One of the highlights of last semester, for me anyway, was hearing about that berserk concertgoer who got ejected from the Homecoming concert after rushing the stage in an attempt to prevent hip-hop group dead prez from burning an American flag.
Having missed the concert personally, I was forced to synthesize newspaper articles and my own overactive, admittedly biased imagination to picture this bizarre scene. I could be wrong, but I visualized some enraged fratboy, blond tips and polo shirt all a blur, lunge for the helpless cloth in a drunken blaze of glory, all the while hearing that mantra reverberate through his skull: Love it or leave it. Love it or leave it. He was probably all amped up for a night of bass-heavy songs about cars, girls and bling, not socialism and cultural consciousness. I couldn’t help but laugh.
But looking back, I see now that my reaction was one precipitated more by shock than by genuine amusement. The issue at the center of this incident, the issue that I find the most disturbing, is not the attack on free speech or the associated debate about flag-burning, but the deeper matter: the furious show of patriotism that this young man exhibited.
On one level, I want to respect anyone who stands up for what he believes, whether I agree with them or not, and this person certainly did that. Still, acts of blind patriotism creep me out like little else does, and I feel as though that incident was an eerie premonition of things to come.
Let me say right away that I am not someone who simply feels that people who have pride in their country are “uncool” and that it’s fashionable to be a brooding politico who knows every evil thing that America has ever done. To be sure, people like that exist, but conservatives would have you believe that every activist or progressive is simply some ignorant wannabe following a trend. You can wave a flag and not be a war-mongering right-wing extremist, just as I can criticize my country without being an ego-driven, arrogant schmuck.
In my experience, the most intelligent people, by far, are the ones who are open-minded. All of us, liberal and conservative, need to keep that in mind when debating potentially sensitive subjects like this one.
That being said, however, the question remains: What is the nature of this surge in patriotism that manifested after Sept. 11, 2001, and is sustained by a looming war with Iraq? I think that a desire for raw vengeance has something to do with it. I think that social conditioning has something to do with it. More than that, however, I think that fear is a central motivating factor — fear of the questioning of all of the values and ideas that we have grown up believing in.
The flag and the ideals for which it stands can be like the blanket that you pull over your eyes when the monster peeks its head out of your closet. It protects us psychologically. We feel better about the world when we believe that we are the good guys and that we will win.
And whether that is right or wrong is beside the point. The danger lies in believing in something, anything, “automatically.” The reason that I am an anti-war activist is that I have heard the arguments for both sides, and believe that a war with Iraq will be a negative thing.
So what is the reason why some people are so blindly, at times violently, patriotic? It is because they feel that they have to be.
Fear, again, is a major factor. After the attacks on the World Trade Center, everyone was thinking about what we would do next, who was going to pay, how we were going to get them. But who took the time to ask why? Why would someone do this? What were their motivations? To be a good society, as is the same with being a good person, we should constantly be questioning our beliefs and values.
Somehow, I don’t think that the kid who rushed onstage at the concert ever really did that. Waving the flag is the easy moral road. It could very well be the correct one as well for all I know, but to do it without carefully analyzing the situation is ignorant and dangerous. It should be sufficient to simply believe in and fight for ideas like liberty and justice rather than personify them in some American thunder-God and blindly trust that he is smiting the right folks.
Personally, I could do without all this spooky nationalism. Now that doesn’t mean that I hate America or that I love Saddam Hussein, but it does mean that I would rather work for positive change than simply defend the status quo by waving my big American flag.
The vitally important mistake that many self-proclaimed patriots seem to make is confusing what America is with what America’s leaders say that it is. This is a distinction that we cannot forget.
I’m all for liberty, justice and freedom, and I fully support what this country is supposed to be, but the sad truth is that the difference between the ideal and the real is quite large right now, and it isn’t going to change unless we collectively reassess ourselves and our beliefs.
Kyle Myrhe ([email protected]) is a sophomore majoring in English.