Going Nucular Read online

  Granted, we all love our purple mountains, along with our golden valleys, redwood forests, wheat fields waving, and dust clouds blowing, not to mention our fogs lifting, a particular favorite here in San Francisco. But any country can make its landscape the focus of a national anthem. The Swiss sing about the Alps going bright with splendor; the Czechs sing about water bubbling across the meadows and pinewoods rustling amongst the crags; the Brazilians sing about the sound of the sea and the light of heaven. And the Syrian anthem begins with a remarkable entomological figure: “Syria’s plains are towers in the heights. . . . A land resplendent with brilliant suns . . . almost like a sky centipede.”

  Anthems like those are appropriate for nations that have no essential commitment to a particular form of government: Landscapes don’t have any politics, after all. But the American experiment was supposed to be different; our patriotism is for a nation, not a land. No other country tells its story as the history of a single regime, and that point ought to figure prominently in whatever anthem we sing.

  There’s a parallel between the swelling popularity of America the Beautiful and the Administration’s choice of homeland security rather than domestic security to describe the office headed by Governor Ridge. It’s easy to understand what they were getting at, given the shock of an attack on American soil. But even though homeland is a perfectly good English word, up to now we’ve never used it to describe our own country. It has an alien sound, like the German Heimat—it’s the word we use for peoples who feel an ancestral connection to a particular plot of ground. Whereas the idea of America isn’t that it’s a place that people come from but a place that they come to. The Germans and Palestinians and Kurds and Ukrainians have homelands; we just have a nation and a flag.

  The Last Refuge of Scoundrels and Other People

  “Peace is patriotic”—I always want to read that slogan as meaning “peace IS SO patriotic,” a response to the charge that peace advocates don’t have the interests of the country at heart. But then patriotism is a word that exists to put people on the defensive. After all, we don’t have everyday words for love of one’s family or loyalty to one’s friends. If we feel the need for a word for devotion to one’s country, it’s only to imply a contrast with those whose who lack that feeling.

  Things were different when patriot acquired its modern sense in the seventeenth century, as a name for those who took the part of Parliament against the British monarchy, whose European connections were suspect. Monarchists like Dryden used the word in a derisory way: “Never was Patriot yet, but was a Fool.”

  By the eighteenth century, though, the love of one’s country was coming to be an unarguable civic virtue. Boswell no sooner reported Samuel Johnson’s famous declaration that “patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel” than he felt the need to defend the remark. Johnson, he said, “did not mean a real and generous love of our country, but that pretended patriotism which so many . . . have made a cloak for self-interest.”

  The New York Times Week in Review, April 13, 2003

  Over the centuries, moral philosophers have wrestled with the fact that patriotism is always a kind of bias, a disposition to favor one’s own nation beyond what the objective facts would warrant. As Max Eastman wrote in 1906, “If one were loyal to one’s nation only because it was good and true . . . one would not be loyal to any nation, but to truth and goodness. The idea of patriotism would have no place either in our dictionaries or our lives.”

  That kernel of irrationality at the heart of patriotism has always been troublesome for Americans. For other nations, patriotism is basically a question of loyalty to the land of one’s birth—patrie, patria, Vaterland—however it happens to be governed. But Americans don’t have words like those to describe the objects of our patriotic attachment, or at least, not until the Teutonic-sounding “homeland” entered the national lexicon. We don’t have a fatherland, only an uncle, and Americans have always tried to justify their love of him by citing the national devotion to liberty and fairness. It’s as if we can’t simply be attached to the land where our fathers died; we have to explain that it’s the land of the pilgrims’ pride, as well.

  That helps to explain why others see Americans as prone to obtrude their national pride so readily. Alexis de Tocqueville complained that “It is impossible to conceive a more troublesome or more garrulous patriotism; it wearies even those who are disposed to respect it.”

  It’s that need to justify national pride that has traditionally tied discussions of patriotism here to the notion of Americanism, as a name for the doctrines and qualities that make our nation exceptional. True, Americanism has been the refuge of quite as many scoundrels as patriotism itself. Whitman warned against those who “are using the great word Americanism without yet feeling the first aspiration of it.” And in Main Street, Sinclair Lewis listed “One Hundred Per Cent Americanism” among the clichés of the patriotic stump orator, along with “Bountiful Harvest” and “Alien Agitators.”

  But Americanism was also a touchpoint for progressives and radicals. Americanization programs for immigrants were often the benign twin of early twentieth-century nativism; striking workers in the 1930s carried American flags on the picket lines. The American Communist Party chief, Earl Browder, famously declared that “communism is twentieth-century Americanism.”

  It wasn’t until the Cold War that Americanism became the exclusive property of the right, particularly when the House Committee on Un-American Activities made “un-Americanism” a synonym for every sort of left-wing activity. In the end, Americanism was an unintended victim of McCarthyism. After that period the word virtually disappeared from the American political lexicon.

