Individualists of the World, Unite!

Now that the Heterosexual Oscars are over, many Colts fans are in deep mourning. Such is life -- you can't have a winner without a loser, or many losers. At alicublog Roy Edroso reports on rightbloggers' reactions to the big game, and quotes one Troy Nelson:

What happened to the days of pulling for organizations, teams, and players whom [sic!] best demonstrate the virtues of team work and heart and will power? Who overcome the challenges of a determined opponent on the level playing field of competition? Of blood, sweat, and tears? I guess in our coddled, emasculated, socialist society any overt demonstration or celebration of these qualities is offensive, too Darwinian, too Randian, too capitalistic.

Ah yes, professional sports are certainly capitalistic, with the heroic players working for the Ellsworth Tooheys of America. But "Darwinian"? I thought good conservatives repudiated Darwin. What the Creationist/Intelligent Design take on team sports would be I don't know. "Randian"? Ayneleh was apparently ambivalent at best about Darwin. I'm not sure what she would have thought of the Superbowl -- surely it would have been too corporate for her, though she never let herself be hobbled by consistency -- but one of her disciples assures the faithful that "no guilt is called for, because watching sports satisfies a vital human need." And this acolyte somehow manages to turn subordination and sacrifice in the service of the group into selfishness and self-glorification; that's fundamentalism for you, which manages to interpret a text until it means its opposite. (Not all Objectivists agree, however.)

That is why the economist John Kenneth Galbraith took on the subject years ago:

I once wrote a piece of which I was at the time very proud (I maybe shouldn't go back and read it again), arguing somewhat ironically that socialism in the United States was the result of organized sports. It takes people at a vulnerable age and makes teamwork, more than individual work, the thing. It subjects people to the authority of the team captain or the coach, and as I say, this is at an age where people are vulnerable. And therefore, team sports are the breeding grounds for socialism and must be watched very carefully. And I had an organization in the piece -- this ran in Harper's -- called "the CIA": the Congress for Individualist Athletics. It was written under a pseudonym because I was then an ambassador, I couldn't write under my own name. One day the postman struggled into my room at Harvard with a pile of letters this thick that had been sent on from Harper's from people who, well, they fell into three classes:

• people who wanted to know whether it was real or not;
• people who wanted to join; and
• people who demanded that I exclude baseball from the list because baseball is not, as they said, a "socialist" sport: when you're up at bat, you're on your own.

Well, it's an example of the dangers of using irony. Under the best of circumstances, many people are going to take it seriously.

Individualists of the World, Unite!

Now that the Heterosexual Oscars are over, many Colts fans are in deep mourning. Such is life -- you can't have a winner without a loser, or many losers. At alicublog Roy Edroso reports on rightbloggers' reactions to the big game, and quotes one Troy Nelson:

What happened to the days of pulling for organizations, teams, and players whom [sic!] best demonstrate the virtues of team work and heart and will power? Who overcome the challenges of a determined opponent on the level playing field of competition? Of blood, sweat, and tears? I guess in our coddled, emasculated, socialist society any overt demonstration or celebration of these qualities is offensive, too Darwinian, too Randian, too capitalistic.

Ah yes, professional sports are certainly capitalistic, with the heroic players working for the Ellsworth Tooheys of America. But "Darwinian"? I thought good conservatives repudiated Darwin. What the Creationist/Intelligent Design take on team sports would be I don't know. "Randian"? Ayneleh was apparently ambivalent at best about Darwin. I'm not sure what she would have thought of the Superbowl -- surely it would have been too corporate for her, though she never let herself be hobbled by consistency -- but one of her disciples assures the faithful that "no guilt is called for, because watching sports satisfies a vital human need." And this acolyte somehow manages to turn subordination and sacrifice in the service of the group into selfishness and self-glorification; that's fundamentalism for you, which manages to interpret a text until it means its opposite. (Not all Objectivists agree, however.)

That is why the economist John Kenneth Galbraith took on the subject years ago:

I once wrote a piece of which I was at the time very proud (I maybe shouldn't go back and read it again), arguing somewhat ironically that socialism in the United States was the result of organized sports. It takes people at a vulnerable age and makes teamwork, more than individual work, the thing. It subjects people to the authority of the team captain or the coach, and as I say, this is at an age where people are vulnerable. And therefore, team sports are the breeding grounds for socialism and must be watched very carefully. And I had an organization in the piece -- this ran in Harper's -- called "the CIA": the Congress for Individualist Athletics. It was written under a pseudonym because I was then an ambassador, I couldn't write under my own name. One day the postman struggled into my room at Harvard with a pile of letters this thick that had been sent on from Harper's from people who, well, they fell into three classes:

• people who wanted to know whether it was real or not;
• people who wanted to join; and
• people who demanded that I exclude baseball from the list because baseball is not, as they said, a "socialist" sport: when you're up at bat, you're on your own.

