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Shadow Government
Nationalism, here
By John A. Jackson
We read about Bosnia or Kosovo or Sudan and our stomachs clench, as if at the stench of blood. Not for us, we think. Blood, land, holy war, fatherland. Not for us. We are enlightened.
But. But we love our country.
In the 1960's, when I came of age, that was particularly hard to do, and not just because of the genocidal war our country was waging in Vietnam.
No, the Sixties saw a great many truths told, truths about race, about slavery and discrimination, about what our country did - and is doing! -- to its native inhabitants, about a foreign policy that looked most of the time a lot more like rape than anything else.
The American Left, which taught itself to be internationalist above all else, simply ceased to be patriotic. Love of country was classed with the other old bigotries. To tell oneself the truth meant to hate one's country, or so it seemed.
Now it is clear that that rejection was part of the Left's long self-destruction.
No political movement in the United States succeeds with any other basis than love of country. Either we choose America or we are not American.
And to choose America means? To love the grandeur and profundity of our land? It is stolen property. To see us as a City on a Hill - and ignore our real but rotting cities?
I believe one can be - one has to be - both a patriot and an honest man, that one can love both justice and our nation. But how?
The French talk about their "mission to civilize." Can we Americans claim, perhaps, a mission to free?
Franklin Roosevelt famously proclaimed that we fought World War II for four freedoms: freedom of conscience and expression; freedom from want and from fear. Good enough.
Do you see there, as I do, a platform for the Left? Do you see unmet human needs, both here and elsewhere, that our nation - out of love of country - must address?
I can imagine a patriotism without lying. I cannot imagine a successful American government that does not define for our nation a special and precious place in the world. But I do not imagine that creating such a government will be easy.
Which brings us to the year 2000. When nearly everything in public life seems to be for sale, and cheaply, too. When most people, while a speculative boom lasts, can buy more of nearly everything, but own less and less of themselves and their own souls. When the virtues of civic love and solidarity seem to mean very little at all.
As a practical matter, I urge those of us who care about these matters to study as hard as we can the truths about our nation and its glories. A love of country that is not rooted in our people's real history is a myth about shadows.
We will need something a whole lot stronger to get through what is surely ahead.ER