  But American patriotism was most thoroughly transformed in the 1960s, when antiwar radicals repudiated American exceptionalism in tantrums of flag-burning. True, the flag-burners were always a small minority in the antiwar movement, and in fact the American flags at antiwar rallies greatly outnumbered Vietcong ones. But from then on, patriotism became largely a matter of defending contested symbols like the flag and the Pledge of Allegiance; for the first time in modern history, the flag itself acquired an explicitly partisan meaning. By 1984, Ronald Reagan could simply assume that the composer of a song called Born in the U.S.A. would be a like-minded Republican. “I have not got a clue about Springsteen’s politics, if any,” George Will wrote approvingly if incuriously, “but flags get waved at his concerts.”

  You can see the shift in the declining use of the noun patriot. It’s still found in the names of banks, newspapers, sports teams, insurance companies, missiles, and the like, not to mention the U.S.A. Patriot Act. But when it comes to describing living people, patriot is outnumbered by patriotic by ten to one. The first is a matter of actions, the second a matter of attitude and style.

  Often, in fact, modern patriotism doesn’t come down to much more than consumer preference. The founder of the Hummer Owners Group recently described the vehicle as “a symbol of what we all hold so dearly above all else.” Or as another Hummer owner said, the troops “aren’t out there in Audi A4’s.”

  At the same time, the traditional symbols of patriotism are treated now with a casualness that would once have been considered more appropriate for sports emblems. In 1968, Abbie Hoffman was arrested for wearing an American flag shirt to a HUAC hearing. Now pro-war demonstrators show up wearing American flag T-shirts, belt buckles, bandannas, halters, and jumpsuits. Take that together with the demonstrators’ chants of “U.S.A., U.S.A.” and it can be hard to tell a patriotic demonstration from a gathering of Oakland Raiders fans.

  That slogan “Peace is patriotic” is an indication of the recent willingness of progressives and liberals to invoke the substantive values of Americanism, like the tradition of liberty and the constitutional sanctity of dissent. But since the 1960s, liberals have been skittish about embracing the symbolic manifestations of patriotism. You can see that diffidence in the anti-war movement’s adoption of “peace flags,” Ameri
can flags whose stars are re-arranged in the form of the peace sign. The design makes its point and is hardly disrespectful by modern standards, but it seems an unnecessary qualification—what’s wrong with Old Glory as it is?

  That’s partly just a stylistic aversion, particularly now that the flag has become a fashion statement for the right. But it also reflects a distrust of the emotional connotations of symbols like the flag, and perhaps a suspicion of the moral basis of patriotism itself—the idea, as the eighteenth-century English radical William Godwin put it, that there’s a “magic in the pronoun my.” Yet the anti-war movement presumes that very connection when it argues that dissent is patriotic, with the implication that we Americans must feel a special obligation to demur when we disagree with the policies of our own government.

  And a love of flag and country doesn’t entail a mindless jingoism. Most Americans can identify with the patriotic pride of the young marine who draped the American flag over the head of the statue of Saddam Hussein in downtown Baghdad, in what instantly became the defining image of American—hardly “coalition”—triumph. But many people also realized just how problematic a gesture that was, and how imprudent and simplistic uncritical flag-waving can be as a response to the challenges that are facing the country. That’s as it should be; the tension between emotional and reflective expressions of patriotism has always been a defining trait of Americanism. Come to think of it, now that the memories of HUAC have receded, it might be a good time to revive that word.

  Pledge Break

  The oddest thing about the Pledge of Allegiance is that people can take its wording so seriously even as they find it charming that children are always getting it wrong. Everybody can cite some second-grader’s winsome misconstruction of the text: “I led a pigeon to the flag”; “and to the republic for witches’ dance”; “one naked individual.” For that matter, nobody seems to mind that even older students are pretty fuzzy on the meanings of words like allegiance, republic, and indivisible. (Slate’s Timothy Noah calculated the readability of the pledge at the ninth-grade level, and even that is misleadingly low, since the Flesch-Kincaid scale that Noah used wasn’t designed to take into account the Pledge’s singularly Victorian turns of phrase.)

  In fact it’s often said that the very obscurity of the pledge is what makes the phrase “under God” constitutionally unobjectionable. In 1984, Justice William Brennan described the phrase as a form of “ceremonial deism,” which has “lost through rote repetition any significant religious content.” That argument came up a lot in criticisms of the recent Ninth Circuit decision banning the words “under God.” Newsday dismissed the pledge as a “harmless civic recitation” and the Washington Post’s Marc Fisher wrote that “God’s name is just a frill, a space-filler in the unthinking torrent of much daily conversation.” To hear some people tell it, you might conclude that there’s not much difference between saying “one nation under God” and “one nation, by God!”

  Fresh Air Commentary, July 8, 2002

  But if the pledge is merely a “harmless civic recitation,” why the torrent of invective over the Ninth Circuit’s decision, to the point where some op-ed trombones were comparing it with a straight face to the September 11 attacks? Columnist Cal Thomas said the court had “inflicted on this nation what many will conclude is a greater injury than that caused by the terrorists.” (Where are the moral equivalence police when you need them?)

  True, the pledge isn’t the only obscurely worded patriotic text that can evoke strong feelings. The Star-Spangled Banner is famously unparsable—how many people could tell you with confidence what ramparts are or why anyone was watching them? But the pledge is the only one of these texts that was actually written for recitation by schoolchildren.

