Happy Patriot Day
So, happy Patriot Day.
What, you didn’t know? By official proclamation, September 11th is known as Patriot Day. And so it has been for a number of years, making the national holiday one of the few disappointments in a string of linguistic victories – your Death Taxes, Enemy Combatants, and, of course, Freedom Fries. And though I’m tempted to say enough already, that these words sound hollow and bureaucratic, that the game is played out, I can reluctantly agree in principle to the President’s strategy. It is, after all, the natural course of government to bend language to ideology. Until this, the fourth (fifth?) Patriot Day, this lazy ignorance mixed with quiet acceptance suited me fine.
But behind the allegedly apolitical nature of the day’s events – Chris Matthews was quick to inform us that President Bush, placing a wreath in a memorial pool, was acting as a head of state, not as a member of the GOP – I found a distinctly political reflection in the shiny patriotic gloss, one I think my fellow unconvinced ought to find distasteful. Ann Coulter was right to spit her venom, though she had her target wrong. It is not the “9-11 Widows” that are to blame, it is the architects of Patriot Day, manipulating our worst fears and biases.
That many used September 11th for political purposes is an obvious, almost trite thing to say, and today’s events should have been nothing new, but the GOP’s attempts are often disguised, mostly from themselves, by a fundamentalist interpretation of country as homeland, or, better yet, mother/fatherland. To those behind the Patriot Act, and to those forced to do the Patriot Act (that’s Jeffery Ross’s material), waving a flag is as natural as burning one is a perversion of nature. Like the defense of the hetero-normative white wedding: Adam and Eve, man, not Adam and Steve.
In this second-grade rhetoric, however, the newly empowered morals movement forgets that it is itself like Adam, given the right to conquer his xenophobic fears by naming God’s numerous, unknown, unclassified, wild and possibly dangerous creations. Because this is not just a struggle of civilizations, it is a struggle for civilization – Western, particularly American, civilization. And just so we’re clear, America’s a woman – a blonde, corn-fed, Daisy Duke Desdemona – who needs our devoted protection, from walls to government departments, and two days worth of pampering. Why not make Independence Day and Patriot Day the new Memorial Day and Labor Day, and just call summer the Patriot Season? And when it’s over, you can’t wear white, or red, or blue.
God named her woman, man tucked inside the word as neatly as Adam’s rib inside Eve; it was Shakespeare who called her Desdemona, and gave her Iago as a defense against what racial pseudo-science would later call miscegenation. Now the cabal in the White House has sublimated the storyline, but still, we have Jessica Lynch, an over-hyped reminder from the second of our revenge fantasies. A true Patriot, that Jessica Lynch. Went back to the hospital just so we could rescue her. And her name, how can you not love her?
Patriot Day is about indulging these revenge fantasies, reveling in them, rolling around like a pig in shit. And the fantasies are delusions, because the entire thing has taken on the quality of a dream, aided by the barrage of televised reenactments and dramatizations. Amidst all this, however, a critical tone is developing, one I think is important. On the safely pro-establishment side of things, the controversy over ABC’s miniseries shows that some facts are up for interpretation, and at the most extreme, films like “Loose Change” are completely rejecting the government’s explanation of the events. Resistance to the linguistic ascendance of Patriot Day and all that implies has made strange bedfellows of these different sorts of doubters.
Perhaps it is a libertarian reaction – keep your filthy paws off my calendar. Or perhaps it is a bias against unilateralism – people from almost two hundred countries died that day. But mostly I think it is a defense of emotional property, of the right to react and cope how one will. Because once the revenge fantasy is indulged, the neoconservative mindstate is achieved and the victory becomes psychological.
I do consider myself a patriot, in some sense of the word, but not the kind they made a day for. Because in the past two months over 3,000 Iraqi civilians have died, and though it doesn’t mean exactly the same thing to me, it is still enough to make me doubt the blind faith and hero worship of Patriot Day.
So happy September 11th. Next year in Damascus?
