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Like most towns, Salida celebrates the Fourth with a
variety of activities, which last year included a band in
Riverside Park. As the sun set and the sky grew dark,
though not dark enough for the fireworks, the band launched
into a Jimi Hendrix version of The Star Spangled
Banner.
Nowhere is it written, that I know of, that our national anthem is to be performed only by brass bands and symphony orchestras. Even so, such guitar-and-feedback renditions always perturb a certain segment of society.
But in me, well, such performances produce emotions that
might well be akin to patriotism. It's a way of saying
We might be hairballs without day jobs, our homes may be
blight standing in the way of the invasion of the gentry,
but this is our country, too.
Just how did the Conformists, Authoritarians and Fundamentalists acquire a monopoly on American patriotism?
The word patriotism
comes, via Old French and
Latin, from the Greek patris,
meaning
fatherland,
and that from pater,
which means
father.
This leads to an interesting gender question. Why do
some peoples refer to their fatherland
and others to
the motherland
? We Americans seldom use either, but
instead apply an avuncular personification, Uncle Sam --
who has a beard, even though I have been told on occasion
that beards are unpatriotic.
There's also a feminine Miss Liberty,
as in the
famous statue. Political cartoons, back in the repressed
Victorian era, sometimes employed a Columbia
in
billowing star-spangled skirts and a blouse with a very low
neckline, displaying so much flesh that modern congressmen
would feel compelled to denounce her as yet another reason
to eliminate the National Endowment for the Arts.
Samuel Johnson, the great English lexicographer of the
18th century, was dubious about the American revolution.
Why is it that the loudest yelps for liberty come from
the drivers of slaves?
he asked.
On April 7, 1775, Johnson observed that Patriotism is
the last refuge of a scoundrel.
According to his
biographer, James Boswell, Johnson added that he did not
mean a real and generous love of our country, but that
pretended patriotism which so many, in all ages and
countries, have made a cloak of self-interest.
At about that time, on this side of the Atlantic,
assorted rum smugglers, tobacco planters and hemp farmers
were organizing a revolution, and began calling themselves
patriots.
When you think about this for a moment, it's
preposterous. Here are a group of people conspiring for
the violent overthrow of the existing government of their
land -- an act generally known as sedition
or
treason
-- and they're the patriots
?
To be fair, though, once our forefathers got their
independence, they often did manifest a real and
generous love of our country.
Since then, though, American patriotism seems to have become the exclusive preserve of the right-thinkers, who employ all manner of twisted logic.
If you point out that the Constitution provides for separation of church and state, and that would seem to prohibit organized prayers in state-operated classrooms, they tell you that you're unpatriotic.
Or if you mention that public lands might best be managed for the long-term benefit of the public who owns the land, rather than the timber or recreation industries, you will hear that you're unpatriotic.
Question the need for more prisons, or wonder how we can have both a War on Drugs and a Bill of Rights, and again, your patriotism will be questioned.
There's an America I cherish, the America of Thomas Jefferson, Jeannette Rankin, Big Bill Haywood, Gen. George Crook, Malcolm X, Bloody Bridles Waite, Ralph Carr, Mother Jones, Frederick Douglass, Clarence Darrow, Lenny Bruce, Sitting Bull, H.L. Mencken and Abigail Scott Duniway, to name a few. A land of agitators, troublemakers, free-thinkers and heretics, none of them perfect and few of them suitable for Nike commercials, but all vibrant and interesting.
That's an America that the modern patriots
denounce -- only the evil revisionist
historians
seem to think we should know about that America.
But it's the America that comes to mind when I hear certain renditions of our national anthem, and at such times, I wish it were possible to be patriotic without thereby falling into line behind mean-spirited men in blue suits with flags in their lapels.
They've decided what patriotism
means, and in
their eyes, the rest of us can't even be Americans, let
alone possess any patriotism.
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