[Peace-discuss] Patriotism Lite by Paul Street

[Morton K. Brussel]

ZNet Commentary
Patriotism Lite August 05, 2005
By Paul  Street

A United States History professor I know tells me an interesting  
story from late March of 2003. "How many of you," she asked her U.S.  
History class that fateful month, "support the American war on Iraq."  
Two-thirds of the 100 students in her lecture hall raised their  
hands. "Okay," she said, "how many of you are willing to enlist in  
the armed forces to join the war?" One hand went up in response to  
the second question.

The first section of last Sunday's New York Times contains an  
interesting article titled "All Quiet on the Home Front and Some  
Soldiers Are Asking Why." The story's author Thom Shanker cites a  
number of American military officials and academic experts on the  
disconnect between the United States' officially declared commitment  
to waging an all-out "War on Terror" and Americans' reluctance to  
sacrifice in support of that war.
Noticing the absence of any "serious talk" of "a tax increase to  
force Americans to cover the $5 billion a month in costs from Iraq,  
Afghanistan and new counterterrorism missions" and the lack of  
"concerted efforts like the savings bond drive or gasoline rationing  
that helped unite the country behind its fighting forces in wars  
past," Shanker quotes an officer veteran of the Iraq occupation to  
chilling effect. "Nobody in America is asked to sacrifice," this  
officer says, "except us." By "us," he means the armed forces.

Shanker also quotes the venerable military sociologist Charles  
Moskos, who criticizes what he calls Americans' "patriotism lite,"  
whereby "the political leaders are afraid to ask the public for any  
real sacrifices." This, Moskos says, "doesn't speak too highly of the  
citizenry." "It's almost," says a retired U.S. military official, "as  
if the politicians want to be able to declare war and at the same  
time maintain a sense of normalcy" (Thom Shanker, "All Quiet on the  
Home Front and Some Soldiers Are Asking Why," New York Times, 24  
July, 2005, A17)

There's a lot missing in Shanker's article, consistent with  
mainstream U.S. journalism's general reluctance to take seriously the  
extent to which Americans are divided along related lines of class  
and power. There's nothing about the sacrifice imposed on the many  
millions of poor and otherwise disadvantaged Americans who are seeing  
needed social programs cut to pay for the deadly, deficit-generating  
combination of massive "defense" (empire) expenditures with huge tax  
cuts for the rich. There's nothing about the millions of Americans  
workers thrown out of work by the also-massive American trade  
deficit, which is widened by the Bush administration's determination  
to privilege military expenditures over "homeland" economic vitality.
There's nothing about the Bush administration's determination to use  
the "war on terror" (curiously expanded to include the occupation of  
Iraq, a country that posed no terrorist or other threat to the U.S.  
in 2003) as cover for a radically regressive domestic policy agenda  
that (more than simply resisting a "tax increase" to pay for the war)  
grants gigantic giveaways (tax and otherwise) to the privileged few.  
There's nothing, of course, about the racist, imperialist, and  
(curiously enough) terrorist nature of "war on terror," amply  
displayed in the prisons of U.S. occupation and in the broad  
indifference that American government and media show towards the many  
innocent Arab victims of U.S. military actions in the Middle East -  
the de-personalized "collateral damage" of supposed American  
"liberation."
There's nothing about the difference between the arguably genuine  
threat posed to Americans by the actual fascist Axis of the 1940s  
(when Uncle Sam successfully advanced savings bond and gasoline- 
rationing drives to "unite the country behind its fighting forces")  
and the concocted and imaginary threat posed by Iraq (one part of  
Bush's laughable 2002 "State of the Union" construction - the "Axis  
of Evil") in 2002 and 2003.

There's little said about the American citizenry's intelligent  
skepticism towards Bush's invasion of Iraq and his determination to  
merge that invasion with a "war on terror." To his credit, however,  
Shanker quotes a perceptive academic who notes that "the public" sees  
"the ongoing mission in Iraq...in a different light than a terrorist  
attack on American soil." "The public wants very much to support the  
troops" in Iraq, this professor says, "but it doesn't really believe  
in the mission. Most consider it a war of choice, and a majority -  
although a thin one - thinks it was the wrong choice."

Such skepticism towards Bush's war on Iraq is something different  
than Dr. Moskos' "patriotism lite." It seems more like a patriotism  
done right, one that speaks highly of a significant part of the  
citizenry. It rejects blind obedience to the deceptive rhetoric of  
militaristic elites who want mass consent to illegal wars in  
accordance with the authoritarian slogan, "My Country, Right or Wrong."

Still, there is a very real ongoing conflict between the hard,  
murderous requirements of militarism and the soft, "normalcy"-craving  
imperatives of American consumer capitalism, which tries to reduce  
democratic citizenship to the uninterrupted and often trivial  
pursuit, purchase, and enjoyment of commodities. The "patriotism  
lite" charge applies reasonably to that significant part of the  
American populace that is content to let predominantly working-class  
others fight and die in imperial campaigns for which they personally  
refuse to sacrifice in substantive way.
"Support Our Troops" is an often cheap slogan on the back of many  
suburban gas-guzzling SUV's loaded with middle-class soccer kids and  
with relatively affluent Moms and Dads who would never enlist their  
children in a dangerous American-imperial service that relies almost  
entirely (as Moskos and others have shown) on the children of  
America's poor and working classes. Nowhere is the slogan cheaper  
than in the oval office, whose Fortunate Son inhabitant George "Bring  
'Em On" Bush continues his Vietnam-era record of cheering on poorer  
and browner other Americans to death and destruction in deceptively  
sold imperial campaigns he prefers to personally sit out.

Paul Street (pstreet at cul-chicago.org) is a writer and researcher in  
Chicago, IL. He is the author of Empire and Inequality: America and  
the World Since 9/11 (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2004) and  
Segregated Schools: Race, Class, and Educational Apartheid in the  
Post-Civil Rights Era (New York, NY: Routledge, 2005)