Patriotic Dissent, page 4
The state, as defined by strict borders, an ethnic, cultural, or political identity, and an organized bureaucratic structure that touched one’s daily life, really only emerged between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries, depending on the country in question. Generally borderless islands, like Britain (with its shared parliamentary and legalistic tradition) and Japan (boasting a homogenous ethno-religious culture), may have made a relatively early and comparably seamless transition to nation-statehood, but continental entities such as Germany (not unified as a state until 1871) and the Austro-Hungarian Empire (which didn’t fracture into somewhat ethnically distinct countries until after defeat in World War I) lagged further behind.
Furthermore, the successor states within the Ottoman Empire (which resisted final dismantlement until 1924) were largely Western inventions with suspiciously linear borders and often containing—for example, in Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq—decidedly multiethnic and sectarian diffusions. In these states, still some of the most unstable and violent in the modern world, the nature and place of the nation, nationalism, and the state itself remain highly contested. Much the same can be said of many postcolonial countries in Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia. Just ask an American or Soviet soldier unlucky enough to have fought in Afghanistan.
In fact, it’s unclear that the nation-state in its current form is necessarily here to stay or the preferred social and organizational construct of most or all people. To assume so is in itself a form of Eurocentrism or Western-centrism, the commonly held belief that because first Europe and then North America coalesced into such entities, this is the highest form of socio-structural development. Indeed, ISIS—no matter how ideologically abhorrent—represented a not altogether unpopular shift in the opposite direction. Their dream of a transnational, multiethnic, and potentially continent-spanning caliphate based on shared religious dogma constituted an outright rejection of the West-initiated nation-state model and, particularly, the postcolonial artificial states that the Europeans bequeathed to the people of the Middle East and that the United States has assiduously maintained. All of this must necessarily complicate any simple discussion of patriotism.
The point is that patriotism and nationalism are not the same thing and no official, mutually agreed-upon definition of patriotism exists today, nor did one in the past. This having, I hope, been demonstrated beyond a reasonable doubt, why, then, should the contemporary generation of Americans, in an age of endless war, accept the simplistic and constrictive bounds of patriotism as so often currently defined?
LIKE ANY STANDARD IRRATIONAL AMERICAN MALE, I LOVE sports. Watching the games, arguing strategies, and especially attending sporting events in person are all gravy to me, a well-needed distraction from the complexity, darkness, and absurdity of the “real” world. Add to that that as a notable extrovert, I enjoy being the center of attention, and one would expect me to enjoy what I’m about to describe.
Only I didn’t. I’d developed into quite an adopted fan of the Kansas City Royals during my years in Kansas, as the baseball team’s low-budget, small-ball, underdog persona struck a chord. Add the insanely cheap ticket prices—at least compared to those of my New York Yankees—and suffice it to say we watched a lot of baseball in Kauffman Stadium. So, back in graduate school, my then-wife secretly emailed a public affairs representative for the Royals. She sent pictures of me from my recent Afghan deployment, a short bio, and a description of my army career thus far.
She knew, as I did, that the Royals—and just about every other professional sports franchise by that time—honored one active or veteran service member at some point during each game. She also knew and appreciated, as a good thrifty New England Puritan, that the military honoree for the game received several free tickets in not-so-shabby seats. Sure enough, I was chosen. Much to my chagrin, my face and combat duty pictures were plastered across the jumbotron; a camera was pointed in my face, forcing me to awkwardly wave for far too long; my accomplishments were announced for tens of thousands of people; and finally I received a raucous standing ovation. No one dared keep their seats in such moments in the post-9/11 era: not in “conservative” Kansas City nor in “liberal” Boston. It just wasn’t and isn’t done.
Already decidedly antiwar, in the midst of penning a book critical of the Iraq invasion, and increasingly convinced that it was actually social workers, teachers, and nurses who belonged on the fields and jumbotrons of America’s sporting rituals, I wasn’t too pleased with the whole charade. Also, in an era in which there seemed little in the way of a large-scale, serious, organized antiwar movement and no military draft to ensure that average citizens had “skin in the game” of these wars, the whole thanks-via-applause aspect of the affair felt vapid, to say the least.
