Write what you like of course! But given that Wretch has been questioning O’s patriotism for months – I’m a bit suprised that he went to China (as oppposed to Independence) yesterday…Though perhaps the issue was obliquely joined when
Wretch invoked Helprin’s rhetorical questions…
“And yet what candidate is alert to this? Who asserts that our sinews are still intact? That we can meet any challenge with our great and traditional strengths? That beneath a roiled surface is a power almost limitless yet fair, supple yet restrained? Who will speak of such things in time, and who will dare to awaken them?”
Helprin’s piece comes with a dig at Obama that hints at H.’s own distance from contemporary American culture. The novelist mocks O by invoking Betty Boop’s blinks – shades of Maureen Dowd’s “Obambi” – How can that girly-man O understand the “sinews” of American culture? (“Where’s the Outrage?”) But that pop cult reference is pretty far gone. It’s a reminder that Helprin’s own writing is less than engaged with contemporary American life. Helprin’s deepest work has charm and force but his imagination is not exactly at home with the horrors or the heights of American life over the past 50 years. Which is one reason why he famously saddled Bob Dole with a bridge to the past in that 96 convention speech that Clinton was able to exploit…
Obama, though, is no Clinton. In his speech on patriotism yesterday, he went out of his way (as he often does) to distance himself from the ease of old arguments. He pushed back on doleful Movement Conservatives and Move.On.com (criticizing their General Betrayus ad)…
“What’s striking about today’s patriotism debate is the degree to which it remains rooted in the culture wars of the 1960s – in arguments that go back forty years or more. In the early years of the civil rights movement and opposition to the Vietnam War, defenders of the status quo often accused anybody who questioned the wisdom of government policies of being unpatriotic. Meanwhile, some of those in the so-called counter-culture of the Sixties reacted not merely by criticizing particular government policies, but by attacking the symbols, and in extreme cases, the very idea, of America itself – by burning flags; by blaming America for all that was wrong with the world; and perhaps most tragically, by failing to honor those veterans coming home from Vietnam, something that remains a national shame to this day.
.
Most Americans never bought into these simplistic world-views – these caricatures of left and right. Most Americans understood that dissent does not make one unpatriotic, and that there is nothing smart or sophisticated about a cynical disregard for America’s traditions and institutions. And yet the anger and turmoil of that period never entirely drained away. All too often our politics still seems trapped in these old, threadbare arguments – a fact most evident during our recent debates about the war in Iraq, when those who opposed administration policy were tagged by some as unpatriotic, and a general providing his best counsel on how to move forward in Iraq was accused of betrayal.”
Compare O’s stuff with Helprin’s writing over the years and I’m guessing many readers might allow O has a more comprehensive understanding of recent American history and culture than Helprin has displayed. Not sure which of them knows more about China! But it’s pretty clear to me who has a better sense of America’s “great and traditional strengths.” And doesn’t Obama’s campaign indicate he has a clue about how to invoke the “almost limitless power” of the American people? Surely more than anyone associated with the Claremont Institute. No real surprise there. Obama’s patriotism comes down to facts of feeling. He’s not very touchy-feely but I suspect he likes Americans more than most Claremonters. (He’s certainly more inside American culture than CI’s royalists and classicists.) O’s patriotism is not…
“just a love of America in the abstract, but a very particular love for, and faith in, the American people. That is why our heart swells with pride at the sight of our flag; why we shed a tear as the lonely notes of Taps sound. For we know that the greatness of this country – its victories in war, its enormous wealth, its scientific and cultural achievements – all result from the energy and imagination of the American people; their toil, drive, struggle, restlessness, humor and quiet heroism.
That is the liberty we defend – the liberty of each of us to pursue our own dreams. That is the equality we seek – not an equality of results, but the chance of every single one of us to make it if we try. That is the community we strive to build – one in which we trust in this sometimes messy democracy of ours, one in which we continue to insist that there is nothing we cannot do when we put our mind to it, one in which we see ourselves as part of a larger story, our own fates wrapped up in the fates of those who share allegiance to America’s happy and singular creed.”
Beyond that happy talk, though, there are principles that link Helprin and Obama and even some Clubbers (as I’ve suggested in the past)….
“Beyond a loyalty to America’s ideals, beyond a willingness to dissent on behalf of those ideals, I also believe that patriotism must, if it is to mean anything, involve the willingness to sacrifice – to give up something we value on behalf of a larger cause. For those who have fought under the flag of this nation – for the young veterans I meet when I visit Walter Reed; for those like John McCain who have endured physical torment in service to our country – no further proof of such sacrifice is necessary. And let me also add that no one should ever devalue that service, especially for the sake of a political campaign, and that goes for supporters on both sides.
We must always express our profound gratitude for the service of our men and women in uniform. Period. Indeed, one of the good things to emerge from the current conflict in Iraq has been the widespread recognition that whether you support this war or oppose it, the sacrifice of our troops is always worthy of honor.
For the rest of us – for those of us not in uniform or without loved ones in the military – the call to sacrifice for the country’s greater good remains an imperative of citizenship. Sadly, in recent years, in the midst of war on two fronts, this call to service never came. After 9/11, we were asked to shop.”
