Nationalism and Civility

The comments on yesterday's post as well as the private emails I have received make it clear that numbers of us are uncomfortable about the way in which words such as hero are reduced and commodified. I focused on Veterans Day, but I could have written a parallel essay about, say, football. Yet despite its absurdity and greed, the sports industry is at least forthrightly focused on entertainment. Manipulating language as a way to promote military prowess while masking its actuality is a darker endeavor.

The marketing of nationalism is not unique to either the United States or to our era in history. Look at any military culture at any time, and you'll find it: Bismarck's Germany, the Napoleonic wars, Saladin versus Richard the Lionheart, the Mongol invasions. . . . The list goes on and on. Still, Americans have a particular bent for jingoism and catchphrases, and this has been an element of our national personality since colonial days. Numbers of writers, from Horatio Alger, to Mark Twain, to Louisa May Alcott, to Walt Whitman, have captured the joy, cynicism, and naivete of the fast-talking, self-satisfied American striver; and visitors from other countries have been downright caustic about that persona. Consider the central character of Charles Dickens's novel Martin Chuzzlewit, a young Englishman who spends much of the book traveling around the United States. These scenes are comic syntheses of Dickens's own travels, which he chronicled in his journals and published as American Notes; and they are often painful to read. Dickens gleefully caricatures our national temperament, cramming the book with a chaos of carpetbaggers, tobacco chewers, suffragettes, and evangelical ministers, all of them trumpeting America's get-ahead pioneer spirit and scorning lily-livered, slowpoke, old Europe.

Dickens may have been mocking Americans, but he didn't lack models. As a nation, we still hang on to our foot-stomping, pioneer delusions, and outfits such as the National Rifle Association thrive on manipulating that image. This is nothing new; it's not even a secret. So why did I, and many of you, feel such diffidence about publicly discussing our misgivings about Veterans Day? For me, I think it comes down, in the end, to the simple fear of hurting someone else's feelings. Is that a cowardly response? A kind one? Or merely a weak one?

In a way my dilemma goes back to the split that Dickens describes in Martin Chuzzlewit: a pack of get-ahead, speak-your-mind Americans versus one thoughtful, well-mannered, somewhat bewildered English gentleman. Dickens would be the last person to claim that every Briton is a model citizen. But I think his point in this novel is to highlight the difficult tension between thoughtless nationalism and individual civility. Those of us who feel driven to chronicle what we see must contend with the fact that what we see is constantly contradicting itself. Those crowds of gun-toting, Obama-bashing anti-intellectuals break down into real people: into the man who responded to the car accident on the Ripley Road; into the neighbor whose child died of cancer; into the night-shift factory worker who drove my son home after theater practice.

Truth has so many faces. We must deal with the both/and, not the either/or, and this makes every word more dangerous--a destroyer, a divider, a knife--whether or not we believe in, or trust, its altruistic urgency.