|
Noonan the neocon nixes abstract notion of nationhood
The neocons are collapsing (or should I say they’re apocalypsing) all around us! They’re turning against their own ideology, even as they refuse to admit that they’ve been relentlessly pushing that ideology on us for the last 20 or 30 years. First, see what Peggy Noonan was saying (as reported by Jim Kalb at VFR) in June 2002:
…[T]he essence of American patriotism is a felt and spoken love for and fidelity to the ideas and ideals our country represents and was invented to advance— freedom, equality, pluralism. “We hold these truths…” The word Homeland suggests another kind of patriotism—a vaguely European sort. “We have the best Alps, the most elegant language; we make the best cheese, had the bravest generals.” It summons images of men in spiked helmets lobbing pitchers of beer at outsiders during Oktoberfest.In other words, normal, traditional, non-ideological love of country is “mud.” The only legitimate patriotism is a love of universalist ideas. Did anyone ever show such disdain for normal people and normal patriotism? Now see what Noonan says today:
The other possibility is that the administration’s slow and ambivalent action [on illegal immigration] is the result of being lost in some geopolitical-globalist abstract-athon that has left them puffed with the rightness of their superior knowledge, sure in their membership in a higher brotherhood, and looking down on the low concerns of normal Americans living in America.The reader who sent the article to me comments: “Oh, the irony of this, from Noonan, who has been looking down on the low concerns of normal Americans for years!”
One weird thing about the dismissal of normal patriotism as “love of mud” is that most of our patriotic songs appeal to exactly that, particularly the way our country’s vastness, unspoiled beauty, and diversity mimic its appeal to pioneering spirits, productive work, lack of restraints on individual talent, and our historical freedoms. For people that talk often of a “civic religion” of American patriotism, the neoconservatives seem awfully narrow and selective in their memories of our actual, historically-received patriotic symbols and rituals. [LA adds: This reminds me of how Irving Kristol and Gertrude Himmelfarb complacently told an interviewer how they had lived for 10 years in an apartment directly across from Central Park and had never gone for a walk in the Park—there’s an awful lot of “mud” in that Park.]I thank Chris for making clear to us what Noonan really meant by mud: she meant the physical being of a country, of our country. For Noonan, spacious skies, amber waves of grain, purple mountain majesties, fruited plains, land where our fathers died, land of the pilgrims’ pride, every mountain side, America’s name that we love, her rocks and rills, her woods and templed hills, the redwood forest, the gulf stream waters, the ribbon of highway, the endless skyway, the golden valley—if we care for any of these things, if they make us love our land more than other lands, then it’s all contemptible mud. And it makes sense, doesn’ it? Just as neocons regard as evil and racist any value attached to the physical reality of a distinct people, they regard as primitive and chauvinistic any value attached to the physical being of a particular country.
Email entry |