[Up here in New England, the third Monday in April is a holiday, Patriots’ Day. But as I argue in my most recent book, patriotism is a very complex concept, and so this week I’ll highlight a handful of examples of the worst of what it has meant for how we remember our histories. Leading up to a weekend post on the state of mythic patriotism in 2024!]
First,
here are two paragraphs from Chapter 7 of Of
Thee I Sing:
“In a telling sentence in
his statement, John Warner did admit another part of the Bicentennial’s
contexts: that it ‘comes after a particularly difficult decade.’ One of the
most divisive elements of that decade, the Vietnam War, had come to a
definitive close just a year before the Bicentennial, with the July 1975
reunification of the nations of North and South Vietnam as a new country, the
Socialist Republic of Vietnam. As has been the case with wars throughout American
history, this one featured celebratory patriotic views through which Americans
sought unity in response to this military conflict. But one of the most
prominent such Vietnam era celebratory patriotisms, the ubiquitous
phrase ‘Love it or leave it,’ represented a far more aggressive and
divisive tone than did the Bicentennial preparations and celebrations. That
phrase appeared on bumper stickers and billboards throughout this period, as
well as in such cultural works as country artist Ernest Tubb’s ‘It’s America (Love it or
Leave it)’ (1970) and his country colleague Merle Haggard’s ‘The Fightin’ Side of Me’
(1970), which begins, ‘I hear people talkin’ bad,/About the way they have to
live here in this country,’ and then argues, ‘They’re running down a way of
life/Our fightin’ men have fought and died to keep/ If you don’t love it, leave
it.’ This phrase’s version of celebratory patriotism was one overtly defined in
opposition to criticisms of the nation, and indeed one that portrayed an
idealized celebratory patriotism as a necessary element to being part of the
United States at all.
The
May
8th, 1970 ‘Hard Hat Riot’ in New York City illustrated with
stark clarity the effects of that aggressive celebratory stance. Hundreds of
college and high school students had gathered at an early morning anti-war
protest and memorial for the four Kent State University students who had been
killed by National Guardsman on May 4th. Around noon, a group of
around 200 construction workers, many carrying American flags and signs with
slogans like ‘America, love it or leave it’ and ‘All the way, USA’ attacked
the protesters with clubs, steel-toed boots, and other weapons. Hours of
violent clashes left nearly 100 protesters injured and made clear the mythic
logic behind and endpoint of the ‘love it or leave it’ celebratory patriotic
sentiment.”
I
said much of what I’d want to say about this phrase and concept in those paragraphs,
but would add one more thing: it’s not just that I find this to be perhaps the
most overt expression of mythic patriotism’s exclusion of any voices/perspectives
that would criticize those myths (although it is that to be sure). It’s that “love
it or leave it” so explicitly contrasts with my favorite expression of critical
patriotism (and the epigraph to my book), from James
Baldwin in Notes of a Native Son:
“I love America more than any other country in the world and, exactly for this
reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.” The question I would
ask anyone who subscribes to the “love it or leave it” mantra is whether they
would say the same about other forms of love: does loving a person mean we can
never criticize them? Or does it require that we do so when we see them falling
short, in an effort to help them be their best? I know which one I’d argue for,
and it’s not the mythic patriotic concept.
Special
post this weekend,
Ben
PS. What
do you think?
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