Today was the third 4th of July that I’ve spent outside of the United States in of the last four years, and maybe because I’ve got almost 4,000 miles of distance between me and the flag-waving and fireworks and history-rewriting nostalgia back home, I have a few reflections on the nature and uses of patriotism.
I started off today by making a playlist of deliberately unpatriotic songs, songs taking aim directly at the policy or mentality of the US. There were a lot of songs.
One song that I decided to include, though, has a somewhat different tone: “Power and Glory,” by Phil Ochs. I stocked my playlist with plenty of Ochs’s far more critical or cynical songs, but “Power and Glory” is the closest I got to praise for my country. It celebrates--if that’s the right word; acknowledges or admires might be better--the country itself, the land and the people, not the government or history or so-called morals or policy or the like. And it declares not just that the land is beautiful and valuable but that it is not equal, not free, not strong--or rather, only as equal and free and strong as its citizens. I don’t know if I’d call the song patriotic, exactly, but it has a message that I think deserves equal airtime on my list, alongside such excellent titles as “Blood-Red, White, and Blue,” “Stuff is Messed Up,” and “When You Don’t Control Your Government, People Want to Kill You.”
Overall, the idea is that we can appreciate and build off of the possibility and the places and the roots that we may have even while we despise the surreal nightmarescape of our corporate government and national (in)security state (or, more succinctly, the “subliminal mindfuck America,” as Green Day nicely puts it).
Beyond the satisfaction of having a slightly more balanced playlist, I think that if we are going to redeem, rebuild, reclaim, or even maintain the world we have, we are going to need more than hatred for the places that we live. Not necessarily our countries by any means, but the places that we all, however enthusiastically or reluctantly, call home.
The borders that outline the 197 or so countries of the world are arbitrary, we have to remember, and fundamentally hold no meaning beyond what we give them. Borders, whether militarized, hotly contested, or porous, are a construct and a tool; they are not natural, permanent or necessary. Most of them came about because of imperialism and capitalism, by map-drawing fiascos like the infamous Sykes-Picot treaty or by forced seizure like the Mexican Cession and the treaty of Guadeloupe-Hidalgo. Borders are largely created by and for the benefit of those who hold the most power, who can redraw the map and make that paper reality come bloodily to life. Borders, then, are tools to maintain power inequality.
In order to foster the belief in a nation-state, and to foment the useful force of patriotism within that state, the populace needs to believe in the borders--that they are natural, permanent, and necessary, which they are not. We need to believe that borders protect our interests--that the people on the other side are as outside of a snowglobe that we must not allow them to penetrate. Borders, and the concept of nation-states, help chiefly to develop and maintain an us-versus-them dynamic.
As an aside, cultural identities, a set of traditions, an attachment to a certain place--these are not bounded or determined by the nation-state within whose artificial borders one resides. Dispossessed people stripped of their land can still feel deep roots there; a person far from home can still partake in a culture outside of the nation-state associated with it. Nationalism in some cases can be a defensive force to unite people against the predations of an occupying power or assault; this is not to deny that. Yet it can just as easily be channeled to support a hateful and exclusionary ideal of what a “country” represents and who it belongs to--who has the power to tell its story.
Conventional patriotism, then, refers to the sentiments of allegiance to an entity that does not actually exist, an artificially contrived nation-state or territory whose borders have been arranged to serve the interests of some particular group in power.
There are less narrow definitions, however. The patriotism of songs like “Power and Glory” is not the patriotism of fealty to the United States in the sense that we owe our country anything, but rather that we live in a place worth loving, and--because we recognize that it is deeply flawed--worth fixing. Worth fighting for, for our own sakes, not worth dying for in the interests of others.
There’s another song I put on my playlist, by the band Desaparecidos, that begins with the lines “I want to pledge allegiance to the country where I live/ I don’t want to be ashamed to be American…” and then goes through plenty of reasons to be ashamed. I do feel ashamed of my country. But I don’t want that shame to extend to the point where I believe that everything shaped by the US is irredeemable. I don’t want to be ashamed of being born and raised in the northwestern hemisphere, because it is not inherently the place nor the people that makes it a beacon of shame. I believe that there is “patriotism,” of a sort, outside of allegiance to a country.
There is also patriotism in believing that we can take the bitter divisions and the dangerous fragmentation of the world we live in and make it better, that struggling for reform and not offering only adulation is the duty of a citizen. I don’t believe that merely reforming our countries and governments will be enough, but I do believe that activism could be construed as patriotism, that the struggle for a better world is a patriotic act. Dissent is the highest form of patriotism, as they say. To unspool that statement reveals the assumption that the activism is being undertaken in the service of one’s country. My allegiance is not to my country, and I would not call my activism patriotic; my ideal endgame is not just a nicer version of the governmental and societal status quo. But by all means, if the sentiment of so-called patriotism can be re-harnessed for activist work, that would be appreciable. I don’t think it’s the best route to encouraging people to make some part of the world better, but it’s something. In this sort-of-free country, it is a duty of morals and conscience, let alone patriotism, to dissent in this age of profitable terror, corporate tyranny, sacrifice zones and sacrificed people.
“Love will save this place,” writes Naomi Klein in her anticapitalist clarion call, This Changes Everything. Building a livable world, salvaging what we have not ruined, repairing what we can, forging solidarity among everyone marginalized and cast off, refusing to leave anyone behind--this process must be one of love. To build that vague and fluffy-sounding Better World that we all dream of will fail, unequivocally, if we cling to our narrow loyalty to our various nation-states and their imaginary borders. Love will save this place--non-divisive love. When loving your country means hating or mistrusting the people on the other side of the border, that is not love. That’s bigotry. The kind of patriotism we need is an allegiance to place, to the value of the earth, to the awe that “Power and Glory” tries to get at. An allegiance to each other. Solidarity.
There’s a slam poem I recommend, called “To the Oklahoma Progressives Plotting Mass Exodus,” by Lauren Zuniga. Its message goes out to all the liberals wishing to abandon ship and leave the throttling atmosphere of deep-red states, and urges them to stay--that they will be needed there more than anywhere. Multitudes of voices are needed to weave the love that will save us. There can be no abandoned areas--no sacrifice zones, politically as well as environmentally. The solidarity that we will need is predicated on faith, but not faith in a “country” or a romanticized and militarized image of what we think our national character ought to be or once was. The faith we will need is in each other.
And if you want to call that a different kind of patriotism, well, it’s probably the best use we can get out of that word.
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