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?