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Friday, April 19, 2024

April 19, 2024: Mythic Patriotisms: Love It or Leave It

[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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