Well, it's an example of the dangers of using irony. Under the best of circumstances, many people are going to take it seriously.

Who Does the Internet Belong To?

(There's nothing new under the sun ...)

Roy Edroso of alicublog has been writing for the Village Voice for about a year now, I think. He's a good writer, and I mostly respect him even when I disagree with him, as I often do. He's a very valuable chronicler of the right wing of the blogosphere -- I'm very glad he reads Ann Althouse, Michelle Malkin, Glenn Reynolds, and the like so I don't have to. His latest piece, "Social Media Ruined the Internet", is a bit of a departure from his Voice writings and even from his cultural posts at alicublog. He sums it up with some irony:

In brief, the tech revolution has brought us some clear benefits (e.g., LOLcats, free porn), but when it comes to thinking and communicating, it's been a net loss. (Hoists snifter) Perhaps you disagree?

Well, yes and no. In the column itself he writes that the Internet

has evolved to the point where it can't do much more for you. Which is to say, it isn't going to get any better: it will add features, but will basically remain the same tool: a super TV that you can talk back to.

Ah, talking back -- now, there was an innovation: Social Media, the last significant piece in the internet evolution, and beginning of the end of the dream.

I should mention that I -- like a lot of people, I think -- use "the Internet" rather loosely, to refer not only to the World Wide Web, which is the text/image/audio/video interface of today, but to early incarnations that were generally text-only, like Usenet, Fidonet, Compuserve, and America Online, but which enabled people to connect from their homes, over telephone lines at first, and interact with people elsewhere: potentially with everyone who had access to those networks. I'm talking here about the mid-1980s, when I bought my first Commodore 64 and, soon after, a 300-baud modem.

Far fewer people in those days had computers, and the computers they had were slower and smaller in terms of memory and storage, but it was tremendously exciting to exchange messages, even chat in real time, with people on the American coasts, and occasionally on the other side of the world. I had a Compuserve account for a while, but dropped it when I got my first $90 bill for a month's activity. I never got onto America Online, but I later met people who did, and learned from gay men that AOL and its competitors were very handy cruising and socializing sites. So I'm confused by Roy Edroso's claim that social networking is a recent, even the latest Internet development. It's been there for over two decades.

Edroso is also critical of blogs, somewhat ironic for a blogger, as he admits. Which doesn't mean he's wrong.

It turned out that the internet wasn't an advanced, processing brain, after all, nor an agent of meaningful change. In the political realm, it has revealed only had one enduring value: as a propaganda tool.

This really baffles me. No one who knew anything about computers or their potential could have believed that the Internet was "an advanced, processing brain", could they? Actually, I guess they did; and for most citizens, including early personal-computer users, their notion of the potential of computers came mainly from the Terminator movies. The fantasy that Artificial Intelligence is just around the corner, followed closely by the Obsolescence of Homo Sapiens, is still with us, like predictions of the Rapture. But it's every bit as bogus: the Internet, let alone any individual computer, is not an agent of anything.

A few people have become better informed about national issues because of it, but far more have been made to know to a certainly that the Congressional health care plan includes "death panels," that Obama is a Muslim born in Kenya who will turn America socialist, and that his wife is Marie Antoinette. We admit our own part in this, for we would rather focus on the latest batshit crazy thing Michele Bachmann said than on the details of the East Anglia email scandal (which has proved for many that "global warming is a fraud").

But is this really new, or specific to the Internet? True, the Net enables people to disseminate their writings more widely and quickly and cheaply than print or broadcasting did, but the US has a long colorful history of batshit crazy commentators talking over the radio, spitting out cheaply printed or mimeographed broadsides (that very word embodies a long history of printed political ranting) whose content spread widely. As one commenter at the Voice pointed out, "the Federalists didn't have e-mail in 1800, but their attacks on Jefferson were every bit as scurrilous and widespread as the right's smears."

Churches were also good vehicles for influencing communities. In the 1970s and 1980s I worked with Pentecostals who passed around photocopied tracts about how the communist World Council of Churches was scheming to impose a One World Government that would take all references to the saving Blood of Jesus Christ from all Bibles, and make everyone wear the Mark of the Beast or they wouldn't be allowed to buy or sell. Some of this was recycled from Hal Lindsey's infamous The Late Great Planet Earth, but Lindsey was recycling material he'd picked up from other writers and preachers. Word of mouth has killed more than a few people in this country and elsewhere, stirring up lynch mobs without a microchip or a fiber optic involved. "Thanks to blogs," Edroso wrote, "our political discourse now reads like Red Channels mixed with an Andrew Breitbart monologue." I seem to remember it was always like that. Maybe the Net has made things bigger, faster, and worser, but I still think the difference is one of degree, not of kind.

