I don’t know you, and I could be completely wrong, but, you sound a little like someone who more or less subscribes to the Howard Zinn school of history. Please correct me if I am mistaken.
It took me about 30 years to understand the mentality behind Manifest Destiny and Westward Expansion in the US. They are not easy concepts for a modern mind to see from their perspective. And that is not the same as agreeing with the concepts. But I really hate studying a historical event, and being dumbfounded about why a person or group would take a particular position , or perform a particular action.
Sometimes countries, especially powerful ones, make very poor foreign policy decisions. I think we agree on that. Destabilizing Iraq was one of those bad decisions. I mention it in particular, because I was front and center on that one. Many of the people I served with there had been there before, and we all felt that it was going to be a disaster. I think that some of the people behind that action really believed that once the dictator was removed, the country would break out in democracy and peace. Our position on the ground was that the dictator was the only thing preserving secularism, and keeping the opposing factions from sinking into anarchy. Even though he maintained his position through torture, genocide, and violence. Ditto with Qaddafi. We probably disagree in that you probably feel that Bush created the monster, and I feel that Bush is only to blame for letting the monster out of the box.
I guess the root of patriotism and the pledge are that some people actually believe that their country has shared values and accomplishments that are worth celebrating. And you can still be strongly patriotic while still feeling that things can stand some improvement. I personally feel that you should always look for ways to make things better.
I have had a crush on Lillian Gish for most of my adult life.
Well to each his own. I LOVED LOVED LOVED anything that had to do with flags or military ribbons and medals as a kid. I remember having a ruler that had all the different flags from the Revolution. I loved the Confederate flag, not really knowing what it was about, mainly associating it with a kick ass car that could jump ramps. My first grade teacher was going to replace the class flag at the end of the year and I begged to take it home. I cried when a few years later my parents convinced me to get up that tattered thing so the Girl Scouts could have a flag retirement ceremony. I still have this flag I made out of felt glued together, not quite enough stars and stripes, attached to a stick I actually whittled with my first pocket knife.
I think all of this was me. My dad was a very down to earth person, but he never really was pro or con patriotism. I guess he did what the average person would do, and he served in the Navy, but he never pushed me to be like this. And my grandpa was career Coast Guard, but would chew my ear off on how fucked up the government is every time we were alone.
In hind sight, I also loved anything with color. I loved collecting stamps and rocks and loved pouring over rock collecting books to see all the colors of minerals. I loved collections - things neatly organized. I loved comics as a kid, and later became a voracious collector.
So if I were to analyze why things like flag and all these things above appealed to me, I would say I have a mild form of OCD. I love the visual impact of color organized into a pattern.
But since I am wasting time not going to comiccon, let me go ahead and babble on more.
The flag - flags as a symbol in general - are interesting things. And what those symbols mean varies greatly. For sure the United States is a complex beast. You can sit down and write 100 good things about it as easily as you can sit down and write 100 bad things about it. So what does the flag stand for?
But I find it puzzling when someone who does nothing but condemn every aspect of the government completely loses their shit when they see someone desecrating the flag in protest. I am like, “You hate everything about this government. Apparently so do they. Why are you upset they burn a flag in protest.” “Because the government isn’t what the flag stands for. It is the nation.”
You know, in a way they are both right. As is your comments about having a duality of support. See NATIONS and national identity are independent of the government. That is why certain nations can die or be engulfed in an empire, only to later emerge again.
So looking at the flag might represent to one the worst things that have been done under that flag or by the government that represents it. Or it might represent the best things. In a way both views are right. You’re right Tribalism and Jingoism can be bad - it depends how it is applied. Everyone rolling up and pitching in to help fellow Americans regardless of their race and creed after a disaster is an amazing thing. Time and again we see two people who would probably have spit on one another in the past, now working together to help a third person they both wouldn’t normally like because they are Americans is a good thing.
Everything else you said about control vs celebration I totally get. I too went through my super cynical Orwellian phase. I think I am cycling back around to being less pessimistic over all. But I do completely agree that all of this can be misused and misdirected. I am not naive and thinking it hasn’t happened and that it couldn’t happen here. But at the same time having SOME national unity I think is a good thing.
Purple? Geometric pattern? Fleur De Li thrown in for good measure? Holy shit, if they would have made the pattern take up more of the shirt, I may have had to go find one.
If I start a national flag I’m putting penrose tiling on it.
In a country where civics education has been so consistently poor that most high school graduates have a worse understanding of Constitutional core values than naturalised immigrants do, the Pledge of Allegiance is a particularly empty gesture. That it’s still mandatory in some schools makes it reek of more authoritarian political cultures, and that’s before you get to the tacked-on McCarthy-era “under God” bit and this creepy pre-war salute. The pledge is an outdated relic that has no place in a liberal democracy founded on Enlightenment principles.
You fucking hate children that have to draw and color that thing in school, don’t you?
Just for that it’s now going to be koch triangle set inside a logarithmic spiral.
There is no “Howard Zinn” school of history. He was a historian who sought to have a much more inclusive perspective on US history. He’s far more influential in popular histories than he is on the profession as a whole, I’d say, which might explain why @Donald_Petersen might be influenced by him on his perspective on ground up history.
I understand that Zinn does not represent history in the sense of documenting things that actually happened, as well as the motivations that the people involved had at the time. Zinn even went so far as to claim that objective facts don’t even matter, nor are they even a desirable thing, except when they serve a political agenda. There are a lot of academics who follow his basic philosophy, and it introduces flaws in their reasoning, usually in the form of arriving at a conclusion, then rearranging the data to appear to support those conclusions. Not that people have not done that in the past. It was just as inexcusable then.
