Pronunciation: \ˈpā-trē-ət, -ˌät, chiefly British ˈpa-trē-ət\
Function: noun
Etymology: Middle French patriote compatriot, from Late Latin patriota, from Greek patriōtēs, from patria lineage, from patr-, patēr father
Date: 1605
: one who loves his or her country and supports its authority and interests
Patriotism is a lightening rod of a word to about the degree that Mount Rushmore is big and made out of rock. To mention it at a bar or party is to tap a fount of human passion -- some positive, some negative, some whimsically indifferent. War. Love of land and landscape. Freedom. Ethnic strife. History. Shared suffering. Indigenous industry. Folk music. Oppression. Food and drink. Fashion. All these things are connected to national identity, which is inseparably linked to patriotism. Each is a canvas on which the human spirit has been sketched. Thus, patriotism is intrinsic to civilized human identity because most of the things we think of as quintessentially civilized are intrinsically bound up with patriotism. That said, patriotism also seems to be a driving force behind virtually every act of barbarism from the dawn of history to now. With all this in mind, what then can we say about patriotism? Is being a patriot a good thing or not?
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I am an American living in Korea -- a country thirteen time zones from my home. The far side of the world. Geographically, ethnically, and culturally, it is hard to get more un-Western than this. Now and then I need a break from all the kimchi and komapsamniddas. I become intensely conscious of the fact that where I am from makes me who I am, makes me different from everybody who is from here. The wave of brown hair in the tide of black. The guy who claims to "get" banjo music and doesn't flip over 2PM or The Wondergirls. The only person who isn't programmed from birth to bow to his elders, accept drinks with two hands, and carry toilet paper with him when he travels. All this makes me the perpetual outsider. It reminds me that place makes a person, and the place I am from is very far from here. It makes me feel that my American-ness has, for once, become something precious, small, and slightly under threat.
"What is patriotism but the love of the food one ate as a child?" Lin Yutang, a Chinese author, asks.
If, as Mr. Lin and the first part of Webster's definition assert, to be patriotic is to love your homeland and its culture, then I think that living overseas draws out the cornbread-mandolin patriot in me. Makes me conscious of this side of myself in a way that I am not back home.
And, from this angle, patriotism does not seem an evil thing at all.
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But what about the 'supporting your country's interests' part of the definition? Especially when some of your country's interests are dangerous, immoral, or at least one-sided? To live in South Korea today is to be constantly reminded of the flesh-blood-and-razorwire consequences of American foreign policy. Compare Seoul -- a glass-and-chrome hornet’s nest of life, commerce, and ultraconsumerism -- to Pyongyang -- with its famine-ravaged Stalinist chic. Patriotism is without question one of the reasons why the two Korean capitals are such different places.
Amongst Koreans, the range of opinion about the United States is wide. Old men I've never met before often ask to shake my hand simply because I'm American. I can’t fathom this. Faces tanned to rawhide, vice-like handshakes. They smile broadly, give me thumbs up, tell me "Americans are gentleman." Sixty years later, MacArthur is still a rock star in Korea. Other people, usually younger, say that they hate America because of the misdeeds of our soldiers and the inflammatory effect American diplomacy has had on North Korea.
Almost every day, I hear the roar of American or South Korean jets tearing across the hazy blue sky on patrol. A few weeks ago, a U.S./Korean armada including the supercarrier George Washington ran war-games in the Sea of Japan -- despite North Korean threats of war. More such exercises were scheduled for the Yellow Sea. Nuclear poker is an everyday thing here.
Even living in Hapduk -- backwater of Korean backwaters -- fatigue-clad Korean Army personnel are omnipresent. All my students -- pimple faced boys who can barely grow a mustache -- know that after graduation they must serve twenty-one months in the military. My coteacher's little brother just started his service this summer. She says she fears for him. Given the tension between North Korea and the West after the Cheonan sinking, I can understand this. One the surface, few seem worried, but many are nervous.
All of this is inescapably a consequence of the second, "supporting-its-interests" part of Webster's definition of patriotism. Neoliberal, free-trade patriotism. Nuclear-powered patriotism. Guns-and-butter patriotism.
Tolstoy draws a bead on this strain of patriotism when he writes in Christianity and Patriotism:
Patriotism […] for rulers is nothing else than a tool for achieving their power-hungry and money-hungry goals, and for the ruled it means renouncing their human dignity, reason, conscience, and slavish submission to those in power. […] Patriotism is slavery.
Balances of power and deterrence and all that usual necessary-evil type jazz notwithstanding, such patriotism seems does seem pretty evil indeed.
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Propaganda, past and present, has worked on many levels that you can pretty much unequivocally denounce. Oversimplification of conflicts that are just not simple. Dehumanization of people who are just as human as us. Obfuscation of important-but-inconvenient details. These are easy targets. The basic implicit premise of most propaganda, though, is not so easy to condemn. Virtually all such appeals imply that the things its audience loves -- home, culture, identity as a person -- are under threat. The “under threat” part usually is not true. But the part about loving one's home/culture/identity is absolutely true. If it wasn't, all the oversimplifying/dehumanizing/lying that propaganda does would not work. So, in a weird sort of way, the very-human food-and-music part of patriotism actuates the nuclear-poker parts that dehumanize other people and us through the acts of violence we commit against them. Thus, patriotism is not two disparate sentiments shoehorned into the same word, but rather a microcosm of dualistic human nature itself. A paradox – beautiful-but-damned. The best thing about us, and the worst. Pascale's scum and glory of the universe in miniature.
Here's to the scum, and the glory that is woven into it.
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