I’m not the sort of person who voluntarily stands for the flag, or for the official national anthem with lyrics by Francis Scott Key. I certainly don’t kneel before the cross; I have never accepted that one must be any sort of Christian to be an American. Nor have I ever truly pledged allegiance to the flag of the United States of America. I merely milli-vannili’d the words to the pledge at school.
Some will say this makes me unpatriotic at best. Let them. I was never their idea of an American, let alone their idea of a patriot. But before we continue, Occasional Reader, indulge me as I share a national anthem that does move me in a way that “The Star-Spangled Banner” cannot.
This land is your land, this land is my land From California to the New York island, From the redwood forest to the Gulf Stream waters; This land was made for you and me.
As I was walking that ribbon of highway I saw above me that endless skyway; I saw below me that golden valley; This land was made for you and me.
I've roamed and rambled and I followed my footsteps To the sparkling sands of her diamond deserts; And all around me a voice was sounding; This land was made for you and me.
When the sun came shining, and I was strolling, And the wheat fields waving and the dust clouds rolling, As the fog was lifting a voice was chanting: This land was made for you and me.
As I went walking I saw a sign there, And on the sign it said "No Trespassing." But on the other side it didn't say nothing. That side was made for you and me.
In the shadow of the steeple I saw my people, By the relief office I seen my people; As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking Is this land made for you and me?
Nobody living can ever stop me, As I go walking that freedom highway; Nobody living can ever make me turn back This land was made for you and me.
The following might mark me as old or out of touch: I refuse to accept that America is about blood and soil. I am saying that as somebody who could claim to be a “heritage American” by virtue of the fact that I have ancestors on my mother’s side (a branch of the Lovelaces in New York) who came to the country before the American Revolution. Some fought for independence, too. Some fought for the Union, and one lost an eye to a Confederate round.
Some of my ancestors, however, came to the United States after the Revolution, if not after the Civil War. They did not all come voluntarily, either. I have Black ancestors, the descendants of African men and women taken as prisoners of war in their homelands and sold into slavery by their captors. I have Jewish ancestors who fled pogroms. I have Irish and Polish ancestors who fled poverty and starvation. I have no idea whether my French ancestors freely chose to emigrate or not.
What does all of that mean? It’s complicated. I’m a descendent of oppressors and the oppressed. Some of my ancestors were enslaved. Others were slaveowners.
If nothing else, it leads me to scoff when anybody proposes a national identity for white people. The very notion of whiteness is one that demands that one sacrifice all ties to one’s national origins, culture, and language so that one might assimilate and become the ruling classes’ idea of an American.
Thus I find the notion of one’s claim to American identity depending on one’s ancestry—a claim pushed by the likes of Vice President J. D. Vance —utterly repugnant. You are not more of an American than anybody else because you can trace your ancestry in this country back to before the Revolution. If we’re to play that game, then the descendants of the First Nations have us all handily beaten. And if you yourself claim descent from the First Nations, and insist on having a greater claim to being an American, I will still disagree with you.
The very notion of one’s claim to Americanness being dependent on one’s ancestry seems to fly in the face of the ideals on which this country had been founded two hundred and fifty years ago. The men who attended the Second Continental Congress in 1776 made their intent plain:
In Congress, July 4, 1776
The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America, When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,—That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.--Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.
...all men are created
equal...
We don’t give that much thought, except perhaps to ask, what about women?
or
to note that many of the signatories were slaveholders—most notoriously Thomas Jefferson. We are not
wrong to do so. The Founders were only men, after all. They might have held ideals, but they did not
consistently live up to them. Regardless, what they accomplished set the stage for others to take up the cause
of Liberty and demand further expansions of individual rights, if not individual sovereignty.
It might bear mentioning that until recently “Man” and “humanity” were all but synonymous. This being the case, this preamble on its own is a rhetorical ICBM launched across the Atlantic Ocean at London. Though aimed at King George III and his government, the fallout spread across Europe, and then the world.
Consider also the mention of the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God. This is not God as understood by most Christians, let alone most traditional Catholics, right-wing cafeteria Catholics like Vance, or evangelical Christians. This is a direct reference to Deism, and to a God who set the universe in motion but does not interfere with Creation.
If the Deism of many of the Founders does not put paid to the notion of the United States as a country founded on Christianity, and you are the sort of Christian supremacist who insists on taking literally the parts of the Bible that you find agreeable, then I defy you to take another look at Romans 13, verses 1-7, and perhaps pray in private for understanding:
- Let every soul be subject to higher powers: for there is no power but from God: and those that are, are ordained of God.
- Therefore he that resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God. And they that resist, purchase to themselves damnation.
- For princes are not a terror to the good work, but to the evil. Wilt thou then not be afraid of the power? Do that which is good: and thou shalt have praise from the same.
- For he is God's minister to thee, for good. But if thou do that which is evil, fear: for he beareth not the sword in vain. For he is God's minister: an avenger to execute wrath upon him that doth evil.
- Wherefore be subject of necessity, not only for wrath, but also for conscience' sake.
- For therefore also you pay tribute. For they are the ministers of God, serving unto this purpose.
- Render therefore to all men their dues. Tribute, to whom tribute is due: custom, to whom custom: fear, to whom fear: honour, to whom honour.
If Christianity demands obedience of its adherents, not merely to religious authorities within the church, but toward secular authorities, then how can a nation founded in revolutionary defiance be a Christian national in the sense that it was founded on the Christian religion? The US might still be mostly Christian in terms of demography. But the historical fact lends itself more toward the United States as a Satanic nation than a Christian one.
