Towards a New Definition of Patriotism

I often find myself wishing I were a member of my parents' generation. Tom Brokaw's "greatest generation" did not, perhaps, seek to be great; rather, as so often happens, greatness was thrust upon them by larger circumstances - Depression and World War. Suffering the necessary crucible to refine greatness.

But whatever the proximate cause, theirs was a generation that did not suffer from an overdeveloped sense of personal entitlement, such as characterises the present generation. I am in a state of perpetual amazement at the accumulation of things that so many Americans have come to believe they need. Whatever happened to Formica? Now one has to have granite. How can I live without portable DVD players in the SUV, or limitless cellphone and Internet service? How can I deny my child a Wii or Guitar Hero?

(For the record... my countertop is Formica. Scratched. Long car trips can be spent reading or drawing or counting license plates. And we don't have any video games or game players in this house. Our only major sin is cable TV. Talk to my husband about that!)

I wonder what it will take for Americans to return to understanding that paying into a common fund (i.e., paying taxes) so that all might have health care, say, or so that our crumbling national infrastructure might be brought up to date and up to code, is in fact the investment most worth making -- an investment whose ultimate value will far surpass the return, however you measure it, on owning a Lincoln Navigator or a state-of-the-art home theater.

When did paying taxes into a common fund for the common good cease to be a civic virtue? I marvel at the success of the Republican Party in persuading many of us that taxes and government are inherently evil and cannot possibly ever do anyone any good, that the supreme American value is to be free to earn as much as possible, regardless of how you do it and regardless of whom you hurt, and to keep it all for your own private personal enjoyment. How they successfully appeal to our lowest and most selfish impulses and then successfully brand them as ideological virtues.

It is this mindset that has led us to the lip of the abyss, if not down into its depths. It is the lack of real civic virtue, of willingness to contribute to and for the common good, that has left us with a society of self-seeking, alienated inhabitants; a crumbling national infrastructure; a school system universally acknowledged to be failing in its mission to train the next generation to compete in the global marketplace; and the largest debt of any nation on earth.

Instead of taking the high road - postponing self-gratification to invest in our future, creating items of real value for our society and the world - we have, with the encouragement of our elected leaders, spent an entire generation rolling in the delicious mud of self-indulgent materialism.

Now don't get me wrong. I've got nothing against someone enjoying the good things life has to offer -- on two conditions: one, that the fortunate soul recognize his good fortune and happily share a reasonable percentage with the society that nurtured and educated and made his success possible; and two, that that success be genuinely and fairly earned, by creating some good or service of tangible value. It doesn't have to be a factory widget; intellectual product (e.g. software) also counts, as do items that make life easier or more entertaining ( I think of Steve Jobs, or Steven Spielberg). But the good life has not been earned when it is obtained through paper-shifting, luftgescheften, and defrauding feckless consumers, nor is it earned by artificially extending the magic of consumer credit to those who could never qualify for credit under any real test of worth.

Surely, someone, somewhere, knew that this was all smoke and mirrors, but nobody cared. Why would they? Some of the biggest pirates were, after all, the largest contributors to the Bush permanent campaign.

But the truth is, "greed is good" has been the American byword roughly since Ronald Reagan. Since FDR, NO ONE has preached sacrifice for the common good and lived to tell the tale. (Remember Jimmy Carter asking you to turn down your thermostat? How prescient he was, and how we scorned and reviled him for it.)

Now we're in the soup, and it's a soup we've cooked for ourselves over these decades of high living. And I have no idea whether there yet survives, beneath the accumulated fatty rolls of our late-Empire self-indulgence, any hard nub of the civic virtue that characterizes a healthy republic. Can we decide, as a nation, to postpone getting a granite countertop or buying the latest gizmos so that together we can invest in building our national grid, which would enable us to make effective use of wind and solar, thereby weaning ourselves off foreign oil? Can we, as a nation, take away our kids' video games and make them spend more time studying math and science? Do we have the NATIONAL WILL to do these things? Is there a leader who can inspire us to rise to this most serious challenge to America's ascendancy? Or are we just too slack, too morally out of shape to get off the national couch, roll up our sleeves and get back to the work of building this nation, as a nation - not just a random collection of disparate individuals each in it only for what s/he can get?

