BEYOND THE COLLAPSE VIII: TALKING ABOUT PATRIOTISM


Americans have been both fortunate and unimaginably naïve about their inalienable right to a homeland. Long witnessing from afar as peoples across the globe have endured dispossession and exile, emigration and loss, they could stand apart and above. Even their ancestors’ rupture from their lands of origin has been recast as an unconflicted ascent to promise and liberation. Secure in possessing a nation of their own, they could condescendingly dole out to others access to America as a final destination beyond the vicissitudes of history.

This idealized scenario explains how so many individuals could express shock at the accession of Trumpism. The tardy recognition of what the nation has become over the past forty years highlights the difficulty Americans face even conceiving of the traumatic dislocations that befall people elsewhere. Only now is it dawning on us that the fabled door of American entry swings both ways.
The fraying of one’s sense of homeland in real time thus tests each of us. What if one can no longer count on what it means to be an American, or worse, has to wonder where is the country I call mine? Many are now troubled that those who reject the creed we thought we shared may well not be there, or will be on the other side, when stark choices have to be made. The assumptions that permeated our daily life, workplaces, social networks, and sense of common cause seem in every case up for reevaluation. How we define this place we now live and its role in the future we seek have become for each of us, on our own, to determine.
The heart cries out that we were not meant to live this way, that even in this age of attenuating belief surely the commitment to one’s homeland — and to the U.S. as the prospective homeland for all — is the conviction from which our life journey, whether consciously or otherwise, properly begins.
Each spirit will recoil in resistance to this shift, to the specter of loss, of imagining against our own core what it could mean to be un-American, not-

American. As I seek to review and reassemble the defense of my entitlement, I recall how I grew up as more than a patriot — I was (and am?) an American exceptionalist. From early childhood, I heard the voices of critique and the cries of injustice, and I was there when the demands were made that society live up to its promises for all. That was American.

I heard in those voices and many others refrains one could not hear anywhere else — the call of the open road and not a road of gates and tolls, of spaces too vast to be seized and domesticated, of people who whatever they were they had made themselves, of the young suspicious that the tie lines of family and tradition were chains, of language and intonation that no elites had proprietary claims over, of the marginalized who often had more to say, to tell us, and in more powerful and unequivocal ways, of futures — always futures — where the rest of the world only had a past. One accustomed oneself to the rhythms of this music, in every cell one found a shape adhering that was nowhere else recognizable or adaptive.
I came to hear these voices as my childhood lullabies, traveling American back roads and civil rights marches, talking to people in general stores and protest rallies, every last place people were taking a load off or calling for light. Always more interested in the dreams they were attuned to than what held

them in place, hearing of the life they wanted or soon would have. I’m a talker, but it was a rush when people began to tell their stories, their faces animated, to enjoy what a bit of genuine recognition could elicit.
But there was another side to these conversations that some don’t like when I talk about — it’s too close to the nerve center. Americans, I found as I listened, never really knew who they were. It was in the tone of voice, the hesitations — things are supposed to pan out, and mind you they will, but the voice would crack and trail off into “what if?” And for those many years, decades by count, on the road, this seemed to make sense. Each of us had landed from wherever, where the options had been closed, to a place we did not recognize, that had no roots but also no boundaries or instructions built in. And one would have to find their own way, figure it out, make it work — which was precisely what the bargain had been. Americans in their everyday life put their faith in capacities that ordinary people had never dared even to imagine.
I caught this fever, and became a student of the ways Americans dreamt of what this new place in this new time could be, hoping to recount these stories and pass on this magic that something priceless could be created by those just coming to realize they had a voice, and could sing.

But at some point, the spirit of the land and its people went bad, dissipated, the future ceased to possess magic, life itself lost its spring, the backroads were no longer a place to listen in. The feeling was more than sourness, disappointment, something no one dared mention — our belief that the story we once bled for had an Ending, that we had been lost so we could be found, was a figment. The package was not late, rather the delivery trucks had been mothballed. And Americans began to turn against their own spirit, to retreat from a future that would not be theirs, to opt for shortcuts and excuses and scapegoats, not even acknowledging the failure of their best selves but simply encasing themselves in the diminished and deflated selves they now occupied.
Where was the nation one recognized, what was the currency called being American, how had the low ground become the only ground? Did one have to reject not merely the label but moreover the shape, that shape that one was oneself? One wanted to speak out against this betrayal, but too quickly it was clear that everyone felt betrayed, that we had all lost that homeland that we believed to be our own. And gradually a solution emerged across the political spectrum, in every corner of this land: to make oneself less vulnerable to disappointment, less likely to be ripped apart by betrayal, one would have to reject belief itself as a form of illusion.
If your own nation betrays you, one can of course by ceasing to believe avoid being wounded. But with such self-sedating, it was now in this ‘value-free’ zone much easier to reign terror and dispossession on others without moral

repercussions. One could take out on defenseless others, at home and abroad, retribution for one’s own disillusionment and loss of way. We thus observe, as the great German novelist Thomas Mann when his nation descended into policies “soaked in blood,” the inner vacuum as countrymen “create as many so-called accomplished facts as [they] want to,” facts however “void,” however not to “be recognized” or “accepted.”
In the face of the Nazi’s “criminal attack upon humanity,” Mann refused to exercise his “right to silence.” Though they “deprive me of my German birthright,” decreeing that “I was no longer a German” for political opposition, Mann wrote, casting him aside “as an émigré, expropriated, outlawed,” Mann reaffirmed his “patriotism”: “From the beginning of my intellectual life I had felt myself in happiest accord with the temper of my nation and at home in its intellectual traditions,” with the land “in whose culture we are rooted, whose traditions we carry on, and whose landscape and atmosphere should be our natural shelter.”
Over the course of many years, as the “soul-destroying regime” daily piled on new forms of “inexpiable evil,” Mann came to understand patriotism in a new way. A true lover of one’s country, he concluded, would have to face that his or her nation, “intellectually reduced and humbled, morally gutted, inwardly torn apart” and “ignorant of the future,” had in the end not only betrayed each of its citizens but had more importantly “forsaken herself.”
Emerson had early on identified this option as one of the core American values available to each of us. He tells of freethinkers in the 1830s, an era of

great religious ferment, who, because of their doctrinal straying from the remaining established churches, were excommunicated for heresy. Their response, Emerson offered for instruction, was to in turn declare the official doctrine as incompatible with deeper truths, and to excommunicate the church for heresy.
Excommunicating one’s nation for moral violation is not a universal solution. For some the way out will be the detachment that Mann and others called “inner emigration,” or for younger people actual emigration. Many will collaborate with varying intensities of commitment, reasoning that if consequences can be placed to the side one might be able to believe again.
Even for those unable to get over the experience of betrayal, there are choices to be made. Those demanding a special dispensation who cannot forgive the nation for its failure to deliver will continue to demand retribution. This stripping away of the humanity of others will in turn accelerate the nation’s descent.

For those who understand the nation’s loss of way as less a personal affront than a collective moral tragedy, the fall from its animating ideals, more than self-righteous indignation will be needed, a more demanding self-evaluation. What if this, my nation, which I along with others have taken a hand in developing and whose spirit is intertwined with my own, has become a place of “terror and of deadly wilderness into which even our dreams do not dare transport us”? How do we distinguish within ourselves the values of the nation worth defending from what the nation itself has become and may have always in part been?
Mann exhorts us to take “responsibility for one’s own people,” to defend the “unity of humanity” and the “wholeness of the human problem” against the defilers amongst us. This is what America once believed about its best self, and what those Americans who still do must assert against the coming brutality.
