The flags are out today, all along Exeter Road and High Street in Hampton, New Hampshire.
It's Memorial Day and the American Legion, which has a building right across the street from the bank, with a gun from the USS Wilimington out front and a stack of cannonballs has men wearing those American Legion hats standing around the front door.
On days like this I get a rush of images blowing by my eyes: The local Democrats beginning their meeting with the Pledge of Allegiance, the look on my high school teacher's face when we started discussing Henry David Thoreau's On Civil Disobedience, the face of a man I met who had his eye, hand and part of his foot blown off in Viet Nam, who had nothing but dismissive contempt from the "Professional Veterans" he saw down at the Viet Nam Memorial the first and last time he went down there, the picture from Butterfield's wonderful pictorial history of the United States, showing American soldiers standing on top of piles of Filipino bodies from the Spanish American war, a war American school children never heard about when I was in school, and the photo in an article in the New York Times Book Review, of the former head of Fannie Mae, some guy name Johnson, who pocketed 100 million dollars for his part in the financial collapse which greeted President Obama upon assuming office, and the photo of Sanford Weill, who was responsible for getting a Depression era law repealed which was meant to prevent the occurrence of another Depression, but the law had stood in the way of Weill's making a profit, so he threw enough money around Congress to get it done. He made untold millions, and just to show he was a good guy, he donate $150 million to Cornell University Medical College and got the school renamed, after himself.
So all that streams by.
And I think about the fact this country is the only country I'm aware of which ever fought a war, and a the most costly war of all our wars, to free an underclass, to free our own slaves. So you have to give us some credit.
But, as anyone who has not been in the military but who has seen The Band of Brothers or Full Metal Jacket can appreciate, the reasons men join the armed forces to go to war are seldom love of country. Each joins for his own reasons. Very few do what that professional football player did, drop a million dollar career and join the Army to go fight (and die) probably pretty much in vain, in Afghanistan.
Thoreau said the real patriotic serves his country best not as a "wooden solider" but with his mind. The real patriot asks himself and his government why going to war is necessary and in the interests of his fellow citizens, and analyzes the answers he gets with ruthless dispassion. I did not understand what he meant by "wooden solider" in high school, but I know now. And, having lived through the Viet Nam years, I agree with him.
As for the Pledge of Allegiance, well, all I can say is any "patriotism" which is easy is not patriotism at all. It's just all "Zeig, Heil," feel good, group hug and worse than useless.
And as for America being the best country in the world, well, it may have become that, although the competition is not stiff. But we have a very sorry past to consider, to be informed by. We had white American boys of the most murderous persuasion giving vent to their unwholesome passions from the Phillipines at the turn of the 20th century, to Viet Nam in the middle to Abu Gharib in Iraq, so there is very little to be proud of there.
On the other hand, we fought a war which helped defeat Hitler, and we did fight that great war to free the slaves. And don't get miss led by later revisionism. Just read Lincoln's second inaugural address--he clearly says everyone knew, at some level, the slaves were the cause of the conflict. More succinctly, when he met Harriet Beecher Stowe, who wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin
he leaned over and shook her hand (she was just about five five tall) and he said, "So this is the little lady, who wrote the book, that started the great big war."
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