Mind Bubbles on Patriotism and Nationalism

One of the most moving scenes in a film that I can think of is where Humphrey Bogart and Paul Henreid walk out of a private meeting into the bar where Conrad Veidt is leading a bunch on Nazis singing Deutchland Uber Alles. The screen pans across the faces of the crowd. For me most notably Claude Rains stone faced witness. That is until, as Henreid walks to the band, I watch Ingrid Bergman’s face. Then Henreid tells the band to strike up the Marseillaise, and they look to Bogart who gives that small nod, I’m swept away by all of what follows…

Thinking of that sets me to thinking about we as human beings and what it means that we belong to groups.

I have just enough of a defective gene, it appears, to have some small distance from these things. I’ve never had a taste for sports and find people’s affinity for teams mildly amusing. I can play at it, but, truthfully I’ll never be a true citizen of Red Sox Nation.

Not that I’m completely immune to such things. I know I have a visceral connection to California that even though it is past unlikely I’ll ever return there to live, doesn’t mean I won’t die a Californian.

And when I’m not mad at it, I am glad to be an American.

And not just because it’s so rich and that as an American my family and I have a better chance than most humans of not going to bed hungry. At least so far…

Intellectually, spiritually, I’m enamored with the experiment, the project of a broadly based democracy. I think constitutional democracy is a great and good thing.

Even knowing that there is a bit of a lie to it as it is practiced, particularly here. The other day I found myself bitterly ruminating on how our elections are often decided by people who are swayed by appeals to baser sentiments broadcast through relentless advertising and how their actual decisions are made when marking the ballot.

The upshot is that our democracy is more an oligarchy designed to serve the rich empowered by those many voters who fantasize they can be, too…

And, still, I love our country.

Ruminating on this I find a distinction between patriotism and nationalism.

Patriotism is that natural enough identity with our group, the us of things.

And nationalism is when it goes bad.

So, in Casablanca we get the patriotism of those who have been conquered standing up to nationalism’s iron heel. If just for a moment.

If just in a movie.

So, here we are on Labor Day weekend. I’ve been struggling with a sermon. I think the old Labor movement has had its day. No doubt the labor movement was important because it was the group that actually cared about the working people. We should never forget the unions are the people that brought us the five day work week. But, that is mostly about the past. So, in the public sector, about the only place they continue to have some power, they’re as likely to be obstructive to necessary changes as useful to the actual needs of the people. Increasingly they’re simply irrelevant to ordinary lives.

But with them gone, or marginalized, who will stand against the powerful as they continue their relentless grasping after wealth?

I fear what may be replacing the unions, the labor movement, the liberal progressive element of our culture.

These are not, in my opinion, good days for the Republic.

In the wake of a disastrous presidency, we elected a young and vital president who tries hard to bridge the gap between the truly rich and the shrinking number who do well but live precarious lives on the one side and the increasing number of people who work hard but are poorer each year, not to mention the truly poor. He almost certainly saved us from a depression. And he led a charge that produced a health care package that while not anyone’s ideal, could be and was passed through the congress.

And, for his efforts, he is castigated by the left for not doing enough and by the right for being a communist (if not a secret Muslim)…

And, if the talking heads are right, the election will be decided by the simple fact the economy has not recovered sufficiently. And instead, a passel of folk who when they’re not outright insane are only looking for a fight against the communist, or, possibly, the secret Muslim, are going to be swept into political office.

The big question right now is whether this resurgent right will take the senate as well as the house.

And, because right after the generic down economy reason, that the airwaves are filled with charges that the president and his agenda is somehow alien, not American.

Here’s nationalism’s shadow.

The veiled racism inherent in suggesting he’s really born in Kenya is obvious to anyone not caught up in the boiling water inside this country. Ask most anyone from Europe, or Asia or Africa, if you want a bewildered and possibly frightened view of what is going on here. But woe to those in the public arena that actually voice this harsh truth.

That’s nationalism, pure as snow.

As I worry about all this I’m probably most worried by the fact that one appears to not be electable if one does not buy into the dogma of American exceptionalism.

I’ve read much of how the Japanese Zen Buddhist church was brought low by their embrace of Japanese exceptionalism in the run up to the Second World War. I look at the clergy of this country, particularly American Christian Evangelical Christians, but also many others, so many of whom whose religion is co-opted, who now think their god is named Jesus but it is in fact mammon. God and guns is the idolatry of nationalism…

Ugly stuff, this nationalism thing.

Patriotism has some modesty about it.

Nationalism knows no such governor.

I wonder what will save the Republic from itself?

How far are we from something very, very nasty?

I don’t feel particularly good about it…

Of course there are dreamers, dreaming of other ways, of other perspectives. There are voices crying out in the wilderness, calling us to our better angels.

And, while who wins is never certain, I hear the strains of angel choruses…

And, so in spite of it all, I hope…