What, you didn’t know? By official proclamation, September 11th is known as Patriot Day. And so it has been for a number of years, making the national holiday one of the few disappointments in a string of linguistic victories – your Death Taxes, Enemy Combatants, and, of course, Freedom Fries. And though I’m tempted to say enough already, that these words sound hollow and bureaucratic, that the game is played out, I can reluctantly agree in principle to the President’s strategy. It is, after all, the natural course of government to bend language to ideology. Until this, the fourth (fifth?) Patriot Day, this lazy ignorance mixed with quiet acceptance suited me fine.
But behind the allegedly apolitical nature of the day’s events – Chris Matthews was quick to inform us that President Bush, placing a wreath in a memorial pool, was acting as a head of state, not as a member of the GOP – I found a distinctly political reflection in the shiny patriotic gloss, one I think my fellow unconvinced ought to find distasteful. Ann Coulter was right to spit her venom, though she had her target wrong. It is not the “9-11 Widows” that are to blame, it is the architects of Patriot Day, manipulating our worst fears and biases.
That many used September 11th for political purposes is an obvious, almost trite thing to say, and today’s events should have been nothing new, but the GOP’s attempts are often disguised, mostly from themselves, by a fundamentalist interpretation of country as homeland, or, better yet, mother/fatherland. To those behind the Patriot Act, and to those forced to do the Patriot Act (that’s Jeffery Ross’s material), waving a flag is as natural as burning one is a perversion of nature. Like the defense of the hetero-normative white wedding: Adam and Eve, man, not Adam and Steve.
In this second-grade rhetoric, however, the newly empowered morals movement forgets that it is itself like Adam, given the right to conquer his xenophobic fears by naming God’s numerous, unknown, unclassified, wild and possibly dangerous creations. Because this is not just a struggle of civilizations, it is a struggle for civilization – Western, particularly American, civilization. And just so we’re clear, America’s a woman – a blonde, corn-fed, Daisy Duke Desdemona – who needs our devoted protection, from walls to government departments, and two days worth of pampering. Why not make Independence Day and Patriot Day the new Memorial Day and Labor Day, and just call summer the Patriot Season? And when it’s over, you can’t wear white, or red, or blue.
God named her woman, man tucked inside the word as neatly as Adam’s rib inside Eve; it was Shakespeare who called her Desdemona, and gave her Iago as a defense against what racial pseudo-science would later call miscegenation. Now the cabal in the White House has sublimated the storyline, but still, we have Jessica Lynch, an over-hyped reminder from the second of our revenge fantasies. A true Patriot, that Jessica Lynch. Went back to the hospital just so we could rescue her. And her name, how can you not love her?
Patriot Day is about indulging these revenge fantasies, reveling in them, rolling around like a pig in shit. And the fantasies are delusions, because the entire thing has taken on the quality of a dream, aided by the barrage of televised reenactments and dramatizations. Amidst all this, however, a critical tone is developing, one I think is important. On the safely pro-establishment side of things, the controversy over ABC’s miniseries shows that some facts are up for interpretation, and at the most extreme, films like “Loose Change” are completely rejecting the government’s explanation of the events. Resistance to the linguistic ascendance of Patriot Day and all that implies has made strange bedfellows of these different sorts of doubters.
Perhaps it is a libertarian reaction – keep your filthy paws off my calendar. Or perhaps it is a bias against unilateralism – people from almost two hundred countries died that day. But mostly I think it is a defense of emotional property, of the right to react and cope how one will. Because once the revenge fantasy is indulged, the neoconservative mindstate is achieved and the victory becomes psychological.
I do consider myself a patriot, in some sense of the word, but not the kind they made a day for. Because in the past two months over 3,000 Iraqi civilians have died, and though it doesn’t mean exactly the same thing to me, it is still enough to make me doubt the blind faith and hero worship of Patriot Day.
So happy September 11th. Next year in Damascus?
posted by base at 11:28 AM
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