Remora

The Patriot game

Lately there has been a lot of, to LI�s mind, rather unseemly genuflecting to the American flag on the part of a group in the left press that apparently entertains the fear that honorable goals, such as economic justice and anti-belligerence, are being undermined by a googley eyed gang of flag burners. We have little patient with the thesis that America is the Great Satan; on the other hand, when lefists get chummy with the tropes of jingoism, we look for the exits.

Dissent recently published an essay by Michael Kazin, an editor, entitled �A Patriotic Left.� This is an excellent example of the neo-Popular Front in the age of Bush. Kazin has a good time sporting in progressive cant. You know the variety: You call for some moderate objective in the most bloodcurdling ultra rhetoric. After the writer is finished, you are supposed to count the silverware in the silverware drawer, to see if any of it has been expropriated by the masses. Since the rhetorical style at Dissent is fatally oriented towards what was hip when Sidney Hook bought his first Flivver, you get bizarre tirades against �cosmopolitanism.� It turns out that patriotism and cosmopolitanism are deadly enemies, in Kazin�s mind:



�In daily life, cultural cosmopolitanism is mostly reserved to the rich and famous. Radical environmentalists and anti-IMF crusaders seek to revive the old dream of internationalism in a version indebted more to John Lennon's "Imagine" than to V. I. Lenin's Comintern. But three years after bursting into the headlines from the streets of Seattle, that project seems stalled indefinitely in the Sargasso Sea that lies between rhetorical desire and political exigency.�

Wow. If the rich are for it, I must be agin� it � I suppose that is the response Kazin wants to induce in his readers; who will then form a posse to string up the varmints. However, LI rather likes those rich who are cultural cosmopolitans � are we talking about Gertrude Stein, here? Well, we are very fond of her. As well as Henry James, John Lennon, and the rest of em. The Frankfurt exiles � just loved those guys! Dutch architects and radical Italian fashion divas � love and kisses, guys and gals.

However, we have our doubts that this class of the rich and the famous actually still exists. Maybe some relics can be found in Tangiers. We live near the border with Mexico, and have found a lot of non-rich'nfamous cosmopolitans. For instance, the sons and daughters of Mexican migrants � or even Mexican migrants themselves, who cross the border to see the family on holiday occasions. They speak Spanish at home and in the street, they make meals that will, no doubt, eventually grace the tables of the the rich and famous (oh, please, please, let us get within rubbin', pick pocketing distance of the rich and famous) with a plethora of unpatriotic ingredients -- chiles, cilantro, or that displacement, to the Puritan mind, of chocolate from the frivolity of pastry to the sober thighs of chicken � mole, in short. Mostly, they are stalled indefinitely in the Sargasso Sea � of credit card debt.

However, just because the Left Patriot side is represented by Kazin�s risible New Masses rhetoric doesn�t make LI want to abandon patriotism to the New School rubes. For the next two posts (approx.), we want to look at Coleridge�s Patriotism � that is, we want to look at how Coleridge transformed himself from a Romantic Jacobin to a Burkean conservative around 1800 in the pages of The Morning Post � and John Stuart Mill�s idea that patriotism is a necessary adjunct of social stability, which, we believe, was probably influenced by Coleridge�s example. Coleridge gives us a sort of emblem of the career of the British intellectual, with its stages -- the romantic enthusiasm for Revolution with its aesthetic root -- the confrontation with the accidents and barbarisms of a real revolution � thebeing absorbed in that confrontation to the extent that the sense of the barbarism of tradition, the continuing structures of oppression, begin to blur � and the ending up speaking for the worst Tory elements � the jingoists, the theocrats, the belligerents, the fatuous defenders of massive economic injustice, etc. etc. Even as we speak, this pattern is being etched in the diatribes of Christopher Hitchens, who is floundering, rather sillily, to find some third, past reference in whose career he can justify his vain attempt to make consistent his past and present stands. Orwell, his choice, is perfect because he was cut off before he could really crawl into the carapace of crankdom that closed around Koestler. Orwell seems wrong, to us, for C.H.'s quest. Hitchens should touch up on his Burke and Coleridge � much more logical intellectual antecedents.