: should they let the “hard-hats” have the flag to themselves, or should they show that they could wave the flag as well?

Well, sure, folks, knock yourselves out. Patriotism is more debilitating to reason than religious faith, so it took me a long time to work out my feelings about the flag. Then, back around the time of the first Gulf War I think, some airhead on a local BBS wrote something to the effect of, But don’t you love your only flag, the flag that gives you freedom? – and everything fell into place for me. The flag doesn’t give my freedom. It’s a piece of cloth. It is also a symbol, and like all symbols it’s a mess of conflicting meanings, some admirable, some despicable. But treating it as something holy is idolatry, and I’m still bemused by the number of hard-core Christians who are also flag-idolaters. Thou shalt have no other gods before me, nor make unto thee any graven image and worship it, remember? Anyway, I'm an atheist, and I don't worship anything.

On the other side, some friends wanted to burn a flag at a party I gave many years ago. I thought about it for a moment, then asked them to do it outside if they really insisted on doing it. They were excited like a bunch of much younger kids getting ready to torture a cat, and that alone (aside from the fire hazard: set something afire in my apartment?) made me uneasy. Far from being indifferent to it, they took the flag as seriously as any flag idolater, only they wanted to defile the holy thing. Homey don’t play that one either. I’m not sure my position puts me in the middle; more likely it puts me way out beyond all decent common-sense discourse, but since that’s where I’ve usually been, I can live with it.

Notice that Roy Edroso seems to be playing a similar, all-too-easy game. Either the right-wing blogosphere pundits or patriotism. The real patriotism, not their ersatz Hate-America-First patriotism. Either you’re for him or you’re against him. But again, I see other possibilities. I don’t want to see this country destroyed, not just because I live here and there are people I love who live here (though those are valid reasons), but because I don’t want to see any country destroyed. I didn’t want to see the Soviet Union destroyed in an orgy of blood-letting, nor did I want to see Vietnam bombed back into the Stone Age, nor did I want to see Iraq destroyed, nor do I want to see Iran destroyed, nor Israel nor Lebanon nor Afghanistan nor Colombia nor China nor North Korea nor Indonesia nor Cuba nor the frothing Batistas-in-exile in Miami – even though they all have the blood of countless innocents on their hands. (Disclaimer: The absence of any country in that list should not be construed as an endorsement of its destruction.)

This article from 2003, which I stumbled on while Googling for Chesterton’s witticism that “My country, right or wrong” is equivalent to “My mother, drunk or sober”, is a textbook case of either-or blindness. Note that it appeared in a left-liberal journal, Dissent (immortalized by Woody Allen’s old quip about Commentary merging with Dissent to become Dysentery); I could link to any number of articles by lefty-libs and progressives raving about leftists who said that 9/11 was all America’s fault, the chickens were coming home to roost, and the shoe’s on the other foot now, ha ha! – but this one will do nicely for now. (Michael Bérubé’s entry has a special place in my personal Hall of Shame, though, because I used to respect him.) For Joanne Barkan, to point out American crimes is to ignore totally the crimes of any other nation, to ignore all other geopolitical factors, to succumb to “the left’s negative nationalism.” But as usual with people of her ilk, it soon becomes clear that Barkan will not concede that America has ever done anything wrong, that any people anywhere in the world have reason to want to strike back at us, that no country in the world has any business defending itself against us, that it’s time to throw out reason and complexity and boil everything down to the question, “Do you want to see America conquered, or don’t you?”

No, I don’t -- not that America is in any danger of being conquered: the US has not fought a war of self-defense in my lifetime. But I don’t want to see any country conquered. People like Barkan get so furious at any mention of American malfeasance because they’ll gladly sic the dogs of war on any other country that behaved as the US has behaved, that killed a tenth as many people as the US has killed, that supported a tenth as many dictators as the US has supported, that harbors the kinds of terrorists the US harbors – so it is they who want to see the US attacked and humbled, if they had any consistency of principle. Those of us who can recognize the faults of our country, by contrast, simply want it to stop hurting people so wantonly.

I think it’s a safe bet, for example, that in 1967, when Martin Luther King Jr. called his own government the greatest purveyor of violence in the world, he wasn’t calling for other governments to invade the US. No, he said explicitly that he had come to realize that he couldn’t condemn the violence of others without first condemning and opposing the far greater violence being done in his name by his own government.

Whether King claimed to be a patriot, I don’t know; a search of the 700-page collection of his writings, A Testament of Hope (HarperOne, 1990), finds the word “patriot” only twice, and this quotation from page 327 is indicative: “It is a paradox that those Negroes who have given up on America are doing more to improve it than its professional patriots.” (The other passage, on 472, is a passing swipe at “sunshine patriots.”) It doesn’t appear that King set much store by the word.

In any case, I see no point in getting into a tug-of-war over words. (“Mine!” “No, mine!”) I’m an American, whether I or anyone likes it much: I was born here, I’m a citizen who pays taxes and votes, and so I have a say in what this country does. I don’t feel bound to support it unconditionally, but then no one does – those who attack others for lack of patriotism are ready, as Edroso said, to turn on their country whenever it suits them. I also don’t see how it can be meaningful to claim to “love” a country, any more than to “hate” it. (When I wrote earlier about the US as a collective, I was all too aware that it was problematic: what does it mean to attack “us” or to say that “the US” or “America” does something?) Whether I’m a “patriot” or not, whether my opinions are “patriotic” or not, is irrelevant, a distraction from questions of substance. My country, drunk or sober; when drunk, to be sobered up -- if that’s possible, which I increasingly doubt.

You know this old joke? “I defended you the other day – someone said that Promiscuous Reader ain’t fit to eat with the hogs, and I said, ‘He is so!’” Being a patriot is like being fit to eat with the hogs. Or not, if you prefer.