After 9/11 we saw lots of cars flying American flags. Where I live, and where we have many older people who tend to be conservative, you can still see cars flying American flags. Time was, any car flying the American flag was the President's car or the car of an American ambassador abroad.
So 9/11 stirred up a lot of patriotism. I think partly it was an expression of defiance to the terrorists but also perhaps sort of having a chip on America's collective shoulder. Just as my sister, living in Germany with her US Army husband around 1955, wore a Jewish star around her neck, sort of saying, "I dare you to discriminate against me—because I'm American, we whipped your Nazi, anti-Semitic ass, and now we're occupying your country."
As a bit of a digression: The wars we've been engaged in have produced a lot of "Support Our Troops" decals and bumper stickers on cars—and they're still there. I'd like to reply to the "support our troops" crowd that I support the troops by advocating bringing them home. Certainly they'd be safer that way and we'd save all the human suffering of war injuries and deaths. On the other hand, it's undoubtedly true that some soldiers want to be "over there." Some will say they want to defend their country--but my feeling is that that's based on incorrect ideas. It's not clear to me that the US invaded Iraq because our country was being threatened (remember, the "weapons of mass destruction" were never found).
Being engaged in a war calls up patriotism. This is fine except that, along with that patriotism there often can be an intolerance of criticism of the country. I remember during the Vietnam War I was told things like, "We don't need your kind in this country," and "Why don't you get out of the country if you don't like it?" People were saying, "My country, right or wrong"—which I thought was a well-nigh appalling idea. Quite recently, in response to a comment I wrote on Huffington Post, I was called "commie"--which if nothing else strikes me as a rather anachronistic term. I thought the McCarthy Era was long past and that we had stopped calling people "commie."
You can view the current climate in this post-9/11 US as an upsurge of patriotism. But it might be that America has moved to the Right. One of my professors used to be fond of saying that the prevailing philosophy is a pendulum that continually swings between liberal and conservative.
And now I learn of some of the things that were said by the Republican Presidential candidates in their most recent debate. They strike me as militaristic, chest-beating comments. (We used to hear the terms hawk and hawkish, in the Vietnam War era.) Mitt Romney mentioned that attacking Iran should not be out of the question, and Cain said he wants to bring back waterboarding of prisoners or detainees:
But Cain also provided one of the most striking moments when he argued in favor of the use of "enhanced interrogation" -- including the now-rejected technique of waterboarding -- in the fight against terrorism, a proposal that is likely to outrage many who thought the era of American-sponsored torture was over.
"I will trust the judgment of our military to determine what is torture and what is not torture," Cain said. Asked about waterboarding in particular, he replied, "I would return to that policy. I don't see it as torture, I see it as an enhanced interrogation technique." [HuffPost: Politics]
(To again digress: I have to comment on that term. My reply to Cain is that "enhanced interrogation technique" was an abominable euphemism coined by the Bush administration simply to call torture by some other name. Politicians know very well the power of words, the power of a name, that what you call something matters. When the United States was supporting anti-government fighters in Nicaragua during the Reagan administration, they were "freedom fighters." Whether people fighting against their government are "freedom fighters" or "rebels" simply depends on whether our government views them as on our side or not.)
I wish I could figure out why advocating cruel things like waterboarding and capital punishment seems to correlate with holding a number of other views. Is it a matter of very general personality type or world view? In an earlier post I mentioned a student who called himself a libertarian and was defending property rights to the degree that he favored punishing a man who stole a loaf of bread to feed his starving family. Extreme conservatives like that--in my view, at least--have no humanity, no empathy, or no imagination that would enable them to see themselves in the other person's shoes.
Copyright © 2011 by Richard Stein
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