I've long noticed a strain of snobbism in the ambivalence many educated people (including me) feel about the spread of computers to Joe Sixpack, the Unwashed Masses, and the Housewife.

The non-news Top Twitter Trending Topics of the year include Michael Jackson, Harry Potter, and American Idol. Perhaps you feel as if you became better informed on these subjects because of Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, and Digg. More likely, you were just more inundated with them; you got more video and audio clips, saw more trailers and red-carpet photos, and read more gossip and reiterations of the same bare facts about them. What did social media teach you about Michael Jackson, besides how big a deal it was that he was dead?

And as for Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, etc, we can hardly tell you anything you haven't discovered yourself. You have XXX friends; you have XX invitations; so-and-so likes this; view all X comments. These are wonderful tools for shut-ins, of which they have made us all.

Well, yeah, but again the difference is at most one of degree. Supermarket tabloids, the Sports section, Hollywood publicity magazines and entertainment infomercials have long been with us, and many Americans have always paid more attention to the doings of the stars than to politics. The Black Sox scandal of 1919 disillusioned many ("Say it ain't so, Joe!"), but was it more important than the Red Scare and the plight of World War I veterans? I know I have just uttered blasphemy and sacrilege, but I'm an all-purpose infidel and I'm used to it. As for Facebook et al., as I mentioned earlier they are new mainly by comparison to the telephone and the telegraph.

Edroso sums up:

The real force behind blogs, Twitter, and all other social media is its users, which is to say, practically everyone of the internet. And this is the saddest part of the demise of the internet as anything other than a microwave for the mind: we are the ones who killed it. And no matter how feverishly we click and scroll and friend and block, nothing we do can bring it back to life.

I think that reports of the Internet's death are somewhat exaggerated. As I commented,

As I recall the early cheerleading for the Internet, it was like most cheerleading for new or "new" technology: partly corporate marketing blather (part of the point was to convince people that every American must not only have their own computer, but a superfast, superadvanced computer on which to file recipes and write e-mail) and partly technogeek masturbation (technology will save the world! or at least I need to have a personal superconducting supercomputer to write code and play Myst on, which will change the world and give every American a faster, more powerful computer to file recipes and write e-mail on, and that will save the world). And there's always been an uneasy feeling among the geek elites that they didn't want to share this wonderful new technology with housewives and couch potatoes who would just waste it on e-mail, filing recipes and analyzing sports stats instead of inventing new computer languages and more advanced role playing games, as God intended. We should also remember America Online, Compuserve, and the like, which also functioned as social sites and provided conduits for netlore that previously had been lower-tech Xeroxlore and low-tech handcopied folklore.

And I disagree with [another commenter]. The dumbification of, say, movie criticism predates the Internet. It is connected to the corporatization of journalism, but then movie reviewing originated as part of Hollywood marketing, and remains so to this day. See Jonathan Rosenbaum's Movie Wars (yeah, it's like totally a print publication, so no link) on the way that, as a serious film critic/reviewer moves up the prestige chain in print media, the space he or she is allotted shrinks. This has to do more with conscious strategies of keeping it simple, by the upper echelons who think of their markets as stupid and uninterested in thinking, whether their markets fit the image, than with any inherent limitation of print. And while yeah, Sturgeon's Law applies to Internet content as much as anywhere else, the Internet also makes it possible for writers to stretch out with less concern about space limitations or what the Advertisers (like the movie companies) will think. The problem is just finding the good stuff, but then it's always been true. "Of the writing of books there is no end." "Another d----d fat square book! Scribble scribble scribble, eh, Mr. Gibbon?"

Just about everyone, it seems, complains about how much junk there is on the Internet. The fault is always the fault of someone else -- Them, the Dumb Ones, and so on. I confess I often feel that way when I'm on Myspace with its "pimped" profiles, so overloaded with graphics and music that they are literally unreadable, and utterly tacky and devoid of all taste. Still, all that gives their users and proprietors as much pleasure as customizing their personal copies of Emacs gives many computer programmers. (Or used to give -- I'm out of touch.) And if it weren't for the Great Unwashed out there with their Nascar obsessions, what would the elite wannabe's have to play Ain't It Awful over? It doesn't hurt me, or stop me from writing and posting what I want to write and post. Nor does it stop anyone else. If it were decided to bar Teh Stupid from the Net, who would be the gatekeepers? Who would watch the watchers?

