Patriotism

Can anything be stupider than that a man has the right to kill me because he lives on the other side of a river and his ruler has a quarrel with mine, though I have not quarrelled with him? —Blaise Pascal, quoted by Tolstoy in Bethink Yourselves

The holiday weekend being nearly upon us, it is right and proper that our outpouring of love for these United States proceed from reflection rather than reflex. It seems to me that only by the latter—by recourse to the regimented, reactionary indoctrination of schoolkids in the Red-scared mid-20th century—can so many of my neighbors convince themselves of some vague moral superiority by virtue only of their living in a place where some rebels bucked a monarchy a couple centuries ago, and of their shouting and singing and crying and pledging and blowing things up about it to this day. We are so not that country anymore. Even our boasts about how "free" we are sound empty—while federal spooks track our every move, purchase, email, and phone call with impunity if they so choose. That's free compared to whom, exactly? On the most loathsome and knee-jerk end of the patriotic rectum spectrum is the insistence that we are a people chosen or blessed above the others of the earth, which, far from elevating or ennobling us, shows merely how petty, cruel, and utterly unenlightened the species can be.

When I stand in the stadium this weekend—while icons of four great American presidents cheat and trip and bully each other and dance to disco and generally act as buffoons, courtesy of Geico—why would I place my hand on my heart and pledge allegiance to the corporate powers that steal from us and kill our neighbors to enrich themselves? For it is surely they who own this country, its government, its institutions, and its weapons.

We would do much better to pledge allegiance to each other.

[Next Sunday's sermon: Sports fandom is how we rehearse our nationalism.]