LUDIC LOG

Patriotism, the new sensation that's sweeping the nation, has always struck me as a very strange emotion. On the face of it, it contains more than a bit of absurdity: being proud of your country because it's where you happened to be born is a bit like being proud of being tall, or having red hair, or being ambidextrous. Sure, it might be nice, but it's not something you really had anything to do with. On the other hand, there's nothing really wrong with loving your country just because you lucked into being born there; after all, you don't get to pick who your mother is, but everyone loves their mother, right?

National pride is somewhat perplexing too. Certainly there are times I feel proud of my country; America has achieved some truly wonderful things in its brief existence, and it's my extreme good fortune that I can't (yet) be locked up or killed because of my lack of arbitrary patriotism. But there's a certain level of bet-hedging that comes with being a proud American. Part of it is the fact that I'm as often ashamed of being an American as I am proud; part of it is the above-mentioned fact that it's not really anything I'm personally responsible for (I think it's neat being part Arab, too, but I imagine I might not feel so different and special if I lived in, say, Aden); part of it is the fact that displays of patriotism are often mawkish and thoughtless, and almost always compulsory. There's a word for love that is forcibly given, and it's an ugly word.

But I think that for the most part, it's just hard to transform my love for freedom, liberty and equality into a love for the place where they happen to exist. Part of my problem as a functioning human being is that I'm unable to make the leaps of faith that other people take for granted; this inability to go from "A, then B" to "and therefore Z" has caused a lot of grief in my life. I am not so much a perpetual naysayer as a perpetual "um, wait a minute"-sayer. So I just can't seem to go from "it is a great thing for people to be able to travel freely" and "people should be able to express their opinions without fear" to "America is the greatest country in the world" and "shut up and say the Pledge of Allegiance". When people tell me I should love my country, I usually tell them I do, as long as I don't have to express that love by taking off my hat and being quiet. When people tell me that if I don't like America I should move somewhere else, I'm usually thinking, give me a few hundred grand and I will. And when people tell me that America stands for truth, justice and freedom, I usually wonder why, then, we have dozens of huge industries devoted to lying, we so often value wealth and status over justice, and we spend so much time trying to deny people in other countries the freedoms we enjoy in the land we love. It's no coincidence that the people I think of when I think about why this country is great -- Eugene Victor Debs, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Emma Goldman, and Clarence Darrow among them -- were reviled and despised by the typical patriotic freedom-loving American, and the positive changes they introduced to society were bitterly resisted every step of the way.

Do I love my country? Of course I do. You can't escape your raisin', as my mother used to say. Am I proud of my country? Certainly, within reason; I'm proud of it when it does things that are worth being proud of. Do I care about my country? Deeply enough to relentlessly criticize it when it uses its unprecedented power in the wrong way. Do I think the best way to express my love, my pride, my concern is to wrap myself up in colors and read aloud whatever patriotic bromides are placed in front of me? Um, wait a minute...