Patriotism is a willingness to stand against the natural tendency that conforms history to a national ideal through the development of a myth. A deep-rooted patriotism will not allow us to escape the ideal through the cheap pretense of having achieved it.
America has lynched a good many black men and women, pacifists and other dissenters in it’s time. The origin of that word is instructive. During the American Revolution, Colonel Charles Lynch of Virginia developed the practice of hanging people he considered Loyalists—pacifists and such—by “by their limbs from a walnut tree in his yard until the screamed, ‘Liberty forever!’”* Ideals die when they are mortified by hypocrisy. Patriotism is sure to keep stories like this alive as part of our history—stories that remind us we are not yet who we wish to be.
When Martin Luther King spoke of the national ideal as a promissory note America had not yet redeemed, as a check it had yet to cash, he was being a patriot in this best sense of the word. When he insisted upon the truth, he refused the myth, kept the ideal alive and promulgated it into my generation. The black man knew that Lincoln’s emancipation proclamation did not free a soul. The black woman knew that she was not equal with her white sister. She and her husband could not vote, were together kept in stark poverty and lived in fear of what Colonel Lynch began in 1776. But history, covering up many unpleasant American truths, had forgotten them and often covered up their bodies.
In her book, “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek,” Annie Dillard offers a harrowing narrative about watching a frog among the stones on the bank of that creek. She writes grimly of seeing it suddenly collapse into itself, a victim of some invisible predator that inserts a needlelike appendage into live reptilian bodies and instantly sucks out its innards.
The real revisionist history is the history that is written first, in the full blush of our guilt, to make some national sin palatable, some war just. It is this myth making process that sucks truth out of the ideal and, left unchallenged, leaves a hollowed skin in its place. What we today call revisionist history is most often an attempt to get to the truth of what happened. It is written not to tarnish the ideal, but to keep it from collapsing in upon itself so that the ideal can travel the distance between generations unmolested.
America has lynched a good many black men and women, pacifists and other dissenters in it’s time. The origin of that word is instructive. During the American Revolution, Colonel Charles Lynch of Virginia developed the practice of hanging people he considered Loyalists—pacifists and such—by “by their limbs from a walnut tree in his yard until the screamed, ‘Liberty forever!’”* Ideals die when they are mortified by hypocrisy. Patriotism is sure to keep stories like this alive as part of our history—stories that remind us we are not yet who we wish to be.
When Martin Luther King spoke of the national ideal as a promissory note America had not yet redeemed, as a check it had yet to cash, he was being a patriot in this best sense of the word. When he insisted upon the truth, he refused the myth, kept the ideal alive and promulgated it into my generation. The black man knew that Lincoln’s emancipation proclamation did not free a soul. The black woman knew that she was not equal with her white sister. She and her husband could not vote, were together kept in stark poverty and lived in fear of what Colonel Lynch began in 1776. But history, covering up many unpleasant American truths, had forgotten them and often covered up their bodies.
In her book, “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek,” Annie Dillard offers a harrowing narrative about watching a frog among the stones on the bank of that creek. She writes grimly of seeing it suddenly collapse into itself, a victim of some invisible predator that inserts a needlelike appendage into live reptilian bodies and instantly sucks out its innards.
The real revisionist history is the history that is written first, in the full blush of our guilt, to make some national sin palatable, some war just. It is this myth making process that sucks truth out of the ideal and, left unchallenged, leaves a hollowed skin in its place. What we today call revisionist history is most often an attempt to get to the truth of what happened. It is written not to tarnish the ideal, but to keep it from collapsing in upon itself so that the ideal can travel the distance between generations unmolested.
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In the 1950s, myth-making had all but overcome the American conscience and paved the way to a Disneyland digest of the American ideal. Patriots refused the substitution. They paid attention to the terrors and horrors of American life and the history that led to them. Men like Martin Luther King refused to let America escape its ideal through the cheap pretense of having achieved it. The need for this kind of patriot is as desperate today as it was then. We are looking for new incarnations. God grant that they may arise.
* Mark Kurlansky, “Nonviolence: Twenty-Five Lessons from the History of a Dangerous Idea” © 2006 Modern Library, New York, page 82
* Mark Kurlansky, “Nonviolence: Twenty-Five Lessons from the History of a Dangerous Idea” © 2006 Modern Library, New York, page 82