It bears mentioning that Romans 13 was no doubt convenient to the aims of Constantine, who made the church a whore of the state to consolidate his power over the Roman Empire; one could almost suspect that the text attibuted to St. Paul might instead of been written by committee. After all, the Bible had been compiled by a succession of committees and synods beginning with the Council of Nicea, which began codifying early Christianity into a coherent belief system that served the state instead of threatening it with the the Nicene Creed and the Apostles’ Creed.
How can a religion that demands obedience to authority be compatible with a Declaration of Independence that
explicitly says, That whenever any
Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it,
and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such
form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
That doesn’t make sense to
me. Nor does it make sense that anybody claiming to be an American or a patriot would accept that some people
are or should be less American because they don‘t have five generations of ancestors buried in a
churchyard in Kentucky, as J. D. Vance defines heritage:
As a United States senator, I get to represent millions of people in the great state of Ohio with similar stories, and it is the great honor of my life.
Now in that cemetery, there are people who were born around the time of the Civil War. And if, as I hope, my wife and I are eventually laid to rest there, and our kids follow us, there will be seven generations just in that small mountain cemetery plot in eastern Kentucky. Seven generations of people who have fought for this country. Who have built this country. Who have made things in this country. And who would fight and die to protect this country if they were asked to.
Now. Now that's not just an idea, my friends. That's not just a set of principle. Even though the ideas and the principles are great, that is a homeland. That is our homeland. People will not fight for abstractions, but they will fight for their home.
Fuck this utter clown and the false dichotomy he rode in on. Vance has ancestors who fought in the Civil War? Fine. But as I noted earlier, so did I, and I reserve the right to disagree with Vance. For somebody who graduated from Yale Law and should presumably have been given cursory exposure to the philosophy of the Enlightenment, particularly that of David Hume, he seems to have a habit of trying to derive ought from an is he cannot even prove.
I refuse to accept that they were fighting merely for blood and soil, even if that had been a common slogan. Both sides were fighting for ideals, and what is an ideal but an abstraction of which people are determined to make a concrete reality? What about the millions of American men who fought in Europe and the Pacific Ocean during World War II? Were they fighting merely for their homeland, or were they fighting for ideals as well?
For my part, I am fighting right now. I chose to take up a pen instead of a sword. I do not want to kill, but to persuade those who are willing to listen, and to demonstrate to those who will not that they face opposition. I don’t do this for my homeland. The closest I have to a homeland is New York City, but I never lived there. Because of my parents’ poverty, I grew up in a succession of rentals around the city, moving at least a dozen times before I was thirteen years old.
As for the town in which I spent the latter half of my childhood and then my adolescence? I left it behind thirty years ago, and that ungrateful country shall not even have my bones. It is not for the town in which I grew up that I insist on putting forth my idea of America. It is not even for New York City. It is for the very abstractions J. D. Vance denigrated in his 2024 acceptance speech before the Republican National Committee.
Vance might call these abstractions, but without them, what even is America if not the force for tyranny that its most vicious critics claim it is? Why did USMC Major General Smedley Butler expose the Business Plot of 1933 (a Republican plot) and then write War is a Racket in 1935? Did he not believe in America, that America was founded in greatness and could be made greater still through the concerted efforts of her citizenry?
I wrote at the beginning that I do not stand for the flag nor pledge allegiance to it. Likewise, I do not kneel to the cross. I am not a Christian, but I am an American, and my allegiance is not to the flag, or even the Republic for which it stands, but the Constitution of the United States -- from which the government of the United States draws its just powers when it homors the Constitution.
Some of a more conservative persuasion might claim that I am ungrateful. They are welcome to do so. I recognize no obligation to perform a gratitude that stifles dissent. As an American, it is my right as both a citizen and a human being to speak up when I see my country falling short of the ideals on which it was founded, or outright betraying them. It is for that reason that I am writing this tonight, Occasional Reader, on the night of the Fourth of July, two hundred and fifty years after the ratification of the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia.
I never had any sympathy for “Make America Great Again” because I grew up believing that my country was great from the start, is still great, but could be greater still. However, it can only become greater, or be made a more perfect Union, if we hew ever closer to the ideals of universal liberty and equality that inspired the American Revolution in the first place. America must be a nation of ideas, first and foremost, because otherwise it can never become one out of many. When we divide ourselves each against the other by tribe, or nation, or faith, we betray every one of our ancestors who chose America by coming here.
Nor can we keep looking back at our past. To paraphrase Michael Moorcock’s The
Revenge of the Rose, a nation that focuses too much on its past soon has nothing but its past to offer!
That is not an America for which I would take up either pen or sword. I mentioned Moorcock because I
have come to think that America is—like Tanelorn or Leo Tolstoy’s Kingdom of God—both a place and
an idea one carries within the mind and heart. One need not come to America; by working in concert
with others one could build America where one stands. It won’t be easy. It is inherently fragile
because it stands in defiance of entropy and humanity’s tendency toward blind obedience to authority. It is,
nonetheless, worth struggling to create and to maintain. As Camus wrote, One must imagine Sisyphus
happy.
At least, that is how I feel. Nor is this wholly abstract philosophy for me. It is not merely a matter of principle. This is personal, and thus political. My wife, Madam Catastrophy, is herself an immigrant. She came to the US from Australia in 2004 to marry me, when I had been willing to emigrate for her sake. Am I truly to accept that she is less of an American because she chose to become a citizen and had to work to earn her citizenship instead of possessing it by birthright?
Too many of my fellow Americans seem to think so. Well, they are no friends of mine. Regardless, they have no less a right to their opinion than I have to mine. They have an equal right to speak their mind, as well; the fact that I disagree with them does not prove that their opinions are objectively wrong.