Who Does the Internet Belong To?

(There's nothing new under the sun ...)

Roy Edroso of alicublog has been writing for the Village Voice for about a year now, I think. He's a good writer, and I mostly respect him even when I disagree with him, as I often do. He's a very valuable chronicler of the right wing of the blogosphere -- I'm very glad he reads Ann Althouse, Michelle Malkin, Glenn Reynolds, and the like so I don't have to. His latest piece, "Social Media Ruined the Internet", is a bit of a departure from his Voice writings and even from his cultural posts at alicublog. He sums it up with some irony:

In brief, the tech revolution has brought us some clear benefits (e.g., LOLcats, free porn), but when it comes to thinking and communicating, it's been a net loss. (Hoists snifter) Perhaps you disagree?

Well, yes and no. In the column itself he writes that the Internet

has evolved to the point where it can't do much more for you. Which is to say, it isn't going to get any better: it will add features, but will basically remain the same tool: a super TV that you can talk back to.

Ah, talking back -- now, there was an innovation: Social Media, the last significant piece in the internet evolution, and beginning of the end of the dream.

I should mention that I -- like a lot of people, I think -- use "the Internet" rather loosely, to refer not only to the World Wide Web, which is the text/image/audio/video interface of today, but to early incarnations that were generally text-only, like Usenet, Fidonet, Compuserve, and America Online, but which enabled people to connect from their homes, over telephone lines at first, and interact with people elsewhere: potentially with everyone who had access to those networks. I'm talking here about the mid-1980s, when I bought my first Commodore 64 and, soon after, a 300-baud modem.

Far fewer people in those days had computers, and the computers they had were slower and smaller in terms of memory and storage, but it was tremendously exciting to exchange messages, even chat in real time, with people on the American coasts, and occasionally on the other side of the world. I had a Compuserve account for a while, but dropped it when I got my first $90 bill for a month's activity. I never got onto America Online, but I later met people who did, and learned from gay men that AOL and its competitors were very handy cruising and socializing sites. So I'm confused by Roy Edroso's claim that social networking is a recent, even the latest Internet development. It's been there for over two decades.

Edroso is also critical of blogs, somewhat ironic for a blogger, as he admits. Which doesn't mean he's wrong.

It turned out that the internet wasn't an advanced, processing brain, after all, nor an agent of meaningful change. In the political realm, it has revealed only had one enduring value: as a propaganda tool.

This really baffles me. No one who knew anything about computers or their potential could have believed that the Internet was "an advanced, processing brain", could they? Actually, I guess they did; and for most citizens, including early personal-computer users, their notion of the potential of computers came mainly from the Terminator movies. The fantasy that Artificial Intelligence is just around the corner, followed closely by the Obsolescence of Homo Sapiens, is still with us, like predictions of the Rapture. But it's every bit as bogus: the Internet, let alone any individual computer, is not an agent of anything.

A few people have become better informed about national issues because of it, but far more have been made to know to a certainly that the Congressional health care plan includes "death panels," that Obama is a Muslim born in Kenya who will turn America socialist, and that his wife is Marie Antoinette. We admit our own part in this, for we would rather focus on the latest batshit crazy thing Michele Bachmann said than on the details of the East Anglia email scandal (which has proved for many that "global warming is a fraud").

But is this really new, or specific to the Internet? True, the Net enables people to disseminate their writings more widely and quickly and cheaply than print or broadcasting did, but the US has a long colorful history of batshit crazy commentators talking over the radio, spitting out cheaply printed or mimeographed broadsides (that very word embodies a long history of printed political ranting) whose content spread widely. As one commenter at the Voice pointed out, "the Federalists didn't have e-mail in 1800, but their attacks on Jefferson were every bit as scurrilous and widespread as the right's smears."

Churches were also good vehicles for influencing communities. In the 1970s and 1980s I worked with Pentecostals who passed around photocopied tracts about how the communist World Council of Churches was scheming to impose a One World Government that would take all references to the saving Blood of Jesus Christ from all Bibles, and make everyone wear the Mark of the Beast or they wouldn't be allowed to buy or sell. Some of this was recycled from Hal Lindsey's infamous The Late Great Planet Earth, but Lindsey was recycling material he'd picked up from other writers and preachers. Word of mouth has killed more than a few people in this country and elsewhere, stirring up lynch mobs without a microchip or a fiber optic involved. "Thanks to blogs," Edroso wrote, "our political discourse now reads like Red Channels mixed with an Andrew Breitbart monologue." I seem to remember it was always like that. Maybe the Net has made things bigger, faster, and worser, but I still think the difference is one of degree, not of kind.