Yet it wasn’t just that. The Royals, like every other damn sports team in the country, weren’t satisfied—or secure enough—with one military recognition. No, first there had to be an embarrassingly gigantic American flag displayed and a military and/or police–first responder color guard during the pregame. Then, during the seventh-inning stretch, the crowd couldn’t possibly just sing the traditional folksy ditty “Take Me Out to the Ballgame.” Now it had become obligatory to follow that up with “God Bless America.” The nationwide agreement on this particular national-pride song was especially curious. I never received a memo or a ballot beforehand; it just happened, seemingly overnight. The peculiar yet profound combination of presumed core religiosity and overt nationalism of the tune is striking.
Presumably, no one informed the commissioners and team owners of the sundry sports franchises of America that “One Nation Under God” wasn’t slapped onto the end of the Pledge of Allegiance and “In God We Trust” wasn’t printed on paper currency 19 until 1956 and 1957, respectively.20 These (perhaps fashionably) late moves were, of course, made only in response to the perceived atheism of communism at the height of the Cold War, as a way to drum up nationalism, encourage unity, and differentiate the supposedly God-fearing United States from the evil, soulless heretics of the Soviet Union and Red China. My guess is the millionaires and billionaires atop the corporate athletics-industrial complex wouldn’t have known or even cared that they didn’t know such uncomfortable truths.
The definition of patriotism as constituting, for the vast majority of Americans (less than 0.5 percent of whom actually serve in the all-volunteer active duty military),21 little more than the self-consciously public display—in a variety of ways—of “thanks” to veterans and, besides occasional first responders, only military veterans is an even newer phenomenon than the term nationalism itself. And its pervasiveness transcends the realm of sports. Repeated loudspeaker announcements in airport terminals express thanks and welcome to soldiers and veterans, and flight attendants also regularly encourage passengers to honor service members on the plane. Civilians load their bumpers with “Support Our Troops” and yellow-ribbon stickers. And most of all, whenever an active-duty soldier or a veteran is outed to a stranger in passing, the conversation seemingly must stop long enough for the civilian to thank the soldier for their service.
This vacuous culture of “thanks” has truly gotten out of hand, hasn’t it? Be honest. I’m just old enough to remember a time, before the 9/11 attacks, when honoring soldiers and veterans was mainly relegated to two main days of the year: Memorial Day and Veterans’ Day. There were parades, war movie marathons on television, supportive newspaper editorials, and special events at sporting events on these two calendar dates. And you know what? That felt sufficient. It really did. Because taking this veritable soldier worship to the level society has in the twenty-first century can be perilous for the republic.
For decades and now more than ever, poll after poll has established that the only public institution that large majorities of Americans trust is the US military—not the presidency, the courts, or the media, and certainly not the Congress.22 This simply isn’t healthy—not for a democratic republic, at least. Maybe it would be appropriate for a tin-pot military dictatorship, but for an aspirational constitutional republic? Hardly.
Some of this gratuitous adulation is sincere and well-meaning. Certainly, no one wants to return to the (historically exaggerated, it must be said) bad old days of Vietnam when some antiwar protesters blamed the average troops, called them “baby killers,” or ignored their trauma upon redeployment. Unfortunately, it doesn’t serve the soldier or veteran particularly well. It doesn’t change his or her life, doesn’t stymie the record twenty-two veteran suicides a day or slow the pace of multiple deployments in indecisive and ill-defined wars for the active trooper.23
Nonetheless, many of us in the military and veteran community would gladly trade 90 percent of the inordinate thanks for an engaged citizenry concerned with and educated in foreign affairs. For the war machine, driven as it is by a profit-motivated military-industrial complex fronted by arms-dealing defense contractors, counts on—requires—collective public apathy. True, active citizens who read the global news daily think critically about America’s role in the world and the prudence or prospects of US military operations: the war machine doesn’t want that. Yet that’s what this country’s soldiers and veterans deserve. What they patently don’t warrant is to be ignored between the thanks and the occasional check picked up by a kind soul at TGI Fridays, or to be shuffled around the Greater Middle East from one hopeless war to another by an unchecked president and an indifferent Congress like so many toy soldiers or chess pieces. Want to genuinely support America’s veterans? Pay attention, watch how you vote, and create fewer of them.