I disagree that Zinn supports an “inclusive perspective”. An inclusive perspective would include a reasoned analysis of all sides of a conflict or interaction. So we should rightly address the perspectives of the various tribes, as well as the western explorers, settlers and policy makers, when talking about US westward expansion. Instead, we have gone from just learning national mythology from the perspective of the US Government, to the other extreme of classifying the world into two groups: the righteous oppressed, and the cartoonish villains that oppress them. It is not a helpful perspective, especially when searching for realistic solutions to modern and historic problems.
I think you’re misstating what he meant here. He was keen to include in a general historical narrative people who are often left out of those narratives (women, the working classes, African Americans, Native Americans, etc) from their perspective on events. He wanted to show how these people are part of the creation of a historical narrative and have often been ignored.
He meant, I think, that when “big history” (from the view point of the top down) is written, that it is a political act, because it erases the views of people who are not in the top (in the case of the US, white, Christian, upper class men). History was already a political field (helping to create and reinforce a particular political configuration, the nation-state - based largely on the works of philosophers/historians like Hegel), and by ignoring those who aren’t already understood as historical agents, we do a disservice to our understanding of the past. He was responded to those who claim that “real” history is objective and that by focusing on people other than those of the power structure, we are “politicizing history.”
This is actually an important criticism of his work and not at all an unfair point. But I will point out that Zinn inspired plenty of more nuanced and critical histories that gave voice to people who have historically not had it - but Foucault’s work is also critical in creating the current landscape of historical study. And of course, our popular histories are still too often top-down and act as a defense of a particular political entity, the nation-state. It’s a means of justifying atrocities and shrugging them off. Zinn’s work helped to push for alternative narratives as a part of the public discourse on history and I think that matters and shouldn’t be shrugged off as unimportant or dangerous.
I had a great mentor at university, who taught me that the key to interpreting archaeology or history is to suppress your cultural preconceptions, and understand not only the things that all of humanity has in common, but more importantly, the traits that are not universal. But foremost, he taught me the importance of interpretation through the study of known objective facts whenever possible, and looking at the participant’s actions in terms of what their actual motivations were at the time.
In our family, we know a thing or two about the history of warfare and military technology. So we had an interesting time of it when my son’s anthropology professor this spring presented the class with the view that warfare in pre-western societies, was almost exclusively a ritual action, in which few people were ever killed. Her focus was Pre-Columbian America, but claimed the same about global tribal societies in general. I run across people with such views pretty regularly. I have even heard the allegation that weapons found in ancient burials were just symbolic objects indicating status. The evidence that this is a false view is pretty overwhelming, from accounts written on stone and on parchment, to the vast archaeological evidence, which lately includes ancient mass burials of warriors with flint points embedded in their bones, and missing heads and limbs. So the bigger question is why would someone hold such a belief, against all apparent evidence? My best understanding of it is that they subscribe to the “noble savage” myth, in which all tribal and ancient peoples lived in harmony with nature and each other, until corrupted by colonialism and western influence. My son’s professor seems to have to believe that tribal societies are inherently good, to balance her belief that modern western society is inherently bad. But this is such a simplification and distortion of the truth.
Here is one good book on the subject- http://www.uapress.arizona.edu/Books/bid1872.htm
Which as I just said, lots of historians now dispute this notion. See for example, Comanche Empire:
My point was that popular histories still tend of err on the side of focusing solely on white male achievements and ignoring the very real problems in American history and still manages to erase the work and contributions of everyone else. Eurocentrism is still a thing to be wrestled with. Being more inclusive of people isn’t saying that all white men are bad, it’s saying they aren’t the only actors in history. Works like the one I linked too is a great example of treating native Americans as historical actors, while avoiding the tropes of the noble savage.
Zinn was critical in pushing more a more inclusive narrative, even if he didn’t get it right and he did that in a way that brought the public into the conversation. That’s why he matters. History is an ongoing conversation about our past. there is never going to be a getting it right and it’s always been a contentious and politicized field. Imagining that Zinn was somehow the only one who did so ignores how history is actually made.
Thanks for the link to the book… it looks interesting and it might be a great work to include in a syllabus.
Here is my favorite Comanche book: https://www.amazon.com/Empire-Summer-Moon-Comanches-Powerful/dp/1416591060
Not an expert or anything, but I am slowly reading (it is pretty dry and factual vs a narrative) the history of the Potawatomis. It echoes what you saying. The tribes around the great lakes had constantly shifting allegiances. There were certain tribes that everyone didn’t like eventually pushed them out of the area. Certainly there was some civility in not targeting civilians at times, and a complex prisoner barter system. But other times there were no holds barred and no mercy given.
Violence also waxed and waned with resources. The biggest issue so far with the white men (mostly French and later British) was trading rights, and what kind of goods they could get, and how much (exchange rate).
So it is an interesting read so far. I keep plodding along, trying to get the general gist of events locked in. I am horrible at reading books, though.
I have to burst that bubble. The behavior you’re describing is not uniquely US american. Happens everywhere.
BoingBoingistan’s national flag ought to be a Louis Wain cat.
I want it to be this one
I don’t see where @Mister44 implied it was uniquely American, I think he was talking about nationalism, and because of the post, he was talking about the American context.
That’s the one I had in mind, aye.