I've long noticed a strain of snobbism in the ambivalence many educated people (including me) feel about the spread of computers to Joe Sixpack, the Unwashed Masses, and the Housewife.

The non-news Top Twitter Trending Topics of the year include Michael Jackson, Harry Potter, and American Idol. Perhaps you feel as if you became better informed on these subjects because of Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, and Digg. More likely, you were just more inundated with them; you got more video and audio clips, saw more trailers and red-carpet photos, and read more gossip and reiterations of the same bare facts about them. What did social media teach you about Michael Jackson, besides how big a deal it was that he was dead?

And as for Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, etc, we can hardly tell you anything you haven't discovered yourself. You have XXX friends; you have XX invitations; so-and-so likes this; view all X comments. These are wonderful tools for shut-ins, of which they have made us all.

Well, yeah, but again the difference is at most one of degree. Supermarket tabloids, the Sports section, Hollywood publicity magazines and entertainment infomercials have long been with us, and many Americans have always paid more attention to the doings of the stars than to politics. The Black Sox scandal of 1919 disillusioned many ("Say it ain't so, Joe!"), but was it more important than the Red Scare and the plight of World War I veterans? I know I have just uttered blasphemy and sacrilege, but I'm an all-purpose infidel and I'm used to it. As for Facebook et al., as I mentioned earlier they are new mainly by comparison to the telephone and the telegraph.

Edroso sums up:

The real force behind blogs, Twitter, and all other social media is its users, which is to say, practically everyone of the internet. And this is the saddest part of the demise of the internet as anything other than a microwave for the mind: we are the ones who killed it. And no matter how feverishly we click and scroll and friend and block, nothing we do can bring it back to life.

I think that reports of the Internet's death are somewhat exaggerated. As I commented,

As I recall the early cheerleading for the Internet, it was like most cheerleading for new or "new" technology: partly corporate marketing blather (part of the point was to convince people that every American must not only have their own computer, but a superfast, superadvanced computer on which to file recipes and write e-mail) and partly technogeek masturbation (technology will save the world! or at least I need to have a personal superconducting supercomputer to write code and play Myst on, which will change the world and give every American a faster, more powerful computer to file recipes and write e-mail on, and that will save the world). And there's always been an uneasy feeling among the geek elites that they didn't want to share this wonderful new technology with housewives and couch potatoes who would just waste it on e-mail, filing recipes and analyzing sports stats instead of inventing new computer languages and more advanced role playing games, as God intended. We should also remember America Online, Compuserve, and the like, which also functioned as social sites and provided conduits for netlore that previously had been lower-tech Xeroxlore and low-tech handcopied folklore.

And I disagree with [another commenter]. The dumbification of, say, movie criticism predates the Internet. It is connected to the corporatization of journalism, but then movie reviewing originated as part of Hollywood marketing, and remains so to this day. See Jonathan Rosenbaum's Movie Wars (yeah, it's like totally a print publication, so no link) on the way that, as a serious film critic/reviewer moves up the prestige chain in print media, the space he or she is allotted shrinks. This has to do more with conscious strategies of keeping it simple, by the upper echelons who think of their markets as stupid and uninterested in thinking, whether their markets fit the image, than with any inherent limitation of print. And while yeah, Sturgeon's Law applies to Internet content as much as anywhere else, the Internet also makes it possible for writers to stretch out with less concern about space limitations or what the Advertisers (like the movie companies) will think. The problem is just finding the good stuff, but then it's always been true. "Of the writing of books there is no end." "Another d----d fat square book! Scribble scribble scribble, eh, Mr. Gibbon?"

Just about everyone, it seems, complains about how much junk there is on the Internet. The fault is always the fault of someone else -- Them, the Dumb Ones, and so on. I confess I often feel that way when I'm on Myspace with its "pimped" profiles, so overloaded with graphics and music that they are literally unreadable, and utterly tacky and devoid of all taste. Still, all that gives their users and proprietors as much pleasure as customizing their personal copies of Emacs gives many computer programmers. (Or used to give -- I'm out of touch.) And if it weren't for the Great Unwashed out there with their Nascar obsessions, what would the elite wannabe's have to play Ain't It Awful over? It doesn't hurt me, or stop me from writing and posting what I want to write and post. Nor does it stop anyone else. If it were decided to bar Teh Stupid from the Net, who would be the gatekeepers? Who would watch the watchers?