Only that’s not how most Americans think or act, not by a long shot. In the absence of a military draft, more than 99 percent of the population chooses to pass on military service. Unworried about the prospect of actually serving in one of the military’s many wars—the armed forces are now fighting, dying, or assisting local militaries in combat in over twenty-five countries daily—and caught up in the standard struggle to earn a living wage, most citizens tune out foreign policy completely. Most of those engaged in politics at all, focus on the kitchen-table issues they perceive do affect them, such as healthcare, taxes, and social security.
If we’re brutally honest, we’d admit that an embarrassing segment of even educated Americans couldn’t pick out on an unlabeled map three of the seven countries the US bombs daily. Probably less than 1 percent could have both geographically identified and properly pronounced the name of the country of Niger, one of the more obscure deployment locales for the US military, where in 2017 four American soldiers were ambushed and killed by an Islamist militia that hadn’t even existed in September 2001.24 The takeaway is simple: in a post-draft, all-volunteer military in an age of endless war, the vast majority of the citizenry has divorced attentiveness to America’s wars—or even basic knowledge about them—from their definition of patriotism.
So in 2020, nineteen years into America’s longest period of continuous warfare, three basic conceptions of patriotism exist. The first two are prevalent, pervasive, and normative; the third appears to the untrained observer to be nearly extinct, or at least extremely rare and hidden from view, especially by the media.
THE FIRST, WHICH I’VE DESCRIBED IN DETAIL, IS WHAT I CALL “Pageantry Patriotism.” Primarily focused on self-conscious public displays of gratitude and ceremonies, it sadly best matches modern American culture in this materialist, millennial age. This is the patriotism of flags, parades, anthems, pledges of allegiance, yellow ribbons, and vapid thanks. The beauty of it is that it is worn as a badge of honor, a point of pride, but requires no work, no critical thinking, no engagement with current events or inconvenient facts. It is a feeling, first and foremost. Patriotism is thereby simple, instinctual, reflexive. Pageant patriots exist on the traditional political left and right but in recent decades have mainly coalesced on the neoconservative, militarist right.
In this framework, pageant patriotism can also be combative. Pageant patriots take as a starting point not just that support for any and all American wars and support for the troops therein engaged are nearly synonymous, but that the former is actually requisite for the latter. Pageant patriots define their own patriotism as much by opposition to alleged nonpatriots as by any positive sense of what they are for. This has, in the past and even today, manifested itself through such pugnacious phrases as “America: Love It or Leave It!” Pageantry patriotism, much like the dictionary definition of nationalism discussed previously, is thus as much about “exalting” itself “above others.”
As such, it serves as a cudgel for the self-styled patriot to wield against real or perceived ideological enemies, usually some imagined conglomeration of traitors, communists, hippies, Muslims, immigrants, and just basic liberals. These are the folks who were up-in-arms shocked by NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick’s decision to kneel in protest of racially charged police brutality during the playing of the national anthem. For them, another’s remonstration—heck, even another’s failure to cohere with the pageant patriot’s preferred nationalist dogma—is judged a personal and public threat. In that sense, this is the most inherently insecure of all patriotisms.
