Patriot: has it come down to this?

These days the words “patriot” and “patriotism” have been getting a rough ride. They’ve been coopted, as I’m sure you know, by right-wing conservatives, or, let’s be a little nicer here in our distinctions, radicals and even traitors.

It’s easy to grab a flag and wave it, or wave a word, or wave your dick, for that matter, if that’s all you have to wave. To make a big display out of something that you don’t begin to understand.

In the wake of the mob riot at the Capitol, on January 6, we might consider these titbits in the news:

• The waving of many flags, and the indecorous wearing of flags, on the part of the mob as they assaulted the Capitol.
• Ivanka Trump’s reference to these mobsters, her father’s own mob, as “American patriots” … and the reaction from Bob Sommer, a good friend of her criminally convicted and then pardoned father-in-law, who told her he was “horrified I attended your wedding.”
• The same unconvincing honorific “patriot” applied to the mob by state legislators from Virginia and West Virginia.
• Even Sen. Lindsey Graham, an enthusiastic defender of Trump for far too long, that is, sycophant and bootlicker, being cursed by an airport mob as he was getting out of D.C., one of the vulgarly hystericals being “Mindy Robinson, who describes herself as a conservative activist and host of ‘Red White and F You: Unapologetically Patriotic.’” 

You would think that if people knew anything about the English language that they profess to speak, they would know what “patriot” means and meant. While the definition of the word, according to Merriam-Webster, is “one who loves and supports his or her country,” that common and I would say superficial meaning has been amply qualified through the years. As Merriam-Webster also says, in a long disquisition on the word, “The word patriot signifies a person who loves his or her country and is ready to boldly support and defend it. That meaning has endured since the word’s arrival in English in the 16th century, but it has not marched through the years unchallenged.”

It would be worthwhile for all of us to read M-W’s longer, historical discussion of the word, including its use in both Europe and America to distinguish between “good patriots” and “false patriots,” in other words, those who are unlike us, whatever we are like or whatever we like.

The more education you have, could be, the more you want to mull and gnaw and digest what abstract words like patriotism really mean. In this case, don’t you want to know what exactly does it mean to love your country and support it?

In my years in graduate school at the University of Texas at Austin, which coincided with our misadventure in Vietnam, I was reading modernist poets including Ezra Pound, whose take on the old Roman poet Horace’s idea of patriotism would light a torch in me. While Horace proclaimed, “Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori,” that is, it’s sweet and right to die for one’s country, Pound, in the wake of the disastrous folly of WW I, wrote in “Hugh Selwyn Mauberly”:

Died some pro patria, non dulce non et decor … 
 
walked eye-deep in hell
believing in old men’s lies, then unbelieving
came home, home to a lie,
home to many deceits,
home to old lies and new infamy …
 
There died a myriad,
And of the best, among them,
For an old bitch gone in the teeth,
For a botched civilization.

And of course there’s the famous poem by Wilfred Owen, a British poet and soldier who died in WW I, “Dulce et Decorum Est,” which ends:

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

When I was studying in Texas, and getting tear-gassed marching on the state capitol (which we never reached, state workers hanging out the windows and shouting to the police, “Kill ’em! Kill ’em!”), common redneck bumper stickers included “America, love it or leave it” and “My country right or wrong.”

No, I think if we love our country we reprove it, and improve it, when it’s wrong, as it has been on many occasions. It was wrong, under LBJ, to get involved in the Vietnam War. It was wrong, under George W. Bush, to invade Iraq. And it was wrong, during much of these past four years under Trump, to suppress voting rights and civil rights, deny climate change, and rile up an ignorant populace.

These Trump years remind me of the fable of the belly and the members that Shakespeare uses in Coriolanus, one of his history plays. A mob of plebians is complaining how the patrician rulers get all the food and do none of the work, but then the patrician Menenius Agrippa explains to them:

The senators of Rome are this good belly,
And you the mutinous members; for examine
Their counsels and their cares, digest things rightly
Touching the weal o’ the common, you shall find
No public benefit which you receive
But it proceeds or comes from them to you
And no way from yourselves. What do you think,
You, the great toe of this assembly?

Whatever you think about the patrician bias of such advice, the point is clear on many levels that riotous behavior reduces rather than affirms or augments the state. A mob of fools, or asses, or toes, as Menenius suggests, does not assure the health of the whole; rather, blessings come from above and flow throughout the body. Or, I would say, blessings come from the whole and are distributed to the parts.

If it is time, from time to time, for Liberty to be leading the people, let’s make sure that Liberty is a wise guide, not a wise guy, a dummkopf, an ass like Trump — a figure with moral and intellectual bel-esprit. Loving our country, finally, being true patriots, requires care and calm and vigilance as well as the gift of discernment.