The First Refuge Of Scoundrels

Roy Edroso had an interesting post last Thursday, in which he tried to find his patriotism. Hm, I know I left it here somewhere…

We are surrounded by conservatives who insist that they love America, and describe it as a horrible place where the unfortunate deserve only the back of the hand of power, which must be maintained by endless wars. After a bellyful of their patriotism I sometimes begin to doubt my own. Maybe they're right, I begin to think: maybe the ugly America they celebrate is the real America, and I have only deluded myself that it was something better.

Oh, here it is, under the couch:

The American people are often ridiculous and sometimes do horrible things, and I have turned my wrath on a broad array of our native fixers, crackers, dupes, dopes, and scumbags. But they are still my people. I too want more than I could possibly deserve, chafe at well-meant and even reasonable restrictions, and prefer a good time to a Great Awakening. And in the last ditch I'll take my stand with our credit-, pleasure-, and freedom-addicted folk against our would-be saviors.

I’ve seen liberals play this game numerous times over the years. Sometimes it was about reclaiming the flag – that one goes back way before September 11, 2001, to the days of the flag stickers, about the size of a 3x5 index card, that turned up in cars in the late 60s. Liberals and even a few leftists fretted: should they let the “hard-hats” have the flag to themselves, or should they show that they could wave the flag as well?

Well, sure, folks, knock yourselves out. Patriotism is more debilitating to reason than religious faith, so it took me a long time to work out my feelings about the flag. Then, back around the time of the first Gulf War I think, some airhead on a local BBS wrote something to the effect of, But don’t you love your only flag, the flag that gives you freedom? – and everything fell into place for me. The flag doesn’t give my freedom. It’s a piece of cloth. It is also a symbol, and like all symbols it’s a mess of conflicting meanings, some admirable, some despicable. But treating it as something holy is idolatry, and I’m still bemused by the number of hard-core Christians who are also flag-idolaters. Thou shalt have no other gods before me, nor make unto thee any graven image and worship it, remember? Anyway, I'm an atheist, and I don't worship anything.

On the other side, some friends wanted to burn a flag at a party I gave many years ago. I thought about it for a moment, then asked them to do it outside if they really insisted on doing it. They were excited like a bunch of much younger kids getting ready to torture a cat, and that alone (aside from the fire hazard: set something afire in my apartment?) made me uneasy. Far from being indifferent to it, they took the flag as seriously as any flag idolater, only they wanted to defile the holy thing. Homey don’t play that one either. I’m not sure my position puts me in the middle; more likely it puts me way out beyond all decent common-sense discourse, but since that’s where I’ve usually been, I can live with it.

Notice that Roy Edroso seems to be playing a similar, all-too-easy game. Either the right-wing blogosphere pundits or patriotism. The real patriotism, not their ersatz Hate-America-First patriotism. Either you’re for him or you’re against him. But again, I see other possibilities. I don’t want to see this country destroyed, not just because I live here and there are people I love who live here (though those are valid reasons), but because I don’t want to see any country destroyed. I didn’t want to see the Soviet Union destroyed in an orgy of blood-letting, nor did I want to see Vietnam bombed back into the Stone Age, nor did I want to see Iraq destroyed, nor do I want to see Iran destroyed, nor Israel nor Lebanon nor Afghanistan nor Colombia nor China nor North Korea nor Indonesia nor Cuba nor the frothing Batistas-in-exile in Miami – even though they all have the blood of countless innocents on their hands. (Disclaimer: The absence of any country in that list should not be construed as an endorsement of its destruction.)

This article from 2003, which I stumbled on while Googling for Chesterton’s witticism that “My country, right or wrong” is equivalent to “My mother, drunk or sober”, is a textbook case of either-or blindness. Note that it appeared in a left-liberal journal, Dissent (immortalized by Woody Allen’s old quip about Commentary merging with Dissent to become Dysentery); I could link to any number of articles by lefty-libs and progressives raving about leftists who said that 9/11 was all America’s fault, the chickens were coming home to roost, and the shoe’s on the other foot now, ha ha! – but this one will do nicely for now. (Michael Bérubé’s entry has a special place in my personal Hall of Shame, though, because I used to respect him.) For Joanne Barkan, to point out American crimes is to ignore totally the crimes of any other nation, to ignore all other geopolitical factors, to succumb to “the left’s negative nationalism.” But as usual with people of her ilk, it soon becomes clear that Barkan will not concede that America has ever done anything wrong, that any people anywhere in the world have reason to want to strike back at us, that no country in the world has any business defending itself against us, that it’s time to throw out reason and complexity and boil everything down to the question, “Do you want to see America conquered, or don’t you?”