THE NEXT MOST COMMON CONTEMPORARY CONSTRUCTION OF American patriotism is what I’ll call “Passively Principled Patriotism.” Most prevalent on the centrist political right and the establishment Democratic left, this version is often equally surface-level but less combative and usually tinged with at least some hint of (theoretical) complexity. These folks still either subscribe to or, in these intolerant times of endless war, have acquiesced to most of the dog-and-pony shows and obligatory thanks associated with pageantry patriotism, but they at least like to believe they support America and its troops well, because they do good. This is what the US is, or at least has been and should aspire again to be: a force for good in the world.
They, too, mainly accept at face value the modern “love” for and “devotion” to country in the most recent Merriam-Webster definition. Passive principled patriots, unlike the pure pageantry crowd, may not always support the government in power (especially if it is conservative Republican) or agree with the prudence of some of its particular wars, but for the most part they limit their opposition to muted complaints, ad hominem attacks on a particular political leader (Bush, Trump), and voting out that figure, all within the constraints of the established two-party system.
Passive patriots are fearful patriots. Often vaguely liberal, or embarrassingly centrist conservative, they’re terrified of the ready pejorative attacks from pageantry patriots. They remember well, even if too young to have lived through it, the Cold War and the incessant slights brandished against those not deemed patriotic enough in the public political space: “un-American,” “soft” on communism (note the sexual connotation), and “weak” on defense (note the masculinity connotation). “Never again” has been their mantra ever since. If necessary, they will out-patriot the pageantry patriots!
Thus, when 9/11 occurred and the “war on terror” began, they were all in, had stockpiled yellow ribbons, and were ready as could be to join the mandatory hyperadulation-of-the-troops culture. And when some of those wars (mainly Iraq) went bad and they either truly opposed them or saw a political opportunity in faux opposition, old-school, in-the-streets, Vietnam-era protest was out of the question. That would have been too risky, opened them to attack. No, the passive patriots play it safe, stay between the lines, and work, always work, within the existing system. For their sins, the troops and the republic have suffered mightily.
THE FINAL, LEAST COMMON FORM OF PATRIOTISM—AND THE one to which I unapologetically subscribe and that I hope to reframe for the mainstream—is what I call “Participatory Principled Patriotism” or, in times of dark necessity such as ours, “Patriotic Dissent.”
It is a patriotism grounded in the more idealistic aspects of Noah Webster’s 1828 definition, placing maintenance of America’s aspirational values—“laws,” “rights,” and “institutions”—with vigor and purity over the easy, obvious requirement to defend one’s country’s borders. It is a patriotism that takes seriously the soldier’s and officer’s oath—which I proudly took upon each promotion during my career—to “support and defend” the Constitution of the United States. I served three presidents, in two separate wars, for a total of eighteen years—the great preponderance of my adult life. My loyalty to each was significant, to be sure, but ultimately ephemeral. My higher loyalty, by oath and by military tradition, was to the purported—if wildly imperfect—values of the American republican experiment.
Participatory patriotism isn’t new; it has a long, proud history. Politicians, artists, and veterans alike have, across the centuries, pushed back when the majoritarian tide too often acquiesced to hegemonic and civil liberties–squelching phases in American foreign and domestic policy. President Abraham Lincoln, Mark Twain, and Marine Corps General Smedley Butler (a two-time recipient of the Medal of Honor), as I’ll soon demonstrate, personified this tradition. I and my many (though largely invisible) antiwar peers are but minor successors to these great men. When they saw their government, the representatives of their country, take the nation on the path of empire, domestic oppression, and values degradation, as we see now, they risked careers, reputations, and personal safety to defend the dream of the United States. Laying it all on the line: that’s participatory principled patriotism.
Still, it is a dangerous path to embark upon. One’s combat veteran status will not save him or her. Take the case of Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard. A serving US Army major, Iraq War veteran, and Democratic presidential candidate for 2020, her unshakeable antiwar stance earned her exactly what? Vitriol and slander. And not just from social media trolls. Mainstream media pundits, serious national newspapers, and famous political figures (think Hillary Clinton) labeled her a “Russian asset,” a “Vladimir Putin apologist,” even un-American.25 I’ve suffered the same attacks on a lesser scale.
