Unpatriotism

I confess that I am an unpatriot. While not a crime, it is, no doubt, a horrifying confession to the über patriots. I was not always in this iniquitous frame of mind. In fact, I had a strict patriotic upbringing. My father had been a drill instructor in the army, and he drilled patriotism into my poor brain with the same zeal he bullied recruits into performing the Manual of Arms. When I was six or seven I wrote an über patriotic poem that I proudly showed my father—I’ve always been a show-off.  All I now remember was the lines: “for might makes right, and this it holds tight,” the “it” being America. There were a few other lines with the same complex meter and rhyme scheme, but they’re lost forever. My father petted me and praised the poem. He was not an educated man—he got his GED in the military—and I don’t know if he praised my poem because he was impressed that at my early age I could write lines that rhymed or because of the sentiment. I began every grade school morning with my right hand over my heart as I recited the Pledge of Allegiance which I readily memorized even though none of the lines rhymed. I swam in a sea of newsreels, TV shows, and movies in which America not only defeated the world’s enemies but offered a lift up to the world’s downtrodden. I memorized the lines on the Statue of Liberty—they at least rhymed. I memorized the Preamble to the Declaration of Independence and Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. I knew the first ten Amendments to the Constitution better than I knew the Ten Commandments. In grade school history courses I learned to be proud of the American patriots who freed us from the evil British and their insidious tax on tea. I was proud that we, the good guys, always won, always did the right thing. I bought American exceptionalism with the same eagerness and pride I would have bought and showed off a new Corvette which I might have been able to buy had I not wasted my lunch money on scrumptious sandwiches of Velveeta Cheese (Product) on Wondrous Bread. We Americans were the leaders of the free world.

My unpatriotism did not come about in a sudden epiphany, like a light turning on with the flick of a switch—for the über patriots, “a light turning off” is more appropriate. It was a snail’s-pace process for my sluggish brain, difficult to pin down when it began, but I blame it on the 60s. Those were turbulent years for America, years of dramatic changes, years of protest against racism and against the war, most of which I missed. Oh, I saw the turbulence on the nightly news and read about the changes in newspapers, but, I was a patriot who swallowed the line about the war that “if you knew what we know but can’t tell you because it’s secret, you would approve of what we do.” I was unaffected by the changing times until I was dragged, kicking and screaming, into the army, kicking and screaming not because of any ethical concerns about military service or the war in Vietnam, but because, like future Vice Presidents and Presidents, I had better things to do, more important things, like getting drunk and trying to get laid, and I was not mature enough to realize that the first ruled out the second. Lacking the resources of Dick Cheney, George Bush, Donald Trump, and whole armies of other well-connected, well-monied young men, I reported for duty when called—kicking and screaming only in my mind. Still a patriot, I went to Vietnam, a land where the seed of unpatriotism found fertile soil.

I nurtured the evil seed until it became a large, spreading Black Oak, or, for the über gang, a thicket of Poison Oak. I grieved for my loss of patriotism, and I cannot better explain how I allowed this oak to mature than to resort to a template based on the five stages of grief proposed by that renowned psychiatrist, Kübler-Ross.

But first: Mirriam-Webster has this to say about a patriot: “one who loves and supports his or her country.” My issue is with the noun “country.” M-W defines a variety of countries, including: “an indefinite, usually extended expanse of land;” “the land of a person’s birth, residence, or citizenship;” “a political state or nation or its territory;” “the people of a state or district.”

STAGE I: DENIAL As far as the expanse of land where I was born is concerned, I love that country. The famous lyrical poet, W. Guthrie mapped out that expanse: “From California to the New York Island, From the Redwood Forest, to the Gulf stream waters.” I have lived in the mid Midwest, the Deep South, the upper Midwest, the Atlantic Coast, New England, and California. I’ve seen Mr. Guthrie’s sparkling sands, diamond deserts, and waving wheat fields, but not the rolling dust clouds, although I have seen enough smoke from forest fires. I have seen plenty of Guthrie’s fog, some summers too much. I love this expanse of land.