No, I don’t -- not that America is in any danger of being conquered: the US has not fought a war of self-defense in my lifetime. But I don’t want to see any country conquered. People like Barkan get so furious at any mention of American malfeasance because they’ll gladly sic the dogs of war on any other country that behaved as the US has behaved, that killed a tenth as many people as the US has killed, that supported a tenth as many dictators as the US has supported, that harbors the kinds of terrorists the US harbors – so it is they who want to see the US attacked and humbled, if they had any consistency of principle. Those of us who can recognize the faults of our country, by contrast, simply want it to stop hurting people so wantonly.

I think it’s a safe bet, for example, that in 1967, when Martin Luther King Jr. called his own government the greatest purveyor of violence in the world, he wasn’t calling for other governments to invade the US. No, he said explicitly that he had come to realize that he couldn’t condemn the violence of others without first condemning and opposing the far greater violence being done in his name by his own government.

Whether King claimed to be a patriot, I don’t know; a search of the 700-page collection of his writings, A Testament of Hope (HarperOne, 1990), finds the word “patriot” only twice, and this quotation from page 327 is indicative: “It is a paradox that those Negroes who have given up on America are doing more to improve it than its professional patriots.” (The other passage, on 472, is a passing swipe at “sunshine patriots.”) It doesn’t appear that King set much store by the word.

In any case, I see no point in getting into a tug-of-war over words. (“Mine!” “No, mine!”) I’m an American, whether I or anyone likes it much: I was born here, I’m a citizen who pays taxes and votes, and so I have a say in what this country does. I don’t feel bound to support it unconditionally, but then no one does – those who attack others for lack of patriotism are ready, as Edroso said, to turn on their country whenever it suits them. I also don’t see how it can be meaningful to claim to “love” a country, any more than to “hate” it. (When I wrote earlier about the US as a collective, I was all too aware that it was problematic: what does it mean to attack “us” or to say that “the US” or “America” does something?) Whether I’m a “patriot” or not, whether my opinions are “patriotic” or not, is irrelevant, a distraction from questions of substance. My country, drunk or sober; when drunk, to be sobered up -- if that’s possible, which I increasingly doubt.

You know this old joke? “I defended you the other day – someone said that Promiscuous Reader ain’t fit to eat with the hogs, and I said, ‘He is so!’” Being a patriot is like being fit to eat with the hogs. Or not, if you prefer.

The First Refuge Of Scoundrels

Roy Edroso had an interesting post last Thursday, in which he tried to find his patriotism. Hm, I know I left it here somewhere…

We are surrounded by conservatives who insist that they love America, and describe it as a horrible place where the unfortunate deserve only the back of the hand of power, which must be maintained by endless wars. After a bellyful of their patriotism I sometimes begin to doubt my own. Maybe they're right, I begin to think: maybe the ugly America they celebrate is the real America, and I have only deluded myself that it was something better.

Oh, here it is, under the couch:

The American people are often ridiculous and sometimes do horrible things, and I have turned my wrath on a broad array of our native fixers, crackers, dupes, dopes, and scumbags. But they are still my people. I too want more than I could possibly deserve, chafe at well-meant and even reasonable restrictions, and prefer a good time to a Great Awakening. And in the last ditch I'll take my stand with our credit-, pleasure-, and freedom-addicted folk against our would-be saviors.

I’ve seen liberals play this game numerous times over the years. Sometimes it was about reclaiming the flag – that one goes back way before September 11, 2001, to the days of the flag stickers, about the size of a 3x5 index card, that turned up in cars in the late 60s. Liberals and even a few leftists fretted: should they let the “hard-hats” have the flag to themselves, or should they show that they could wave the flag as well?

Well, sure, folks, knock yourselves out. Patriotism is more debilitating to reason than religious faith, so it took me a long time to work out my feelings about the flag. Then, back around the time of the first Gulf War I think, some airhead on a local BBS wrote something to the effect of, But don’t you love your only flag, the flag that gives you freedom? – and everything fell into place for me. The flag doesn’t give my freedom. It’s a piece of cloth. It is also a symbol, and like all symbols it’s a mess of conflicting meanings, some admirable, some despicable. But treating it as something holy is idolatry, and I’m still bemused by the number of hard-core Christians who are also flag-idolaters. Thou shalt have no other gods before me, nor make unto thee any graven image and worship it, remember? Anyway, I'm an atheist, and I don't worship anything.

On the other side, some friends wanted to burn a flag at a party I gave many years ago. I thought about it for a moment, then asked them to do it outside if they really insisted on doing it. They were excited like a bunch of much younger kids getting ready to torture a cat, and that alone (aside from the fire hazard: set something afire in my apartment?) made me uneasy. Far from being indifferent to it, they took the flag as seriously as any flag idolater, only they wanted to defile the holy thing. Homey don’t play that one either. I’m not sure my position puts me in the middle; more likely it puts me way out beyond all decent common-sense discourse, but since that’s where I’ve usually been, I can live with it.

