gracchusdixit

On the evening of April 7, 1775, Dr. Samuel Johnson, who gave us the first definitive dictionary of the English language, remarked to his friend and biographer, James Boswell: “Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.”  We do not know what sparked this now famous aperçu or exactly which scoundrel the redoubtable doctor had in mind—because Boswell didn’t say.

We can be reasonably certain, however, that if Dr. Johnson were still with us, he would be surprised not in the least by the latest shenanigans of the scoundrel who now occupies the White House.

During a recent rally in the state of Alabama, the purported purpose of which was to support one of the two Republican candidates aiming to replace Jeff Sessions in the Senate, Donald Trump veered off script and improvised, as he so often does.  After a tiresome and familiar litany of attacks against “Crooked Hillary” and Senator John McCain for refusing to support the GOP’s latest craven attempt to deny healthcare to 30 million Americans, Trump, out of the blue, turned in a different direction, no doubt sensing, like a Catskills comic, that his stale material wasn’t working as it once did.  In search of a new applause line, Trump directed his ire at the National Football League and those of its players who have chosen to kneel during pre-game recantations of the national anthem to protest the endless murder of African Americans by racist local police officers across the land:

Wouldn’t you love to see one of these NFL owners, when somebody disrespects our flag, to say, ‘Get that son of a bitch off the field right now. He is fired. He’s fired!’

Since Trump is a racist himself, it is no surprise that he chose to make black athletes the object of his ire, just as it was no surprise that he chose to defend the Neo-Nazi’s and KKK members who descended upon Charlottesville, Virginia, several weeks ago.

Over the weekend following this attack, during which Trump “doubled down” via Twitter, his surrogates and cabinet members slavishly tried to defend his vicious rhetoric.  The most craven, and least convincing, of these defenders was Secretary of the Treasury Steve Mnuchin.  Mnuchin is a former Goldman-Sachs banker and predatory mortgage investor, who was recently caught red-handed trying to wangle a government jet to transport himself and his bride, at the taxpayer’s expense, on their honeymoon.   This is the man who proclaimed:

This isn’t about Democrats, it’s not about Republicans, it’s not about race, it’s not about free speech.  They can do free speech on their own time.  This is about respect for the military and first responders in the country.

For Mnuchin to say, “This is about respect for the military, ” is richly ironic, coming as it does from a man who has never served a day in the military and who now works for a president who evaded the draft five times.

Even more ironic is the claim that Trump’s rhetoric has nothing to do with race or free speech, when he indulges in blatant race-bating, with the obvious purpose of chilling free speech and the right to protest.  If it had been white athletes kneeling during the national anthem, there is no doubt whatsoever that Trump would have been as quiet as the proverbial mouse.

In the end, all of this is a cynical attempt to distract public attention from the ongoing failures and scandals of the Trump presidency:  the relentless pace of the investigation into Russia’s effort to rig the 2016 election; the collapse of GOP attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act; the revelation that Trump’s daughter and son-in-law used private email accounts and servers to conduct public business, just like “Crooked Hillary;” the self-dealing, financial conflicts of interest, and corruption of highly placed administration officials.

As dreadful as this campaign of distraction undoubtedly is, it runs the risk of distracting our attention from the more fundamental issue of patriotism itself.

The flag, the national anthem, and the pledge of allegiance are merely symbols; they are not the nation, nor are they intrinsic to our governing ideals and institutions.  You won’t find a word in the Constitution about the flag, let alone the national anthem or the pledge of allegiance, both of which were fabricated long after our republic was founded.  What you will find in the Constitution are hard and fast protections of free speech and the right to protest.  The Founding Fathers were not concerned about the symbols of patriotic feeling; they were concerned about the substantive issue of personal freedom.  Trump is trying to conflate the two; indeed, he is using the one to undermine the other.

Public displays of reverence for symbols like the flag or the national anthem neither signify nor constitute what it means to be patriotic.  The decision to stand with hand laid over heart before the beginning of an NFL game does not qualify as patriotism, and Trump’s claim that it does must be rejected for the sham that it is.  On the contrary, such gestures are all too often cheap, painless, and in some cases cowardly substitutes for the real thing.  In the case of Donald Trump, the cowardice is appallingly apparent.

Finally and most importantly, Trump would like us to believe that patriotism is a one-way street, and that he, as president, has the right to demand reverence for the nation and its symbols, while we, as citizens, must comply without question or demur.  That is a travesty and a perversion.

In effect, Trump is demanding that we bow to the old saying, “My country, right or wrong”.  Those words are the very definition of what it means to be unpatriotic—because the relationship between a nation and its citizens is reciprocal.  For a nation to be worthy of patriotic feeling, for its symbols to be worthy of respect, for its leaders to have any purchase on the loyalty or patriotism of its citizens, all citizens must be treated with the fairness, justice, and respect they deserve as human beings.  Until our nation honors and upholds its side of that civic bargain, phony displays of patriotism will continue to be the last refuge of scoundrels like Donald Trump.