Oh, Say Can You Still See?

By Stefan Kanfer

Oh, Say CanYou Still See?

Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.

-Samuel Johnson

MAYBE. But it is not the first. No dictionary in any language treats the word as a pejorative. It is generally accepted to be "love for or devotion to one's country." Theoretically, then, that devotion ought to be a virtue, a tribute to a citizen's character. To believe in one's country is, after all, to believe in something larger than one's self, to uphold a faith in a considerable portion of humanity. By most global standards, the notion of patriotism still defines the honored achievements of courage, industry and humility.

But in America patriotism has come to mean more-and less. Virtually no other nation demands the daily reaffirmation of a pledge of allegiance. Hardly any other country plasters its cars, cocktail glasses and clothing with aggressive representations of the flag. But then, hardly any other citizens burn their nation's flag, or mock their own national anthem. To a growing number of Americans, apparently, the external symbols of patriotism have come to imply something else: a strident super-Americanism-or a collapsing standard of national and international morality. It is not difficult to perceive the causes for protest.

To many blacks, for example, the 50 stars have come to signify so many stations of racism. To the poor, to disaffected minorities, to antiwar demonstrators, the pledge is the reverse of truth (one nation divisible, with liberty and justice for some). To them, the flag sometimes seems a distress signal, a pennant of aggression and ill-used power. The more militant have responded to it with the conditioned reflex of rage, flying the Stars and Stripes upside down from the Statue of Liberty or setting it aflame. In reaction to this lack of respect, the "100% Americans" and just plain Middle Americans have endowed Old Glory with an almost regal air. With more truth than he knew, Billy Graham once declared: "The flag is our queen."

The Pledge of Allegiance has been less controversial. Indeed, so many children-and parents-pronounced it meaningless that last November a U.S. court of appeals ruled against those who would make it compulsory in schools. In a widely discussed opinion, Judge Irving R. Kaufman wrote: "Patriotism that is forced is a false patriotism, just as loyalty that is coerced is the very antithesis of loyalty."

As for the national anthem, that song has been under fire since the War of 1812. At the Mexico City Olympics, black athletes greeted it with a Black Power salute. In Munich, the mode was elaborate indifference. Last week The Star-Spangled Banner was again the center of a brief, ludicrous controversy at Manhattan's Madison Square Garden. There, the director of the U.S. Olympic Invitational Track Meet announced that it would not be played at the event. Thereupon the Garden switchboard lit up like a scoreboard. After receiving "irate calls from all over the country," the meet officials set a new indoor record for backpedaling. They would be "delighted," they claimed, "to continue the custom" of anthem playing. Twenty New York councilmen suddenly put on their best red-white-and-blue suits and introduced a probably unconstitutional bill making it unlawful to "commence any sporting event...without first playing the national anthem."

There is, of course, an aesthetic case to be made against the national anthem. As Bass-Baritone George London indicates, the song is "impossible to sing if you're sober...the words do not automatically communicate their message." Another opera star, Enrico Caruso, found so little to understand in The Star-Spangled Banner that he devised a phonetic version: "O seiken iu see bai dhi dons erli lait/Huat so praudli ui heild at dhi tuailaits last glimmin..." As for those who do comprehend the message, what is there to like? Images of "the rockets' red glare, the bombs bursting in air" no longer evoke 19th century triumphs but this century's despair.

Yet, despite all the passion and polemic, the symbols continue to endure and prevail. Imperfect, wide open to charges of hypocrisy and misrepresentation, they manage to reain enormous emotional significance. The vast majority of Americans cannot and will not reject the flag, the anthem or the pledge. It would be, in effect, rejecting aspects of themselves. Whatever militant blacks may feel, N.A.A.C.P. Executive Director Roy Wilkins' directive speaks with equal commitment: "There is no national anthem for Negroes. There is only one national anthem. The national anthem is for all Americans." In a debate with a member of an East Harlem street gang, the Young Lords, at his high school graduation, Andrew Rodriguez, a Puerto Rican, said: "Behind that flag is all of us. It really means something to me. I don't think in terms of blacks and Puerto Ricans. I think in terms of human beings."

That is, perhaps the only way to interpret the emblems of democracy. Despite the radical and rightist cant, the American symbols contain no occult powers. Saluting them or reviling them can do nothing to alter social policy. Placing a decal on a car window does not grant the bearer a moral superiority. Spitting on the flag is about as effective a challenge to the Establishment as sticking pins in a wax effigy of the Pentagon. The externals of America are, at best, only expressions of a fragile ideal. The land of the free and the home of the brave is not a boast, but a hope. Liberty and justice for all is not a headline, but a desire.

In any case, in a nation where customs are interred every day, it may yet be valuable to retain a few civil rites. The Pledge of Allegiance, the singing of the national anthem, the saluting of the flag-these are, in essence, the acknowledgment of the most neglected minority of all. As G.K. Chesterton put it, "Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes-our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who happen to be walking around."

That is something to bear in mind during the next challenge or defense of the national symbols. For no matter what side he takes, the debater stands with his enemies in a "small and arrogant oligarchy." A piece of prose, a bit of cloth and a song are little enough to give those most obscure Americans

the ones who went before. Besides, the country, like its

flag, its anthem and pledge, still remains open to new arrangements and interpretations. Like beauty (or ugliness), patriotism depends upon the beholder. -- Stefan Kanfer

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