Poisoning Patriotism
By Christopher Dickey
September 10, 2004

Newsweek

The dean of American historians, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., fires a broadside at the Bush administration

Sept. 7 - The parking lot in front of the Bi-Lo Supermarket at Pawley’s Island, S.C., is full of cars with decals of Old Glory or twisted ribbons stuck to their sides. The yellow-ribbon decals say SUPPORT OUR TROOPS. Those in red-white-and-blue say FREEDOM ISN’T FREE. Just inside the store there’s a big bulletin board with clips from local newspapers about the men from the South Carolina National Guard who shipped out for Iraq this summer. They’ve always trained as an artillery battalion, but their new assignment will be as military police—cops on the beat on the meanest streets in the world. Six of the Pawleys contingent are related. All are male. Most are black.
Beneath the bulletin board is a big box with a sign that says PLEASE HELP A SOLDIER, and an official list of some 60 kinds of items these men might want you to buy them at the store, from baby wipes, batteries, beef jerky, to flea collars (for ankles) to shoe boxes (for shipping) to washing powders (liquid). This morning when I looked in the bin there were a lot of empty shoe boxes, and there was one toothbrush.

It would be a mistake to read too much into this, of course. But it seems to me there’s a lesson here about the way people support our troops. Some wave the flag and put stickers on their cars. Others really do try to help the soldiers and their families. There are people who fit in both categories, but the first group appears to be a whole lot bigger than the second one.

A couple of doors down from the Bi-Lo is Litchfield Books, one of the shops where I went last week to sign copies of my new thriller, The Sleeper. It’s a fiction built on facts, a novel about the terrifying ways that home towns and global terror, Main Street and Armageddon are tied together in this post-9/11 world. So there’s always a lot to talk about with anyone who’s frustrated and angered by what’s happened these last three years. In bookstores up and down this coast I’ve found a lot of despair, a lot of denial, and, still, a lot of fear.

Most disturbing of all, I’ve come across a lot of men and women who’ve grown afraid of their fellow Americans. It’s as if their patriotism has been poisoned. They say they feel their flag has been appropriated by narrow-minded zealots. Their hopes are being crushed by cynical politicians. Their sons and daughters are being sent to die in wars that seem to have no end, and anyone who questions those politicians or those wars is being branded a traitor. I can’t bear to look at all these flags, a woman told me who has worked for the United States government for several decades. It’s like they all belong to [Attorney General John] Ashcroft. It would be sad if those stickers on cars were put on by some people scared not to show the flag.

Democratic challenger John Kerry hasn’t offered any effective antidote for this poisoned patriotism. Reliving, refighting and re-arguing the Vietnam war won’t do the job, certainly. But among the new releases at Litchfield Books I found a volume by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., War and the American Presidency, that could restore some sanity and perspective to our patriotism. Is this an anti-Bush book? You bet. Schlesinger’s ties to the Kennedy clan go back to the age of Camelot. But this isn’t just another cut-and-paste screed of the kind we’ve seen this political season from Michael Moore. When Schlesinger aims a broadside at the current administration, he brings big guns to bear from the whole range of American history. He tells us what prudent American statesmen thought of preventive war and why. (You don’t ‘prevent’ anything by war except peace, President Harry S Truman wrote in his memoirs. ) He skewers this administration’s zealotry with a barb from the 19th-century satirical character Mr. Dooley, who defined a fanatic as someone who does what he thinks th’Lord wud do if He only knew th’facts in th’case. He defines true patriotism as living up to a nation’s highest ideals. In the famous phrase of 19th-century immigré Carl Schurz, Our country, right or wrong. When right, to be kept right; when wrong, to be put right.

Schlesinger is especially good when he looks at our innate American resistance to imperialism. As John Quincy Adams said when he was secretary of State—in 1821—the United States should stand for freedom and independence wherever her flag is unfurled, but she goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. By launching foreign wars of interest and intrigue, Adams predicted, the fundamental underpinnings of American policy would change from liberty to force. America might become the dictatress of the world: she would no longer be the ruler of her own spirit. Foreign adventures and foreign threats are, as often as not, pretexts for curtailing the freedoms Americans believe they should be fighting for.

In modern times, Schlesinger demonstrates, Americans are simply not competent imperialists. There is no colonial service devoted to the task of building and maintaining empire. There is no national commitment to the project. There is in fact no public admission that such a project actually exists, although hundreds of thousands of Americans are asked to risk their lives for it.

Even the list of items for care packages to be sent to those South Carolina artillerymen-policemen testifies to the awkward dangers of the unprepared undertaking in Iraq. A friend of mine, an Army lieutenant colonel who’s been in Baghdad several months, sent me a quick note when I asked him what to purchase for the bin at Bi-Lo.

The first thing I will tell you is NO FLEA COLLARS, he said. That is a huge misinformation item that is actually harmful to the soldier and causes skin rashes, nausea, and potentially nervous disorders. The soldiers here have treated uniforms for insect protection, and we train them on how to stay bug free. The flea collar issue is the remnant of some old time special forces grunt attitude that does not work.”

Baby wipes are good, he went on, especially since we often run out of toilet paper, and some areas the guys can go a week or more without a shower. We all like beef jerky and Peanut M&Ms are a premium item here … very hard to find. Dark socks really suck, they turn your toes black. I only wear white cotton socks. I have about 50 pairs. Just about any non-issue uniform item is not authorized, so scarves, hats, stuff like that—NO GO. Nearly every soldier in the theater is issued Wiley X sunglasses that have ballistic glass lenses, so cheap sunglasses really do nobody any good.

What I really like is when we get a box full of NEWSWEEK, Time, Sports Illustrated—magazines. That I really like. I get yesterday’s news tomorrow, but at least I can read something that is not in the Stars and Stripes.

My friend ended his note by reminding me that as he wrote, 997 American soldiers had died in Iraq. In the hours afterward, the toll rose to more than 1,000. So, after due consideration, I’m dropping a copy of Schlesinger’s book in the Bi-Lo bin this afternoon. It’s a reminder, in its way, that freedom isn’t free.

© 2004 Newsweek, Inc.

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