I bet Helprin would’ve bought out of Bush’s prompts back in that day…And I’m reminded there was another moment of possible, ah, solidarity. In his last book of short stories, Helprin tells a tale about a woman working mad hard in a Cali WWII munitions factory (as her young husband fights the Japanese overseas). Taught me something about the inner lives of the “greatest generation.” But Obama needed less instruction than me as you’ll see from the following sequence in his patriotism speech yesterday – a talk that makes me doubt O needs lessons from Mark Helprin in how to embody the American idea…
”One of my earliest memories is of sitting on my grandfather’s shoulders and watching the astronauts come to shore in Hawaii. I remember the cheers and small flags that people waved, and my grandfather explaining how we Americans could do anything we set our minds to do. That’s my idea of America.
I remember listening to my grandmother telling stories about her work on a bomber assembly-line during World War II. I remember my grandfather handing me his dog-tags from his time in Patton’s Army, and understanding that his defense of this country marked one of his greatest sources of pride. That’s my idea of America.
I remember, when living for four years in Indonesia as a child, listening to my mother reading me the first lines of the Declaration of Independence – “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal. That they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” I remember her explaining how this declaration applied to every American, black and white and brown alike; how those words, and words of the United States Constitution, protected us from the injustices that we witnessed other people suffering during those years abroad. That’s my idea of America.
As I got older, that gut instinct – that America is the greatest country on earth – would survive my growing awareness of our nation’s imperfections: it’s ongoing racial strife; the perversion of our political system laid bare during the Watergate hearings; the wrenching poverty of the Mississippi Delta and the hills of Appalachia. Not only because, in my mind, the joys of American life and culture, its vitality, its variety and its freedom, always outweighed its imperfections, but because I learned that what makes America great has never been its perfection but the belief that it can be made better. I came to understand that our revolution was waged for the sake of that belief – that we could be governed by laws, not men; that we could be equal in the eyes of those laws; that we could be free to say what we want and assemble with whomever we want and worship as we please; that we could have the right to pursue our individual dreams but the obligation to help our fellow citizens pursue theirs.
For a young man of mixed race, without firm anchor in any particular community, without even a father’s steadying hand, it is this essential American idea – that we are not constrained by the accident of birth but can make of our lives what we will – that has defined my life, just as it has defined the life of so many other Americans.
That is why, for me, patriotism is always more than just loyalty to a place on a map or a certain kind of people. Instead, it is also loyalty to America’s ideals – ideals for which anyone can sacrifice, or defend, or give their last full measure of devotion. I believe it is this loyalty that allows a country teeming with different races and ethnicities, religions and customs, to come together as one. It is the application of these ideals that separate us from Zimbabwe, where the opposition party and their supporters have been silently hunted, tortured or killed; or Burma, where tens of thousands continue to struggle for basic food and shelter in the wake of a monstrous storm because a military junta fears opening up the country to outsiders; or Iraq, where despite the heroic efforts of our military, and the courage of many ordinary Iraqis, even limited cooperation between various factions remains far too elusive.
I believe those who attack America’s flaws without acknowledging the singular greatness of our ideals, and their proven capacity to inspire a better world, do not truly understand America.
Of course, precisely because America isn’t perfect, precisely because our ideals constantly demand more from us, patriotism can never be defined as loyalty to any particular leader or government or policy. As Mark Twain, that greatest of American satirists and proud son of Missouri, once wrote, “Patriotism is supporting your country all the time, and your government when it deserves it.” We may hope that our leaders and our government stand up for our ideals, and there are many times in our history when that’s occurred. But when our laws, our leaders or our government are out of alignment with our ideals, then the dissent of ordinary Americans may prove to be one of the truest expression of patriotism.
The young preacher from Georgia, Martin Luther King, Jr., who led a movement to help America confront our tragic history of racial injustice and live up to the meaning of our creed – he was a patriot. The young soldier who first spoke about the prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib – he is a patriot. Recognizing a wrong being committed in this country’s name; insisting that we deliver on the promise of our Constitution – these are the acts of patriots, men and women who are defending that which is best in America. And we should never forget that – especially when we disagree with them; especially when they make us uncomfortable with their words….”
Doesn’t Obama deserve Clubbers’ respect for his readiness to prod his own natural constituency? (And shouldn’t yall give it up to his cultural range – that Twain ref was nice – his sense of history and his feeling for the moment (the diss of Zimbob). As I’ve said in the past, he doesn’t pander – he pushes all-American sides out of their comfort zones into New Worlds. (That’s why Dylan has endorsed him!)
Let me close by giving Wretch a gentle push – But let’s tighten up first. Isn’t it apparent that Wretch shares with O a felt sense of internationalism…Note the range O covered in the speech above (which was not an address on foreign policy) – from Indonesia to Zimbabwe. Worthy of Wretch’s own worldliness. (Which often makes me feel like a piker!) Still, I wish Wretch’s internationalism was tempered by a little more of O’s American imagination. Look at the following passage and I think you’ll see why O’s world-view gets at something missing in Wretch’s…
“leaving aside the question of whether this strategy would work, those bare-knuckle solutions would be hard sell to an intellectual elite that instinctively recoils from dog-eat-dog change; and whose main worries are in any case about providing everyone with a sense of “self-esteem”, avoiding anthropogenic Global Warming and spreading Enlightenment.”
Sure – I understand the Wretch means to anatomize (as the academics say)the habits of “intellectual elites” but he ends up implicitly coming down against anyone who “instinctively recoils from dog-eat-dog change.” That’s to say he’s on the opposite side of most Americans. Social Darwinism will always have its proposents on the hard right. Reagan revived it with it a smile. But Obama is betting that most Americans don’t instinctively ID with a dog-eat-dog way of being in the world (at home or abroad). UNLESS the dog you’re dealing with is a mad one (right Wade?) I hope O wins his wager. Better angels anyone?
