Hugh Hewitt, writing about his book tour in a March 30 post, mentions in passing that "The prospect of Democrats in control in time of war means a replay of the Vietnam War endgame."
He's right, and of course he's not the only one to give reasons why the US must not walk away in Iraq. Let's begin with the usual: 1) to help make the U.S. more secure and 2) to help the Iraqis and avoid civil war there if we can.
But there's another reason, a serious one. It's that we don't want to hand our youngest citizens what the baby boomers handed us: crippling self doubt about our country.
Oh yes, we post-boomers have all had our brains washed to think that learning to be suspicious about the U.S.--its history, its motives, its accomplishments--is the same as "critical thinking," that genuinely valuable liberal arts skill. "We won't get fooled again," we tell ourselves.
Unfortunately, all we've received is this suspicion. We haven't received the national myth, the positive image of America, intact. All the suspiciousness we've been taught was not presented within a context that might achieve a truly balanced perception. Instead, the idea of patriotism was mocked and declared untenable if not downright naive.
The problem is what I call the "Indestructible Virtue Fantasy" (more on this another time, by which point I hope to think of a better term for it). Liberal educators and other influential people imagine that when they attack tradition or traditional values, they're merely tearing away at some phony, worthless practice. All the while they fantasize that the virtues of our culture, the one's of which they so ostentatiously approve, will survive their assaults, no matter how violent.
Yet anyone who has ever seen or been a gifted child constantly criticized or reprimanded, sometimes sharply, by a well-intentioned parent or coach knows this behavior. The parent imagines they are only perfecting the gift while sculpting away the extraneous. But they don't wind up with a perfect kid; they wind up with an insecure and self-persecuting kid. The tragedy is, they often end up undermining or distorting the very thing they were trying to perfect.
This situation has an analogy on the political left. Those liberal educators and influential others seem bent on sculpting a perfect America by violently chipping away any material they find inconvenient or uncomfortable. And they call this chipping "dissent" and vigorously (and lamely) defend, in their self-aggrandizing way, as the very essence of patriotism.
In this case, too many try to perfect the gift, the America they imagine might or should be, by savaging the allegedly distorted myth of America, America the Good -- the America emblemized by the Statue of Liberty, the one that saved Europe in WWI, the one that saved the world in WWII.
Is this image a fiction? Yes, partly. In terms of sterile facts it is not the full truth. But myth is not, by definition, a compendium of sterile facts. Myth captures a larger truth through broadstrokes; it is impressionistic, more coherent or even more beautiful when beheld at a distance. But this image is a not a contemptible illusion just because it must be viewed a few steps back. What it conveys is a broad truth, but it is a truth nonetheless. And this truth is not diminished because one standing up close is unable to see it all, or because, at extremely close range, he sees flaws in the brushstrokes.
What they've really delivered us is another, opposite, perhaps even more distorted myth: America the Horrible. There's no "balance," but rather toxic imbalance.
Writing on immigration and assimiliation, Peggy Noonan makes a similar point (much more elegantly) in March 30's WSJ. Here's the second half:
What this all got me thinking about, the next day, was . . . immigration. I know that seems a lurch, but there's a part of the debate that isn't sufficiently noted. There are a variety of things driving American anxiety about illegal immigration and we all know them--economic arguments, the danger of porous borders in the age of terrorism, with anyone able to come in.
But there's another thing. And it's not fear about "them." It's anxiety about us.
It's the broad public knowledge, or intuition, in America, that we are not assimilating our immigrants patriotically. And if you don't do that, you'll lose it all.
We used to do it. We loved our country with full-throated love, we had no ambivalence. We had pride and appreciation. We were a free country. We communicated our pride and delight in this in a million ways--in our schools, our movies, our popular songs, our newspapers. It was just there, in the air. Immigrants breathed it in. That's how the last great wave of immigrants, the European wave of 1880-1920, was turned into a great wave of Americans.
