America? Not so bad, maybe
Just when I was ready to forgive and forget Barack Obama’s puzzling hardline stance against flag lapel pins, his wife offered this observation last week during a speech in Madison, Wisconsin:
Let me tell you something, for the first time in my adult lifetime, I am really proud of my country. And not just because Barack has done well, but because I think people are hungry for change.
Sigh. Are these two determined to test the patience of everyone who — I know this is crazy — sincerely thinks America is a great country, and maybe even the best ever? I count myself among the members of that group. I’m not a flag-waver, nor do I believe that reflexive, unthinking patriotism is a condition of citizenship. I love my country in the same way I love my children: It can disappoint me, make me to slap my head in frustration, and cause me to want to send it to its room and ground it for the next century or so; but it also can have me marveling at its achievements, swell me with pride when I see it do great things effortlessly and gracefully, and make me want to leap to my feet and say, “That’s mine, I helped make that.”
But the sense I get from Mr. and Mrs. Obama is that their love for the country is conditional; that sometimes they’re ready to drop it off at the orphanage and head for Europe, where people are worldly and sophisticated and prone to believe that the whole idea of country is so declasse.
I don’t think this is actually true of the Obamas. I still give them the benefit of the doubt. But as Peggy Noonan said a few days ago:
So many Americans right now fear they are losing their country, that the old America is slipping away and being replaced by something worse, something formless and hollowed out. They can see we are giving up our sovereignty, that our leaders will not control our borders, that we don’t teach the young the old-fashioned love of America, that the government has taken to itself such power, and made things so complex, and at the end of the day when they count up sales tax, property tax, state tax, federal tax they are paying a lot of money to lose the place they loved.
And if you feel you’re losing America, you really don’t want a couple in the White House whose rope of affection to the country seems lightly held, casual, provisional.
True, that. I’d prefer that my president not have the directions to the orphanage permanently programmed into his limo’s GPS system.
February 25th, 2008 at 11:20 pm
You have given a voice to the words that have been bouncing around in my head for days. Thank you for such a common sense approach!
March 6th, 2008 at 1:07 pm
I’m late to the party, but I have a different sense of the beloved country that is being lost than Peggy Noonan does. I mourn for a Constitutional government with a finely tuned system of checks and balances that has been replaced with a system in which the whim of the President becomes law, or overrides law. I mourn for a country in which civility has been replaced by the politics of personal destruction. I feel a deep sense of loss when a culture that produced Faulkner, Steinbeck, Buckley, Murrow, Ellington and Capra (in the twentieth century alone) now offers us Spears, JLo, American Idol, Facebook, Matthews (Chris and Dave) and the Farrelly Brothers.
March 9th, 2008 at 8:56 pm
Just out of curiosity, what’s the last great thing you saw your country do effortlessly and gracefully?
March 11th, 2008 at 1:37 pm
I see Ms Obama’s statement as matter-of-fact, plain speaking; no more, no less. As we all know, there’s no place for talk like that during a presidential campaign. Obfuscate, flatter, patronize, condescend, but NEVER say what you really think (or feel) unless truth and expedience happen to align like Jupiter and Mars. Oh yeah, the moon has to be in The Seventh House too - whatever the hell that means.
I’m an old white dude, and I cringe when those of my persuasion endeavor to speak for black folks and/or the balck experience. I don’t pack the credentials. Having offered that disclaimer, however, allow me to speculate on where Ms Obama was coming from.
It’s probably not Webster’s definition, but I see the emotion of pride as one born of inclusion. You’re proud of your kid for acing his SAT’s or serving his country in the military. You’re proud of your alma mater’s successes.
However, the acheivements of your neighbor’s kid or the net worth of your wife’s ex husband may make you (choose one):
A. gloat
B. gnash your teeth
C. nod in grudging admiration.
D. all of the above
You’ll notice that “swell with pride” ain’t among the choices.
I’m not responsible for the sins of my grandfather, but colelctively speaking, it hasn’t been that long ago (perhaps during Ms Obama’s lifetime even) that black folks were treated as second-class cititzens in this country. I won’t belabor the point further.
To me, it’s human nature. If you’re scorned, shunned and made to feel as an outsider, how much affection and pride should you feel for the entity that treats you so?
And does anybody else think that all this hooha about Obama’s heritage coulda been avoided if he tweaked his last name ever-so-slightly from Obama to O’Bama?
Still gotta do some work on Hussein though. That’s gonna be a tough nut to crack.
November 11th, 2010 at 3:24 pm
[…] Here’s part of a message I sent to my friend, who had taken issue with this column I’d posted in which I declared that Obama and his wife, Michelle — who’d said that she felt proud of her country for the “first time” only recently — were causing people like me to wonder how much they actually liked the United States: I don’t define patriotism as automatically thinking your country is always right. To me, it’s recognizing that for all its (mostly correctable) flaws, your country still stands as mankind’s greatest experiment in freedom and self-rule. The Obamas, whether they mean to or not, have people wondering if they believe that. Their attachment to the U.S. comes across as conditional … as if the country still has something to prove to them. […]