The Challenge of 'Diversity'
to 'Patriotism'...
Veterans Day, 2001, was observed across the nation today. In local downtown Sacramento, California, capitol of the state, the Sacramento Youth Symphony performed a series of concert works at a commemorative performance to honor active duty members of the US military services now serving in Afghanistan and veterans of all wars America has been involved in.
Veterans wearing their former military uniforms were welcomed as guests of the symphony and so I dusted off the old Air Force 'blue suit' from my mid 60s service and attended. Despite the fact that I frequently criticise my native land for its many, many failings and breeched promises, I maintain the greatest respect for the principles that our nation was founded upon, over 200 years ago. I am also not above experiencing a stab of emotion when I hear the national anthem and see the national colors being advanced, as they were at this ceremony. It is always a most inexplicable feeling--that tingle of supreme emotion that is unrestrained patriotic pride. Very much like religious ecstasy some 'true believers' feel when they pray to their god, and something that doesn't easily define itself in mere words, but simply has to be felt. When the strains of the "Star Spangled Banner" filled the air, I too found myself experiencing a misty surge of pride and spirit, and even my wife later admitted that she had to wipe away a tear evoked by this poignant moment.
Despite the powerful feeling of pride and national unity that these stirring sights and sounds provoked, I was nonetheless strongly aware of the need to reflect critically on exactly what we were all experiencing in that precise moment--a moment when reason momentarily took a decided back seat to the pure, strong emotion that flowed among us all, at the beginning of this concert. Somewhat later, near the end of the concert performance, a selection of patriotic songs were sung by the gathered choruses, most of which were typified by the sort of stirring paeans to patriotism that is the powerful "Battle Hymn of the Republic" and others like it that invoke images of "God's" vengeful wrath arrayed against the wrongdoers (whomever they were) who threaten American democracy. As I listened to these works, some choral and some symphonic (one of the most beautiful was Samuel Barber's haunting "Adagio for Strings", played at the funeral of John F. Kennedy), I was impressed by a sense that invariably each of these musical pieces invoked the common theme of "God", "The Lord", and "His Wrath", etc. Before long, the irony of what I was listening to catalysed my sense of irony, as I watched the crowd of spectators, estimated to be in the vicinity of about 1000 people of all ages (but virtually all white), focus on the spectacle before them.Toward the end of the concert, a special display of flags and costumes of the American revolutionary period took place, performed by the local Sons & Daughters of the American Revolution. The narrator, in a dramatic voice-over and also dressed in period costume, read several pieces of vintage patriotic prose before their group retired from the stage.
Sitting here now, musing over all of this, a number of thoughts flood my mind,
each vying for serious consideration. First, I suppose, is the awareness that this is no
longer the America of 1776, with its 13 struggling colonies and small population of
several hundred thousands of simple citizens. In fact, there is hardly any realistic
comparison possible between that remote period in our history and today, with an high-tech
America that contains almost 325 million people and giant commercial corporations that
literally control the entire economy from top to bottom. The simple and heroic principles
(freedom from economic oppression and to a smaller, subordinate extent, freedom of
expression) that marked the struggle for independence from the British colonialists have
been so buried in the effluvia and dross of modern, sophisticated American culture that
they bear virtually no relationship whatsoever to the day-to-day modern realities of our
present social and political economy.
Similarly, it is amazing how many people today fail to understand this fact....that exhortations to America's distant revolutionary past hold other, darker and less desirable possibilities, when framed against the economic oppression that most Americans now suffer at the hands of the supremely powerful economic interests that literally rule our nation and dictate our daily lives. The more astute student of history would surely see that if America was originally forged in the fires of a common revolutionary uprising against economic oppression (at the time against British colonialism), the smouldering embers of those fires could in fact today still be potentially reignited by the sort of manipulative economic slavery that corporations levy on American citizens today through advertising and media. While vastly more subtle and tantalizingly sugar-coated, it is none the less a very real threat to the freedom of spirit and self-actualisation of the American mind and soul. Further, it is clearly evident, to anyone brave enough to try to see past all the flag-waving sentimentality that tends to clog our senses, that today's modern American society is no longer significantly influenced (or even greatly affected) by the real cares and concerns of the average American citizen. Instead, we are ministered over and manipulated predominantly by powerful partisan commercial lobbying organisations whose influence sways and motivates our erstwhile 'elected' legislators far more completely and convincingly than the feeble efforts of the average citizen to make his wishes be known and acted upon.
Finally, the patriotism of old that has been recently blowing through this country since the events of 11 September, is at its core and in actual fact a very much obsolescent and severely outdated institution, when we consider that in 1776 America's spirit and that of the "Christian God" were virtually one and the same. This was a spirit and belief in a God that was predominantly and virtually the exclusive property of the uniform mass of white Anglo-Saxon people that populated our early nation. Since that time, well over 225 years ago, America has grown to embrace the concept of the "melting pot" to such an extent that "white man's Christianity" is only one religion among many religions, and Anglo-Saxon ancestored families form but a segment of a seething sea of racial, ethnic, social, cultural, and religious groups that now populate America. Seen from that standpoint, it is a wonder that more non-white, non-Christian people do not stand up and actively call into question the curious theme of "God is on our side" that still runs as an active undercurrent through all the present extant patriotic rhetoric. Specifically, questions such as "Whose God are we talking about, here?" The Christian God? The Islamic God (Allah, supposedly and in theory the same "single God" as the Christian Yahweh...)? The Wiccan deity? Vishnu? Shiva? Zoroaster? There is much room for clarification here, yet hardly anyone appears to have the clarity of insight to sense the inherent paradoxes that our present smarmy feelings of old fashion patriotism seek to smother, in the great and highly charged emotional exhortation to rally everyone around the American flag. In our collective haste to smash the pathetic radical Islamic 'Pathans' of Afghanistan with all our full array of modern military might, it is all too easy to lose sight of the important fact that what we are rushing off to "protect" is not the same moral high-mindedness of 1776 America, but the crass, morally void, blatantly philistine, and downright toxic economic obsessions that characterise the supreme operative ethic of modern American global business!
Sitting in the balcony of Sacramento's historic old Municipal
Auditorium, I gazed down on the thousand or so white people sitting below me in rapt awe
as they watched this patriotic spectacle come to an emotional end. I couldn't help but
reflect on how small and insignificant this gathering of like-minded people were, seen
against the broader and contextually quite diverse demographics of Greater Sacramento--a
modern urban center numbering more than 500,000 very different citizens of all
backgrounds, beliefs, and cultural origins. Harking back to the 60s and to the words of
Bobby Dylan's famous lyrical warning of things to come: "The times, they are
a-changin'....". Indeed they are, and no Dorothy, we definitely aren't in Kanzastopol,
anymore...
Oh yes, I love my country. But that intense feeling doesn't automatically extend a red carpet to the modern corporate & economic oppressors of my homeland who seek to turn us all into a nation of mindlessly reactive and unquestioning idiot consumers. Perhaps it is time to change the definition of 'patriotism' a bit, eh? Think about THAT as we all rush off to do battle with, as President Dubya so eloquently put it, the "forces of evil".........
As for me, I prefer to recall the immortal words of Walt Kelly's Pogo Possum, who succinctly put it another way: "We have met the enemy, and he is us!"
Somber reflections for America's Veterans' Day, 2001, and may the best forces of good win (whoever and whatever they may be!) over the real forces of evil (whoever they may really be).......
