My Patriotism

I am an American by birth. If you’d asked me a decade or so ago where “patriotism” ranks on my List of Very Important Things (a list I do not keep), I would have placed it quite low, somewhere above “occasional viewer of Everybody Loves Raymond” reruns but lower than “pizza lover.”

So yes, I am an American by virtue of my having been born here – thank you 14^th Amendment – but I have never felt particularly proud to be an American, any more than I am proud to be left-handed. It’s just the way I got sorted.

Now that my nation is being dismantled like an old TV set, I am starting to mourn the patriotism I thought didn’t matter very much to me. What I’m learning is, it does.

I am not patriotic for America the place, even though it’s beautiful and diverse and filled with incredible places and good people. My patriotism is rooted in the radical idea that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.

I’m patriotic for making a more perfect union. For the least of us having opportunities – many opportunities - to rise as high as our ambition and talent allow us.

I’m patriotic for people offering a welcoming hand to those who would bring their ambitions and talents to the United States for the purpose of building that more perfect union.

I’m patriotic for a nation that acknowledges its imperfection in its founding documents, and seeks to always improve itself, to remedy its past deeds and to learn from its mistakes. I’m patriotic for men and women of good conscience who speak up in the face of tyranny.

I am an American patriot for an America that I fear may already be lost. Or maybe it never was, I don’t know. As I write this, the best of our nation is being uprooted and cast upon a bonfire of vanities.

The original bonfire of the vanities was set in 1497 on the order of the Dominican friar Savonarola, who objected to the liberality of 15^th century Florence. On February 7^th. of that year, Savonarola’s supporters collected sinful objects such as secular paintings, games, dice, sheet music, and cosmetics – and burned them atop a giant pyre.

Nothing has changed. Here we are, allowing zealots to burn our ideals to the ground. Not as a rebuke to American vanity but as a twisted sacrificial offering to their own. They are happy to throw my version of America atop the pile because that version does not privilege them. Or, should I say, it doesn’t privilege them enough. And so, rather than learn to share, they would rather burn it to the ground.

From those ashes, they hope to rebuild the nation in their image. White and “Christian” and feudal. It’s an America that more closely resembles the England of our founders, an England they chose to flee in order to escape the very strictures they now want to impose. They’ve already installed their own mad king and now seek to concentrate all power into his hands, the better to manipulate those hands for the purposes of doing their bidding.

The bonfire of the vanities, Florence, 1497

Maybe I would feel better about the whole thing if their aims weren’t so hopelessly… boring. Mostly want they want is money and power. How banal. How trivial. How predictable. How depressing that the richest man in the world wants only more money for himself. It’s pointless to talk about “all the good he could do with that money.” One doesn’t accumulate that much wealth if their aim is to do good. The only reason for that much wealth is to have a dollar more than the second-richest person in the world. Meanwhile, the rest of us wind up like Oliver Twist, holding up our bowls of gruel and asking for more.

My patriotism is rooted in the notion that the most powerful nation in the world has the greatest obligation to do the most good in the world. It’s easy to be cynical about America, and I often am, but I have also sat with those dreaded Deep State bureaucrats as they raced to deliver food aid to Sudan. I’m the son of a woman who spent most of her work life at the Social Security Administration helping people secure their benefits. My brother-in-law is a retired JAG officer who served combat tours in Iraq and a United Nations peacekeeping tour in Bosnia. Now he works with vets to make sure they receive the benefits for which they bled. Much of my career is spent trusting that the FAA can ensure the plane I’m aboard lands without incident. Every American reading this probably has the same stories.

I’ve watched my nation fumble and soar and inspire and flail; and while I’ve often worried about our penchant military adventurism, I also recognize all the good things the nation has tried to do in the world. More than that, though, America has always been, to me, a nation of aspiration. Not that everybody should try to be us, but that we can be a place to look to for inspiration. No more. Maybe it never was.

My patriotism has now been tossed atop the fire along with everything else. This America - cruel America - isn’t mine. Its ideals aren’t mine. Its aims are as alien as the AI chips they want to implant in our brains. I am an American by birth and a patriot by inclination; I don’t know how much longer I will be either.

(By the way, Savonarola was burned at the stake.)