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I want to say something, having watched a weekend’s worth of Independence Day posts, that might surprise some of you:
I am, in my heart, a patriot.
I know, I have a reputation, in some circles, for being a bit of a crank. “A tremendous hater” or a “tiresome nag,” as Gore Vidal once described himself. If I had a dollar for every time an elected official, PR shill, or comms officer complained that I never write any “good stories” – meaning positive, uplifting – I could establish a foundation to fund WHQR in perpetuity.
Like many journalists, I’m a cynic by nature and a skeptic by trade. I’m not a cheerleader, and wouldn’t be very good at it if I tried. And, after all, in the private and public sectors alike, there are small armies of horn tooters. (I’ve lost count of how many of my former colleagues have joined those ranks, but it’s quite a few.)
But, grinch that I am, I still love my country. I love the music, the food, the writing, the architecture, the staggering natural beauty, the awe-insprising size – I love so many things about it that I couldn’t list them all if I dedicated every weekend newsletter for a year (and, after all, I said I’d be relatively brief today). I know I won the global lottery by being born in the United States in the late 20th century, and I’m grateful.
My ancestors, Irish Catholics and Ukrainian Jews, came to this country for a better life and – for all their suffering, despite all the insults and indignities – they found it. Things were not perfect, it’s true, but they were immeasurably better than the famine roads and pogroms they left behind.
My family’s story is far from unique, but it’s also a happier history than many in this country can look back on. Poverty and prejudice, slums and ghettos, these are tough. Slavery and genocide are worse, by orders of magnitude. And while I think it is in some ways foolish to measure our historical traumas against each other’s, a 'Pain Olympics' as I’ve heard them called, I can’t pretend my family has ever known the suffering that this country’s Black and indigenous people have known.
And I’m aware – and reminded constantly in my personal and professional life– that it’s not just about the inequities of the past. The past is never dead, it’s not even past, as Faulkner said. Every Fourth of July – or “Fourth of You Lie,” as some call it – is a celebration of our country’s bounty and promise, but also a public shaming. Reading Frederick Douglass, who was “outside the pale of glorious anniversary,” as he described the “immeasurable distance” between the White haves and the Black have-nots, it’s hard to quarantine his justifiable anger to a historic anteroom. The slaves have long since been freed, but for many Black Americans, watching the pomp and circumstance, it feels incumbent to say, “You may rejoice, I must mourn.”
There are some who insist, against all evidence past and present, that this country is and always has been perfect, our founders’ genius flawless, and our city on the hill unblemished. They are a distinct and deranged minority and I am, of course, not among them.
There are others who admit all, or at least many, of the ills inherent in our nation’s founding, and the tragedies of our first decades. “Early America was a moral morass,” as Bill Moyers – a mensch, if ever this profession had one to look up to – put it, “we’ve never been a country of angels guided by a presidium of saints.”
But often folks feel that, at some imperceptible point in the arc of our history, things were set right. This sense doesn’t hold up well under scrutiny. Are things better? Absolutely. Have we seen the last day of bigotry and violence, and erased their last repercussions down through the generations? I know it can look like that, from a certain point of view (or, perhaps, a certain zip code). But I can tell you, no, absolutely not, the work is not done. The promissory note of our founding documents has yet to be paid, as Douglass might have it.
No clear-eyed person, and certainly no journalist, can be romantic about where we are now or how we got here. And, like Moyers, I don’t valorize ‘the people’ – who can be selfish and cruel when they act as a mob. They vote against their own interests, troll strangers in the comment sections, and hate their neighbors – all while oligarchs, plutocrats, and wannabe strongmen fleece the country and its people of wealth and dignity.
But it’s also a journalist's job to get to know people up close, one-on-one. Twenty-five years ago, a journalism professor at Rutgers told me he “loved people and hated humanity.” That’s strong stuff, but I can see where he was coming from. In fact, I think that might be where I am today – but it’s important to hold on to the first part of that formulation.
I love people, I love Americans, even when they scare me, sometimes. I love Americans because they’re alchemists. So many perfect meals are oral histories of privation and inequality, so many amazing songs are palimpsests of pain and rage, so many wild stories of independence and creativity are, in the end, tales of desperation. So many things I love about my country, down to the land itself, are also indictments. You can’t have one without the other; that’s the American paradox, and that’s for everyone to wrestle with.
There are those who think the American experiment has failed – damned in the root or grown astray, but irreparably derailed just the same. I am not among them. I do not want to burn our country down and sweep the cinders into the ash bin of history.
So, what then? Do I think we’ll ‘get there’ – the promised land, or at least some less morally blasted landscape – eventually? I do. I don’t know if I’ll live to see it, but I do.
(And I know that, on this note, I part company with more than a few friends, who see my faith and patience as complacency and complicity. They would like a swifter revolution, starting today, if possible.)
I do think things will have to change, though. The toxic combination of social media, campaign financing, and – I’ll just say it – the two-party system has left the people enraged and confused.
Modernity has left us hyperconnected and utterly lonely. We’ve stopped seeing each other as humans. But it doesn’t mean we can’t start, again.
I was not bumped on the head on 9/11, lulled into a trance by Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA.” Patriotism isn’t singing in the war choir. It isn’t cheerleading. And it’s not the empty stuff of Facebook posts – AI-generated Uncle Sams, eagles and fighter planes, flags and fireworks – or the half-story of our country’s history that so often gets told. It’s a lot harder, and a lot less popular, than that.
So when it seems I am a hater, a nag, or a crank, it’s because I want to see that change. I want us to change, to be better. I am pointing out the iceberg, not rooting for it. As James Baldwin, who had so many reasons to hate this country if he’d chosen to do so, once said, “I love America more than any other country in the world and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.”
That, for me, is patriotism.
And it’s not just for one day, July 4th. When this weekend is over, the last few fireworks are shot off, and we’re all shuffling back to the office, the work goes on.
