Conspicuously Unpatriotic?

Playboy recently defined 'Hexpatriots' as people who bash America but haven't left the country, and sometimes that’s me. I don't fuss about my coffee, there's no coffee to fuss about. Read on and you might get a notion why I might not come off as particularly ‘pro-American.’

I've wandered all over the political map in my life, from my Marxist junior high days to the anarcho-capitalist present. I've been pro-abortion and seen the error of my ways. I've gone from believing in a Maximum Wage to not even believing there should be a minimum. Some people are so inept and rude they should have to pay to have a job.

I've been a pseudo-pacifist posing in the pew of a Friends Meeting so I could get conscientious objector status if Reagan tried to draft me for a war I was sure he would start (somewhere). I've also worked for a hard-right, pro-Reagan, magazine that sometimes endorsed Libertarians but mainly went for conservative GOP candidates and positions. There's almost no opinion I haven't reconsidered, changed my mind about, etc. I'm told that most people set up like concrete by the time they're twenty or so, and get sick from intellectual turbulence if exposed to new ideas after that, so maybe I'm wired differently. I'm probably as guilty as anyone of making up my mind, then looking for evidence to prove my opinions fact. Maybe that's why novels are such a fixation with me, reading them, writing them. As Donald Maas observes, a well written novel provides one or more really strong points of view. A novel with no opinions or judgments, that makes no case, is not likely to stir interest.

The Fourth of July, this is a tricky holiday for me. Dad sent me a link to The Improved Order of Red Men which I was shocked to find didn't immediately turn my guts. I'm definitely the kind of guy who doesn't want to join any organization so indiscriminate as to let someone like me in, but scanning their info, it looked like the sort of outfit I would like. I even like the politically incorrect name of the outfit and the appropriation of probably bogus Indian rituals.

So what is tricky about the Fourth?

I love the basic ideas outlined in the Declaration and Constitution. There's some fucked up shit in there, like the idea that the government has any business even looking at people's mail, much less delivering it. But basically the Founders didn't try to remake man in their own image. They tried to set up rules of engagement that actual people could function within. The biggest fallacies of socialism are based on asking people to act against what they perceive to be their personal interest. Almost no one will do it for something as nebulous as the 'people' or the 'greater good.' Even the best intentions whither in a system larger than a family. And since most people don't know what's in their own best interest, much less the interests of the community, both the people calling the shots and the people disobeying the orders are as like as not making big mistakes.

Capitalism lets us make our own mistakes, really. If you look at is as a democracy of dollars, when you buy Bangladesh-made jeans from Wal-Mart, you're voting for cheap imported goods; if you go out of your way to find the one brand of jeans (if there is one) made in the U.S. from American, Union Made and organically certified cotton, you're voting (with even more dollars) against cheap imported goods. In fact, you're voting for high wages, intensive regulation and unions. If there's no such pair of jeans to be had (likely), that means it's been drummed out of the market on strictly democratic grounds. And you're free to grow your own cotton and try DYI jeans as Ghandi-style protest.

Where big business gets off the capitalist ideal, in my view, or big labor or big elderly or big anything else, is when you start saying that a little bit of tweaking would make the system even better. Start picking winners through the wholly undemocratic means of the state. Impose tariffs on textile imports, pro-strike laws to protect the unions, ban pesticides on cotton crops, etc., and the next thing you know people have no choice but to buy the expensive jeans. And if they're poor, tough shit. Let them buy their own lobbyist.

And just as we always have 'the poor' (a relative term, there's always a bottom fifth), we always have the well to do. Call it wealth, power, whatever you want, the main difference between the top players in a capitalist system versus a socialist system is whether they generally generate wealth or generally deplete it. Also, even Enron didn't do the kind of damage the Khmer Rouge did. That's probably the biggest difference between corporate bosses and Communist Party bosses, the body count.

The Fourth isn't necessarily even tricky for me because I'm ambivalent about the contradictions of American history. No, we didn't abolish slavery as quickly as we should have, nor did we resolve the issue without a disgusting war, inexcusable Reconstruction and a botched attempt at civil rights.

We did a ton of things wrong. The genocide of Native Americans; illegal annexation of lands through wars with Indians, the Spanish and Mexico. Even tried to get Canada, and would have if the British hadn't all but won the War of 1812. Not to mention wiping out buffalo only to turn around and breed cattle higher in fat and cholesterol, eventually favoring the specific short-horn breeds that amount to a jobs-program for cardiologists.

I can live with most of that because if you didn't get wiped out by America, you generally were probably better off as part of the United States than as part of the alternatives (Spanish Empire, Mexico, British Empire, Canada). The end doesn't justify the means, but there's worse ends.

I struggle more with the things we fuck up today, really. The war on drugs is an abortion of justice, making prison a growth industry and involving an unconscionable proportion of our population in a Kafkaesque system that disenfranchises people who've done nothing wrong.

Speaking of abortions, the Supreme Court has maintained for over three decades that a girl who can't get her ear pierced without parental consent can have an abortion without even parental notification. The result has been a holocaust that makes Hitler look like a Cub Scout.

What else? The state has grown to a magnitude that the Founders would be astounded by. If they'd foreseen half of it, they'd have petitioned King George for readmission to the Crown. Prior to blundering into Iraq on false pretenses, our defense budget was bigger than the rest of the planet combined. Who are we competing against? The almost entirely engineered Cold War has just been replaced by the even more engineered War on Terror. For that matter, six decades of unqualified support for Zionism in both monetary and military form goes a long ways towards making 9/11 appear a self-inflicted wound.

In all this negativity, where’s my patriotism?

America's not quite the 'free' country it poses as, but it's closer than most alternatives. The fact that I'm unlikely to be awakened in a few hours by secret police for this blog, for instance. Dissent can be patriotic if you look at it as constructive criticism. I'm not saying 'down with America,' I'm saying 'we can do better.'

And while I think we should have focused on exposing the corruption in the U.N. and the economic incentives France, Germany, Russia and China had for keeping Saddam in power, I think we did something near right in Afghanistan. We'll see if we fuck it up again or not. Al Queda did, after all, grow out of the Muhajadeen we supported against the Soviets. The enemy of your enemy isn't necessarily your friend, though I'm sure Soviet support of the PLO was guided by the same principle.

The buffalo weren't quite wiped out, there was even some left for me to make bison burgers out of yesterday. And while we have gotten awfully candy-assed about home fireworks, the public display my family went to last night was quite nice. The only thing I liked more than the fireworks themselves was watching my daughter's face reacting to them...