Friday, September 21, 2001

Red, white and blue bleed indispensible patriotism across nation
By Jack Bullion
Skiff Staff

In a state where flags with only one star vastly outnumber those with fifty, the sudden proliferation of American flags on cars, in windows and hanging half-staff from flagpoles is truly overwhelming. For an emblem that for the most part has been missing in action over the past decade, the ubiquity of the American flag is rampant.

Except, of course, in stores that sell (or used to sell, before they sold out) replica American flags and related images. But many have compensated for this lack with heartfelt ingenuity: three ribbons — red, white, and blue — fastened to their car antenna or pinned to their lapels.

These colorful emblems we once took in with a shrug as normal fixtures, pieces of wind-whipped cloth that functioned as little more than periodic reminders of the place where we happen to live. It seems that now you can’t walk five feet without seeing one, and you know that things are far from normal.

The attack on this nation has made patriots of even the most uninterested armchair Americans. You’re no longer the neighborhood eccentric if you hang the American flag off the porch. In fact, a drive through the residential subdivisions that surround this campus shows that the number of neighborhood eccentrics has increased exponentially.

Flags and ribbons are only a small part of the explosive rebirth in American patriotism. “God Bless America,” a song that occupied second-tier status to the infinitely more recognizable “Star Spangled Banner,” has morphed into a rallying anthem, its title splashed across everything from fast-food billboards to the cover of Newsweek. On the steps of the Capitol, it provided a solid symbol of congressional unity. In stadiums, it has replaced “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” during the seventh-inning stretch. And at the New York Stock Exchange, it has served as nothing less than a spiritual catalyst for the Exchange’s opening on Monday.

The song and the emblem are two things we obviously need right now, when there is so little out there to comfort us, to rally us together in our grief and confusion, to forge something resembling solidarity. These symbols represent a dwindling number of symbols in which we can attempt to make sense out of senselessness, and to find strength in each other.

But if we allow these symbols, these flags and anthems, to render us blind and deaf to everything but them, a dark and frightening kind of patriotism begins to emerge. I am reminded of a Friedrich Nietzsche quote, in which he observed, with chilling clarity: “How good bad music and bad reasons sound when one marches against an enemy.”

This is the moment when patriotism becomes dangerous, when we begin to harm ourselves as much as our opponents, a truth history has shown us many times. Can we learn from incidents like Communist witch-hunts? Or from the internment of Japanese-American citizens in World War II? Can we, even in this time of trial, possibly remember the deep regret we feel as we consider the shameful asterisks in an otherwise glorious history?

Early indications, such as President Bush’s gracious appearance at the Islamic Center of Washington, would say yes. But still, unnervingly misguided notions of patriotism still rear their ugly heads in paranoid Internet postings, hate-filled radio diatribes, stark and violent phone messages and cracked glass in the windows of houses of worship.

In the last week, we have seen patriotism disguise itself, concealing, at the very least, misguidedness or, at the very most, outright hatred, all beneath a cloak of Americanism. Patriotism has provided a license for more zealotry in the stunningly asinine comments of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. Patriotism has told us that buying stocks will save America, but even the most clinical market analyst must agree that there are much nobler ways of proclaiming your love of country than buying a hundred shares of Wal-Mart stock.

Amid the staggering media detritus of the past week, a minor story surfaced from, of all places, my hometown of Columbia, Mo., a diverse, mostly liberal, funky little college town that has also unfortunately witnessed the darkest shades of red, white and blue. An Arab-American, a family man, a good citizen and the owner of a popular downtown coffee shop, which I have passed by countless times in my hometown, has seen the doorway of his business spat upon,and has heard the vicious catcalls of those who ignore the American flag in his window, preferring to focus only on the sign above it: Osama’s Coffee Zone.

American patriotism is itself indispensable to our country’s recovery, but it will make invalids of us all if we do not approach it with reason. Whether we display flags or not, all Americans are now members of a saddened, but resilient society that must conquer an uncertain future with togetherness, not divisiveness.

No one expressed this necessity more eloquently or bluntly than Susan Sontag in the new issue of The New Yorker. “Let’s by all means grieve together,” Sontag writes. “But let’s not be stupid together.

Jack Bullion is a senior English major from Colombia, Mo.
He can be contacted at (j.w.bullion@student.tcu.edu).