Ask Not What You Can Do For Your Country

Are we at war?  Were we at war?  It's hard to tell.

News flows moment to moment, endlessly panicked, breathless, and reactive.  But if you step outside, and turn off your phone, there's not even the whiff of war.  America remains oblivious and untouched, except for a modest bump upwards in the price of gas.  There aren't shortages.  Sirens and alerts don't sound, and distant columns of smoke don't rise lazily upwards in the bright spring sky.

Nothing, nothing at all, is asked of us.  Not a thing.  

When republics go to war, citizens are generally expected to pitch in.  Grow a garden. Reduce your consumption, so the troops don't have to go without.  Be alert, at least.  But none of that is true.

Out in my garden, amongst my other garden flair...sleeping gnomes, umbrella-wielding Totoros, windmills, and the like...there's a sign from another time.  It's a bit of tin, upon which is printed a call to Garden for Victory, as so many Americans once did.  I do that, all the time, because it is, as the sign says, "thrifty and patriotic."   It's hard to be a patriot these days, because patriotism in a republic requires more than blind obedience.  Still, doing the right thing is doing the right thing.  

We are, for now, in the midst of our second war in less than five months.  We are overthrowing a monstrous regime,  but we're also not, and we're going to obliterate them, while letting them sell oil at huge profits to support their war effort, and we're killing and existentially threatening their leadership, while at the same time expecting them to negotiate.  

Given the gibbering incoherence of our addled leadership, a sentient citizen must come to their own conclusions.  Iran is, obviously, a war over oil, because the common-sense through-line between Venezuela and Iran is control over fossil fuel resources. 

And so, as I would if we were still a decent and honorable republic, I'm using less fuel, because that seems like the thing a citizen would do if they were patriotic.  It's what my grandparents did.

Yesterday, in the heat of a false summer, I did all of my necessary travelling on my scooter.  To church, and back, and then to celebrate a little one's birthday with some old friends.   The roads were full of traffic, heavy with Americans rushing about, as we always are, fat with SUVs and pickup trucks.  It was just an ordinary Sunday.

Because nothing, nothing at all, is asked of us, other than to keep spending money, not asking questions, and carrying on as if nothing is happening.

On How to Love America

It was the third of July, and I was in the Grand Ole Opry, listening to Country music.  Enjoying it, even, though it's not generally my thing.

In the last set, a new singer was brought out, a little coltish dude with a breakout hit single about boats and trucks and beer, whose guitar hung down like an oversided decorative necklace.  He started in with the obligatory opening crowd-connect patter by uttering the words, "I love America."

No context, no build up, no lead-in, no explanation as to why, just "I love America."  There was much hooting and hollerin', it being America and all.

That got me to thinking, as I drove the ten hours back from Nashville through the heart of the deep South on the Fourth of July, about what it means to love your country.

I mean, seriously think about it, because Lord, did I have some time on my hands.

And as I thought, I reflected on love of country through the lens I'd bring to all other forms of love, and with the the things I'd say to a couple in relationship counseling.  Because while most Americans will *say* they love America, that love may not be the healthiest of loves.

Love, you see, requires you to love the whole person in front of you.  The actual person, the real, complicated, messy and imperfect person.  We do not want to do this.

Some of us would rather love the person who once was.  We want to love that person we fell in big dreamy love with ten years ago, and not the less dreamy person who's standing in front of us right now.  We want to love the one who lived for us and us alone, our best friend and lover, and not this harried distant soul who's juggling a million responsibilities and the weight of life.  We want to love that little angel-baby who never cried and never got sick, our selective memory of big eyes and cheeks and heart-melting smiles.  We do not want to love the frustrating fourteen year old who is sitting and furtively snapchatting to their friends about what a [expletive deleted] we are.

When the person we love is a person they no longer are, and maybe never were, then we do not love them.

This is how conservatives do not love America.

Then there's the love of what might be.  "I love you for who you're going to be," we say to our lover, "once I've remade you."  "You're just so messed up," we say to them.  "But I just know I can save you and make you who you need to be."  Oh Lord, if someone ever says this to you, you need to run like H-E-double toothpicks.   Because tempting as it is to be the white knight, the one who comes in and fixes and saves and makes it all right, that ain't love.  What we love then is the sense of power that tearing down gives us.  We love deconstructing for the sake of deconstructing, and that leads us to seek out faults rather than possibilities, flaws rather than living hopes.

When the person we love is only the person we want to make them into, we do not love them.

This is how progressives do not love America.

To love a person, you need to love the whole of who they are.  That means their past, their whole-truth story to date, with all of its triumph and tragedy, all of its success and mess.  You have to love their potential, which rises from the grace notes of that story in all of its complexity.

And you have to love them right now, in that ephemeral place where the told and the yet-untold meet.

That's how we love people, if we really love them.  And that love, truth be told, is the love that heals and transforms for the better.

I'm reasonably sure love of country ain't so different.

Flag Etiquette

I had a very American fourth.  The family and I spent the weekend off in Hershey, Pennsylvania, enjoying a few days of amusement park/water park/chocolate-gorging indulgence.  We went from bucketing around on mild-concussion-inducing old wooden coasters to being aaaaaaaaieeee launched four stories straight up to walking slowly through a vast garden of roses.  We watched the fireworks display that night from a still-warm parking lot, with a random and rainbow-hued mix of Americans.

It was quite pleasant, although even all that park-walking didn't prevent a slight increase around my midsection.  

As we pulled back into our driveway, there was a small American flag stuck in the ground at the entrance.  It had been left by our local realtor, an "8" by 12" Economy U.S. Flag," a red-white-and-blue reminder that if we're thinking of selling our house, or know anyone who is...well...  

We get these inexpensive bits of Americana now and again, and add them to a collection of flags we keep in our basement, including the several that flew in our front yard along with those in all the yards in our neighborhood during the months after the attack on the Pentagon and World Trade Center.  One house in our subdivision was missing a mom after that day.  

On the new little flag was a set of instructions on flag care and etiquette, which I read just because it was there.  It was standard stuff.  Here are the days to fly the flag.  Here is the Pledge of Allegiance, along with Pledge Protocols.  Nothing unusual.  Until I hit these two sentences:

"The flag is not an inanimate object.  It flies freely with a life force powerful enough to unite an entire nation."

Purple prose above the fruited plain is not uncommon in patriotic literature.  But this was an odd thing, peculiarly animistic to the point of almost sounding mid-20th Century Shinto. 

Of course the flag is an inanimate object.  If it moves, it is only because the wind moves.  If it has life, it is only because there is a republic of free citizens who wave it.  The American flag that sits forever still on the moon would be meaningless to an alien probe that arrived to explore that rocky world and the asteroid-shattered, lifeless main planet around which it orbited.

It's only two sentences on a card on a mass-produced adflag, so I suppose it matters not.

Still, it needled me.  Perhaps it's just my reflexive Calvinist resistance to any and all forms of idolatry.  Even...and especially...the ones that stir us.