Sunsets when I’m at an overlook in the Berkeley Hills and look down at the enormous, shimmering San Francisco Bay, watching it unhurriedly turn from gray to golden and back to gray, or when I climb, in cross country skis, to a high Sierra hilltop and look down at beautiful Lake Tahoe and all the surrounding snow-covered peaks, I feel fortunate to be at those places, at those times. But I cannot help but think that it was all more beautiful, less contaminated before we white people came along.

We seem to be homozygous dominant for the hubris gene. We nearly killed San Francisco Bay, even had plans to fill it in to expand our local “expanse of land.” We clear-cut forests in the Sierras. We have heedlessly dotted the land with toxic superfund sites, polluted the water we drink and the air we breathe. We have not been good stewards of this “expanse of land.”

STAGE II: CONFUSION (this is my own category; I can’t think how Kübler-Ross missed this essential category, but then she was born and lived her formative years in a foreign land). When I was on a government-paid vacation overseas, I read about the Chicago riots (not the riots in April ’68 after King was murdered, but those in August after King and Kennedy had been assassinated and during the Democratic National Convention). My hometown newspaper and the Stars and Stripes stated that all the deplorable violence in Chicago was caused by hippies, anarchists, and outside agitators. Slowly reports emerged that claimed the riots were caused by the Chicago police, soldiers, National Guardsmen, and Secret Service who attacked peaceful protesters, the press, and innocent bystanders. An angry Mayor Daley attacked those reactionary historians. What was I to believe? Throughout my paid vacation I read about riots, cities burning, hate, and anger back in the land I longed to return to.

On that vacation we had armaments problems, which I accepted as only natural and learned to mitigate. Then I read that corrupt government inspectors were charged with accepting bribes to look the other way when armaments factories produced defective armaments for us fighting patriots. I saw civilian contractors ripping off Uncle Sam. For six months I camped next to the Michelin Rubber plantation, a safe zone for our enemies. The US had to pay Michelin for every rubber tree destroyed. The war seemed to be more about money than keeping dominoes upright.

STAGE III: ANGER I returned to the world from Vietnam, a lowly decorated combat veteran, not proud of my service, only relieved that it was over.  And angry, angry that my life had been so completely controlled by incompetent officers, leaders of men who were a danger to those men, and angry that so many of those men were bigots. I had seen too much corruption, moral and venal, too much racism. I had counted the days down for a year before I returned to the world I had idealized, and I was angry at what I saw when I returned. I was angry at the same corruption and racism; angry at redneck hardhats who bashed long-haired hippies and protesters; angry at the massacre of students at Kent State by uniformed National Guardsmen; angry with the Dirty Tricks and the enemies list and the smarmy politicians who justified them; angry about support for the coup in Chile, the Dirty War in Argentina, the genocide in Guatemala and the murderous military in El Salvador. I was angry for a long time. I was not angry with the election of an obvious flim-flam man, shocked yes, but not angry. However, I soon became angry at the evil emanating from his administration, the racism, xenophobia, and homophobia, and perhaps the apogee of evil: taking children from their parents and locking them in cages in order to terrorize tempest-toss’d masses who dared think about breathing free in our shores, our version of Sophie’s Choice.

STAGE IV: COMPLACENCY (Kübler-Ross carelessly missed another one). I thought things were getting better. Sure, I was angry at Bush’s criminal invasion of Iraq. And I was angry when a federal cop beat me up at a demonstration—well, at the time I was mostly in pain; the anger came later. But I couldn’t stay angry forever, and all around me I saw that things were getting better. Maybe I was just getting older and mellower and should have taken off my rose-colored glasses. But when I participated in a demonstration I felt that I was surrounded by the kind of people I could “love and support,” the kind who made this, if not a great country, at least a better country, my kind of people. Sure, there was no shortage of holier-than-thou types and people who were angrier at other demonstrators than at the people and policies we were demonstrating against. Still, I thought things were visibly getting better. I realized that I lived in a bubble in the Bay Area and things were different in other places in this “extended expanse of land.” And I wasn’t always wearing rose-colored glasses. I saw that even in the Bay Bubble we were plagued with problems. But we were working on cures.