We are not assimilating our immigrants patriotically now. We are assimilating them culturally. Within a generation their children speak Valley Girl on cell phones. "So I'm like 'no," and he's all 'yeah,' and I'm like, 'In your dreams.' " Whether their parents are from Trinidad, Bosnia, Lebanon or Chile, their children, once Americans, know the same music, the same references, watch the same shows. And to a degree and in a way it will hold them together. But not forever and not in a crunch.
So far we are assimilating our immigrants economically, too. They come here and work. Good.
But we are not communicating love of country. We are not giving them the great legend of our country. We are losing that great legend.
What is the legend, the myth? That God made this a special place. That they're joining something special. That the streets are paved with more than gold--they're paved with the greatest thoughts man ever had, the greatest decisions he ever made, about how to live. We have free thought, free speech, freedom of worship. Look at the literature of the Republic: the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Federalist papers. Look at the great rich history, the courage and sacrifice, the house-raisings, the stubbornness. The Puritans, the Indians, the City on a Hill.
The genius cluster--Jefferson, Hamilton, Adams, Madison, Franklin, all the rest--that came along at the exact same moment to lead us. And then Washington, a great man in the greatest way, not in unearned gifts well used (i.e., a high IQ followed by high attainment) but in character, in moral nature effortfully developed. How did that happen? How did we get so lucky? (I once asked a great historian if he had thoughts on this, and he nodded. He said he had come to believe it was "providential.")
We fought a war to free slaves. We sent millions of white men to battle and destroyed a portion of our nation to free millions of black men. What kind of nation does this? We went to Europe, fought, died and won, and then taxed ourselves to save our enemies with the Marshall Plan. What kind of nation does this? Soviet communism stalked the world and we were the ones who steeled ourselves and taxed ourselves to stop it. Again: What kind of nation does this?
Only a very great one. Maybe the greatest of all.
Do we teach our immigrants that this is what they're joining? That this is the tradition they will now continue, and uphold?
Do we, today, act as if this is such a special place? No, not always, not even often. American exceptionalism is so yesterday. We don't want to be impolite. We don't want to offend. We don't want to seem narrow. In the age of globalism, honest patriotism seems like a faux pas.
And yet what is true of people is probably true of nations: if you don't have a well-grounded respect for yourself, you won't long sustain a well-grounded respect for others.
Because we do not communicate to our immigrants, legal and illegal, that they have joined something special, some of them, understandably, get the impression they've joined not a great enterprise but a big box store. A big box store on the highway where you can get anything cheap. It's a good place. But it has no legends, no meaning, and it imparts no spirit.
Who is at fault? Those of us who let the myth die, or let it change, or refused to let it be told. The politically correct nitwit teaching the seventh-grade history class who decides the impressionable young minds before him need to be informed, as their first serious history lesson, that the Founders were hypocrites, the Bill of Rights nothing new and imperfect in any case, that the Indians were victims of genocide, that Lincoln was a clinically depressed homosexual who compensated for the storms within by creating storms without . . .
You can turn any history into mud. You can turn great men and women into mud too, if you want to.
And it's not just the nitwits, wherever they are, in the schools, the academy, the media, though they're all harmful enough. It's also the people who mean to be honestly and legitimately critical, to provide a new look at the old text. They're not noticing that the old text--the legend, the myth--isn't being taught anymore. Only the commentary is. But if all the commentary is doubting and critical, how will our kids know what to love and revere? How will they know how to balance criticism if they've never heard the positive side of the argument?
Those who teach, and who think for a living about American history, need to be told: Keep the text, teach the text, and only then, if you must, deconstruct the text.
When you don't love something you lose it. If we do not teach new Americans to love their country, and not for braying or nationalistic reasons but for reasons of honest and thoughtful appreciation, and gratitude, for a history that is something new in the long story of man, then we will begin to lose it. That Medal of Honor winner, Leo Thorsness, who couldn't quite find the words--he only found it hard to put everything into words because he knew the story, the legend, and knew it so well. Only then do you become "emotional about it." Only then are you truly American.