  Still, Bellamy made no concessions to the linguistic limitations of his young audience. The words “I pledge allegiance” were an allusion to the oath of allegiance to the Union that many southerners were required to sign before their political rights were restored after the Civil War—a reference that was galling to some southerners, along with the business about “one nation indivisible.” But none of those words would have had much meaning to schoolchildren in the 1890s, three decades after the war had ended. Nor would they have been able to make much sense of Bellamy’s original wording of the end of the pledge: “with liberty, fraternity, and equality for all,” a phrase that the sponsors rejected as too radical, and too French.

  Granted, that was an age that delighted in high-blown patriotic language—late-nineteenth-century schoolchildren were expected to memorize and declaim orations like Patrick Henry’s “Give me liberty” and Daniel Webster’s “Against Hayne.” But the pledge persevered even after those exercises and elaborate patriotic pageants and rituals were dropped from the curriculum, and in fact its syntax grew more convoluted over the next sixty years. Bellamy had originally written “I pledge allegiance to my flag.” But in 1924 that was changed, over his objection, to the more unwieldy “the flag of the United States of America”—this at the urging of the Daughters of the American Revolution, who were worried that the ambiguity of “my flag” might offer a loophole to immigrants who wanted to maintain their allegiance to the flags of Italy or the Second International. (You can’t be too careful.)

  The pledge became even more opaque when “under God” was added in 1954, so as to underscore the difference between godfearing us and godless them. Whether or not you agree with the sentiment of the addendum, it’s hard to defend its syntax. For one thing, the interpolation leaves the modifier indivisible dangling at a remove from the word nation. And more to the point, it isn’t at all clear what “under God” is supposed to mean. The phrase was taken from the Gettysburg Address, but Lincoln used it as an adverb—“this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom” (that is, under God modifies have). But in the pledge, under God was somehow changed to an adjective, which leaves its meaning up for grabs. Is that the under of “under heaven,” the under of “under a monarch,” or the under of “under orders”? Does it mean that we believe in God or that we’re subject to Him or that we have His personal attention? It’s anyone’s guess, since the phrase isn’t used that way anywhere else in the English language. But then that vagueness is probably what commends the phrase in the first place—what better way to signal the doctrinal neutrality of the state than to express our official deism so obscurely?

  Helpful schoolteachers sometimes try to explain the pledge to their charges in words that they can understand: “I promise to be true to the symbol of my country, the United States, a single country where people believe in a supreme being and which can’t be split apart. . . .” But there wouldn’t be much support for simplifying the official wording of the pledge, much less for replacing it with a more meaningful text like Lincoln’s Second Inaugural. We like the pledge as it is, in all its turgid opacity. All that talk about “harmless civic recitations” gets the pledge wrong. Because there is a point to having children gather in collective acquiescence to sentences they don’t really comprehend. As Eric Hobsbawm once observed, patriotic rituals are invented to provide the emotional signs of membership in a club, not its bylaws. “Dah-dah-dah flag, dah-dah-dah America, dah-dah-dah God, dah-dah-dah liber ty . . . ”—it’s Americanism scored for rhythm band.

  Media Words

  Rush Limbaugh’s Plurals

  “I think some of the sports media is influenced in their opinion of his performance by their desire for a black quarterback to do well. And now that—that—my friends, is the point of this.”

  That was Rush Limbaugh on his radio show on October 1, 2003, explaining the comments he had made a few days earlier on ESPN’s NFL Today, when he said that the media were going easy on Philadelphia Eagles’s quarterback Donovan McNabb because of his race. A few days later, the controversy over the remarks obliged Limbaugh to resign from his new post as a television football analyst (though the story was rapidly eclipsed by the revelations about his drug use).

  Keep
your eye on that plural vocative “my friends.” It helps to explain a curious feature of the incident: Why was everybody up in arms about a remark that wouldn’t have raised an eyebrow if Limbaugh had made it on his regular radio broadcast?

  True, Limbaugh was talking on a sports show, not a political broadcast. But then ESPN had hired him in the hope that his talents as a controversialist would liven up the show, and indeed, its ratings rose 10 percent after he began to appear. And while his remark may have had racial overtones, it wasn’t racist in itself—and certainly not in the same league as some of the things he has said on his radio show, like telling an African-American caller to “take that bone out of your nose and call me back.”

  Whether or not the comment warranted Limbaugh’s departure from the program, the incident drove home once again that you can say things on radio that you simply can’t say on TV. In July of 2003, Michael Savage was abruptly yanked from his weekend talk slot on MSNBC after he addressed an unidentified caller as “you sodomite” and said he should “get AIDS and die.” Yet Savage raises scarcely a public ripple when he effervesces along similar lines to his 5 million radio listeners.

  Some people have tried to justify the difference in standards by saying that listeners to radio talk shows tend to be partisans who know what to expect from the hosts, while TV seems to be aimed at a general audience. TV, we like to say, comes into our living rooms, whereas talk radio is a vice that we indulge in in the privacy of our cars.