Joe Sixpack, Again??

I wonder what has happened
To this country that I love;
Where once we chose our leaders
From those who rose above
The ordinary middle --
Those talented and wise --
Now we elect Joe Sixpack
‘Cause he’s ‘one of the guys’.

And when Joe Sixpack leads us toward
Disaster and abyss,
We gasp and say, My goodness,
How has it come to this?

Our economy in tatters,
A war that has no end;
Our reputation shattered,
Who can this ruin mend?

Surely we need someone who’s wise
And gifted beyond measure,
But many look to ‘hockey moms’
To restore our lost luster.

We like the bottom of the class,
‘Cause brilliance makes us fear;
We choose to choose someone who
Doesn’t know to say ‘nuCLEAR.”

Our schools are failing, yet we still
Believe ourselves superior;
Blinded by patriotic pride,
We can’t see our face in the mirror.

Are we like Rome - where people let
Old Nero play his fiddle?
Why do we vote for those who fit
The ordinary middle?

I see the American Century
Declining like the sun;
Where is the will to halt this slide
And raise us up again?

The face of hope may not look like
Your face, or even mine -
But he’s the best hope that we’ve got
To reverse our decline!

You know that what I say is true,
Your heart must tell you so;
Your ‘gut’ misled you in ‘04,
Why would you trust it now?

I wonder what will happen
To this country I hold dear
If we don’t take our blinders off
And see what’s all too clear.

We’ve let ourselves be led right to
The edge of the abyss,
Do you believe this can be stopped
By the bottom of the class?

Is his judgment good and sound?
Or does he improvise
Based on his ‘gut’, without the facts,
So very far from wise?

Did he know much about his choice
To be his running-mate?
Had he vetted carefully?
Or did he just tempt fate?

Will he use careful judgment in
A crisis with Iran?
Or will he rush into a war
Without a thorough plan?

We’re already in one such war,
Do we really need another
To leave us bankrupt and bereft,
A line of weeping mothers?

A hundred years he said we’d spend,
A century of treasure,
Just ask yourself which candidate
Is wisest, by this measure.

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In Media della Nostra Vita

Among the many 'pleasures' of middle age that await me is that of saying farewell to my parents. (Yes, I KNOW I'm lucky to still have them.)

At present I'm watching my beloved 88-year-old dad slowly diminish. His is a gentle slide towards the abyss, the heart weakening and the breath shortening, but mental and other faculties all intact; and I know I am supposed to be grateful, that he is not suffering too much, that he is not having to undergo any painful therapies, and that trips to the hospital, with all their attendant degradations (really, you can't even take a s---t alone), remain just occasional, at least for now.

But I'm not grateful, I'm still too busy being incredulous and upset that this is happening. Wasn't he going to be on the Today Show, Willard Scott saying "Happy Birthday, 103 years old today?" I am stuck at the part where I simply cannot imagine this world without him in it. Even if all he is doing at this point is crosswords and sudoku and reading books... the sweetness and wit remain -- a spark that even survives profound hearing loss and throws out a sudden riposte when you thought he wasn't listening.

It has been - instructive? - not sure how to characterize this - to see how the spirit truly shines through the thinning frame, how, as daily life concerns dwindle, core feelings get more exposed. I have witnessed his terrible remorse for having been among those who bombed the ball bearings plants of the Nazi war machine, an action which he knows cost many civilian lives. He sits at the kitchen table and the tears stream down his sunken cheeks. No reassurance that the Nazis had to be stopped from annihilating the Jewish people and the rest of Europe can allay his guilt and sadness for having bombed and killed people who were, most likely, forced labor rather than willing volunteers. All bombast about the larger goal of the Allied victory no longer speaks to him; he just sees the imagined faces of his victims.