I Hear America Singing

Reflections on patriotism are always puzzling for me – take, for example, Whitman; as a gay man, he was excluded from American society and condemned by the religious beliefs of the majority of the population. Yet the sonofabitch loved America. How do you square that? Semantic debates aside, the guy was all about a whole group of people that thought he was going to hell. Is this a separation of national ideals from the nation (i.e. the people) ?

I’ve been wrestling with the same sorts of questions as I reflect on post-college careers and employment – while I would be intellectually quite interested in work for the State Department or the government in the broader sense, I’m not sure that I can whole-heartedly endorse U.S. policy in a number of areas. Should I be able to? Are these sorts of hesitations normal for people considering this? Perhaps pursuant to my research, perhaps preceding it, perhaps influencing it, I’ve never particularly identified myself with a strong national identity. I suppose that’s part of being an elitist (or a loner) – I enjoy my solitary moments, I love foreign languages, I’m interested in books and writing and abstract considerations. I’m not really interested in your thoughts about whether or not Grey’s Anatomy has gotten better or worse or how jesus changed your life or that crazy dream you had last night. It’s not that these things make me pre-disposed to be against a national identity; they just don’t suggest it in any sort of meaningful way. What’s more, my personal beliefs tend to put me at the extremes of a number of spectrums  - i.e. religious, political, social policy (although I suppose nihilism / post-modern apathy puts you outside of spectrums, which is in many cases worse than being an extremist.)  I’m not terribly prone to compromise, and national interests are always compromise, in the sense that generally powerful people want something that’s really bad for everyone else, so the powerful people pretend like they’re giving up a little bit of something that works entirely in their favor, and people proceed on thinking that Goldman Sachs really gives two flying fucks about American taxpayers (they don’t.) Plus, being a post-structuralist is always bad for going along with other peoples’ belief systems – tends to make you hard to get along with when all you want to do is look for power relationships in any given position.

To lend a little material support, I’ve been debating with one of Joel’s friends who is a strident anti-American dude. I understand the sentiment, although I think it’s much more appropriate to be generally anti-imperialism than anti-American. I suppose the question is however if it’s a matter of Venn diagrams or concentric circles  - a number of permutations are obvious (can you be both anti-american and anti-imperialist? Yes, obviously, it’s called Europe) but can you be anti-imperialist without being anti-American? This is the more difficult question, and one that I’ve been stewing over these past few days. Glenn Greenwald is one of my favorite authors, and he’s an American constitutional rights lawyer who claims to love the old Stars and Stripes (although many people consider him anti-american, he sees himself to be the opposite.) Similarly, America had some really cool movements – Woodstock, Black Power, Womens’ Suffrage, Beat poets, etc., although most of these tend to be counter-culture voices. Maybe the issue isn’t one of nationalities but narratives – I’m generally interested in counter and minority narratives more so than dominant ones, and so it doesn’t particularly interest me to declare a national / hegemonic affiliation – what does that prove to anyone? It’s like saying you feel a strong connection to whiteness or male identity; those aren’t disputed narratives, there’s nothing risked nor ventured in declaring them, and doing so seems more like a dog-pile than any sort of meaningful opinion. In fact, it almost seems like declaring your support for those things is a counter-claim against the things which question them as general or positive narratives. Do people declare themselves to be pro-American as a way of implicitly saying they’re anti-Muslim, or anti-dictatorship, or anti-europe? I honestly don’t understand, because it seems like supporting something automatically assumes that it’s in a competition against something else that threatens it, but being “pro-American” is so hopelessly vague that it doesn’t really seem like anything other than a neat trick to get crotchety white people to vote for you.

All this said, I haven’t really contributed anything meaningful, so I’ll stake out a position that is at least a little bit controversial. I’m pro-American in the sense that I believe the Constitution represents something significant; namely, that big decisions about governance don’t belong in the hands of popular decision making. The Founding Fathers were a select group of highly educated individuals who were (obviously) much more in love with concepts than the Nation itself. They liked what America stood for, not what it was – because it wasn’t anything yet. Thus, if I express patriotism, it’s in a faith that intelligent people can do a little bit of good in the world. That’s not to say they got things all right, as the 3/5ths clause would suggest, but I think they lend credence to the suggestion that important decisions regarding political and legal rights should be made by a small, educated, and progressive group rather than the sort of regressive populism that this country seems to be turning toward. I’m looking at you, Maine Measure 1 and California Prop 8. Is it confusing if by embracing American ideals, I reject the right of Americans to vote on civil rights?

Amusingly, Whitman was elected to the New Jersey Hall of Fame in 2009. Are you kidding me? That’s like “Best Television Repairman in Amish Country” – it’s not much of a distinction and there’s not a lot of competition.