Back in the 70’s I had stopped standing for the national anthem at baseball games. Nobody paid attention, perhaps because I’m a white guy, perhaps because I lived in San Francisco. After years of being ignored, I complacently stood during the n.a.

STAGE V: ACCEPTANCE Many an evening I shared cognac and dark chocolate with a friend, an over-psychologist who had a rather elitist view of humankind. He argued that stupidity was rampant in the species, while I argued that it wasn’t a question of stupidity, but of ignorance, lack of education. I argued that nearly all humans were born with the same equipment, giving them the same potential for intelligence.

Along came the Trump phenomenon. I knew that we had racists, Nazis, and fellow travelers, but I thought they were all in hidden enclaves in remote forests or in Congress and had no idea that our “extended expanse” was so lousy with them until Trump made them feel safe enough to come out of the closet. The magnitude of this minority has poked a giant hole in my argument. I am forced to accept my friend’s argument. How else explain all the people donating hundreds of millions of dollars to Trump’s farcical and losing battles to overturn the election? Even after Trump’s consigliere says there’s no there there? How else explain the Trumpites’ loyalty throughout four years of lies and scams? I knew there were always people who would jump at the chance to buy the Brooklyn Bridge from a fast-talking flim-flam man, but I had no idea they were so numerous. The great American philosopher, P. Barnum, posited the intellectual hypothesis that a sucker was born every minute. I now believe that his estimate was far too modest. But If the suckers were born with the same number of brain cells as everyone else, why do they refuse to learn? Are their brain cells not properly functional? How can they so readily fall for flim-flammery?

I cannot be a patriot because I cannot love or support “a political state or nation or its territory;” or “the people of a state or district,” when that political state is run by battalions of flag-waving, lapel-pin-wearing, über patriots loved and supported by flag-waving, MAGA-hat wearing suckers who trust that their hats, but never masks, will protect them from a pandemic. I cannot love and support Proud Boys and Boogaloo Boys and other childish groups whose unifying characteristic is hate and fear of the other.

I am an unProud Boy. I am opposed to 40% of the people of this country. How can I believe in American exceptionalism when one of our two major political parties, the party of Lincoln, no less, has eagerly allied itself with racists, Nazis, and Uriah Heepish politicians who fear and fawn over Trumpian tweets? If America is exceptional, it’s because it leads all developed nations in bad health outcomes, despite paying the most for health care. America leads in hunger, poverty, violence, and the number of citizens incarcerated. We also currently lead, by far, in the number of cases and deaths from COVID19. Americans are violently opposed to universal public health care, fearing that it is simply evil socialism, yet applaud expensive health insurance which is simply socialism for profit.

Americans are not exceptional, neither better nor worse than other populations, but merely plodding members of what the greatest American philosopher, M. Twain, dubbed “the damned human race,” and I do “love and support” Americans more or less than I “love and support” people from other “expanses of land.” I now accept and am proud of my unpatriotism. How can I be other than an unpatriot?

A few years ago, I was pleased when a pro quarterback for the San Francisco football team took a knee during the n.a., and more than a little angry at the hypocritical, faux anger from Trump and rich, white football club owners, who stoked the anger of MAGA-hat wearing suckers. During the current (and biggest, so far) Black Lives Matter wave, I was pleased to see many pro athletes take a knee. Hypocrites argue that the sports arena is no place for political statements, but isn’t standing with your hand over your heart a political statement? I believe I’ll remain seated during the n.a. the next time I’m at the ballpark.