Notice that Roy Edroso seems to be playing a similar, all-too-easy game. Either the right-wing blogosphere pundits or patriotism. The real patriotism, not their ersatz Hate-America-First patriotism. Either you’re for him or you’re against him. But again, I see other possibilities. I don’t want to see this country destroyed, not just because I live here and there are people I love who live here (though those are valid reasons), but because I don’t want to see any country destroyed. I didn’t want to see the Soviet Union destroyed in an orgy of blood-letting, nor did I want to see Vietnam bombed back into the Stone Age, nor did I want to see Iraq destroyed, nor do I want to see Iran destroyed, nor Israel nor Lebanon nor Afghanistan nor Colombia nor China nor North Korea nor Indonesia nor Cuba nor the frothing Batistas-in-exile in Miami – even though they all have the blood of countless innocents on their hands. (Disclaimer: The absence of any country in that list should not be construed as an endorsement of its destruction.)

This article from 2003, which I stumbled on while Googling for Chesterton’s witticism that “My country, right or wrong” is equivalent to “My mother, drunk or sober”, is a textbook case of either-or blindness. Note that it appeared in a left-liberal journal, Dissent (immortalized by Woody Allen’s old quip about Commentary merging with Dissent to become Dysentery); I could link to any number of articles by lefty-libs and progressives raving about leftists who said that 9/11 was all America’s fault, the chickens were coming home to roost, and the shoe’s on the other foot now, ha ha! – but this one will do nicely for now. (Michael Bérubé’s entry has a special place in my personal Hall of Shame, though, because I used to respect him.) For Joanne Barkan, to point out American crimes is to ignore totally the crimes of any other nation, to ignore all other geopolitical factors, to succumb to “the left’s negative nationalism.” But as usual with people of her ilk, it soon becomes clear that Barkan will not concede that America has ever done anything wrong, that any people anywhere in the world have reason to want to strike back at us, that no country in the world has any business defending itself against us, that it’s time to throw out reason and complexity and boil everything down to the question, “Do you want to see America conquered, or don’t you?”

No, I don’t -- not that America is in any danger of being conquered: the US has not fought a war of self-defense in my lifetime. But I don’t want to see any country conquered. People like Barkan get so furious at any mention of American malfeasance because they’ll gladly sic the dogs of war on any other country that behaved as the US has behaved, that killed a tenth as many people as the US has killed, that supported a tenth as many dictators as the US has supported, that harbors the kinds of terrorists the US harbors – so it is they who want to see the US attacked and humbled, if they had any consistency of principle. Those of us who can recognize the faults of our country, by contrast, simply want it to stop hurting people so wantonly.

I think it’s a safe bet, for example, that in 1967, when Martin Luther King Jr. called his own government the greatest purveyor of violence in the world, he wasn’t calling for other governments to invade the US. No, he said explicitly that he had come to realize that he couldn’t condemn the violence of others without first condemning and opposing the far greater violence being done in his name by his own government.

Whether King claimed to be a patriot, I don’t know; a search of the 700-page collection of his writings, A Testament of Hope (HarperOne, 1990), finds the word “patriot” only twice, and this quotation from page 327 is indicative: “It is a paradox that those Negroes who have given up on America are doing more to improve it than its professional patriots.” (The other passage, on 472, is a passing swipe at “sunshine patriots.”) It doesn’t appear that King set much store by the word.

In any case, I see no point in getting into a tug-of-war over words. (“Mine!” “No, mine!”) I’m an American, whether I or anyone likes it much: I was born here, I’m a citizen who pays taxes and votes, and so I have a say in what this country does. I don’t feel bound to support it unconditionally, but then no one does – those who attack others for lack of patriotism are ready, as Edroso said, to turn on their country whenever it suits them. I also don’t see how it can be meaningful to claim to “love” a country, any more than to “hate” it. (When I wrote earlier about the US as a collective, I was all too aware that it was problematic: what does it mean to attack “us” or to say that “the US” or “America” does something?) Whether I’m a “patriot” or not, whether my opinions are “patriotic” or not, is irrelevant, a distraction from questions of substance. My country, drunk or sober; when drunk, to be sobered up -- if that’s possible, which I increasingly doubt.

You know this old joke? “I defended you the other day – someone said that Promiscuous Reader ain’t fit to eat with the hogs, and I said, ‘He is so!’” Being a patriot is like being fit to eat with the hogs. Or not, if you prefer.