the (new) meaning of patriotism
Every year, in the small, progressive southern town in which I live, there’s a big celebration on the fourth of July. It takes place on the Town Commons, which is normally where organic kale and gluten-free empanadas are part of the farmer’s market held every Saturday morning.
It’s a celebration full of water balloon tossing, a pie-eating contest, bubble blowing, face painting, live blues and rock performances, info tables set up by the local library and the local homeless shelter, a bunch of food trucks and—until Covid—a watermelon seed spitting contest. With the exception of a few people dressed in red, white and blue, there are generally no signs of in-your-face patriotism to be found.
Of which, I have to admit, I have been very glad.
Like many of us, I’ve been wary of flag-waving, aggressive patriotism for a long time. The term first became a pejorative to me nearly 60 years ago. It meant jingoistic support by Archie Bunkers for a disastrous war I found appalling. Too many of those on the other side wrapped themselves in the flag of patriotism—of my country, no matter what—and I reflexively recoiled.
That oppositional sense has stayed with me for a very long time. Maybe it’s partially because for a decade I lived outside the United States, and outlandish American displays of patriotism felt particularly performative, as if this country, more than any other, had something to prove.
I detested when fans at an international sporting event would ferociously—and mindlessly—chant, “USA, USA” as if it meant that a hockey goal or a faster runner or a better swimmer justified some kind of national chauvinism.
After 9/11, that kind of patriotism often turned particularly toxic, into anti-Muslim prejudice. During the misbegotten Iraq War, it was used as a cudgel to silence dissent. If you were against the war, or doubted the motives for it, you were deemed “unpatriotic.”
Over all these decades, reasonable national pride had been distorted into what often has seemed like xenophobia, and has been used to justify policies and actions that, under the banner of patriotism, has hurt others.
Now, in these days of masked ICE agents grabbing people off the streets, of crackdowns on due process and other Constitutional rights, of the passage of what has been accurately called the most destructive piece of legislation in American history and of a semi-fascist takeover of our government, all in the name of so-called patriotism, it should be even more difficult to be truly patriotic on this anniversary of our nation’s independence.
And yet, I am actually starting to feel just a bit more patriotic than I have felt in some time.
The government may be in the hands of those who have warped the term patriotism beyond recognition, Congress and the Supreme Court are mostly composed of sycophantic toadies and are doing incalculable damage, the official opposition seems weak if not indifferent.
And yet. I’m sensing that increasingly large numbers of everyday Americans still believe in another America, an America that should be worthy of pride.
On “No Kings” day, more Americans massed in protest in the streets than perhaps at any time in our history, and not just in the places where you’d expect that to happen. Judges and clergy and even baseball teams have been trying to protect the most vulnerable. People are contacting, again and again, their representatives, asking them to finally do something, urging them to stand up, imploring them to do the right thing. People are voting—as in New York City—for progressive change.
Lawyers and universities and institutions and businesses—not all, by any means, not even most, but I sense a growing number—are fighting back. Or starting to fight back. And, perhaps because their fight is against the odds, they are making me proud, for the first time in a long time, to be an American.
Our institutions overall may be failing us, but we the people are not rolling over.
Now if we can just get the watermelon seed spitting contest going again.