Bookmark & share:

E-mail this page E-mail a letter to the editor Reader Comments (below)

story tools
sponsored by

07/06/2008

This past week, as the nation edged into its July 4th anniversary celebrations, the topic du jour was patriotism. On television, in the newsweeklies, on talk radio, in blogs and virtually everywhere you turned, we heard about love of country. These days, political campaigns focus on what they call “messaging” about issues — one week, it’s the family, another week it’s free trade — and the past week’s message about love of country was geared to hang on the most patriotic of American holidays.

We heard that a patriot is a war hero. A patriot is an earnest critic of his or her country. A patriot is a conservative — no, wait, a patriot is a progressive. A patriot believes in America as it has been; a patriot believes in America as it can be.
All of the discussion, of course, is in the service of helping you, the voter, choose your new president. Is John McCain the real patriot? Or is Barack Obama the real patriot?

As far as we’re concerned, anyone who runs a serious race for the presidency is a patriot. If you believe enough in your country and its ideals to seek its highest office, if you choose to sacrifice all that must be sacrificed in order to pursue and hold that office, then you’re a patriot, plain and simple.

Of course, who is a patriot is always less of an issue than who isn’t a patriot. That’s often been the case in American politics, where criticism of a government’s policies and the status quo has, in our lowest moments, been met with questions about the critic’s true devotion to the United States. It’s a particularly ugly version of “kill-the-messenger.” To call someone unpatriotic is a primal, potentially fatal political wound; after all, who is the first cousin to the un-patriot but the traitor?
The current national discussion about patriotism is not about whether John McCain is a patriot. The military veteran and former prisoner-of-war in Vietnam is, hands down and no questions asked, the embodiment of patriotism. His very physical appearance, which bears the scars of his imprisonment and torture, conveys, wordlessly, the sacrifice McCain has made for his country.

The discussion, instead, is about Barack Hussein Obama, whose patriotism has been a constant source of question and innuendo among his critics.
Why?
Because he’s a candidate who bears a name that sounds utterly un-American — even, god forbid, like a terrorist’s name. Use the phrase “African-American” to describe Obama and he sounds even more like a person of divided loyalties. He’s a candidate who lived abroad in a Muslim country, who was photographed without a flag lapel pin, who was caught on camera with his hand down — not on his heart — during the Pledge of Allegiance. Those who question Obama’s patriotism say: This is a man who does not really love America as he should.

Obama’s speech in Independence, Mo. last week was designed to answer the questions about his patriotism; whether he did so adequately is up to American voters to decide.

What is unfortunate, though, is that he must address those questions at all. As scholar Peter Reinert eloquently stated in an essay on patriotism in Time Magazine recently, patriotism in America has at least two faces. There’s the conservative face, a patriotism of “affirmation,” which holds that America’s past is worthy of celebration and reverence. And there’s the liberal face of patriotism, which maintains that true love of country means striving constantly to redeem a past that has yet to live up to America’s founding ideals.

We find no fault with either of those definitions, nor do we believe that they are mutually exclusive. America is big and resilient enough to accommodate, even celebrate, an expansive and inclusive definition of patriotism. In human behavior, we express love for each other in a range of behaviors, from indulgence to tough love. So, too, should the definition of patriotism — love of country — allow for both reverence and criticism. The common currency is love; how we use it is simply, and only, a matter of individual expression.

Bookmark and share this story: