Be a patriot

Lesson 19 in Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny is “Be a patriot”. When I think of patriotism, I think of exercising civic virtues—obeying the law, voting in elections, being a good neighbor, being involved in the community in which you live. But let’s be frank: the traitorous fucking freaks who stormed the capital on January 6 considered themselves to be patriots. Ultra-patriots in fact. The important thing is distinguishing between these two ideas of patrotism.

Snyder quoted Orwell on the difference between a patriot and a nationalist. After all, a nationalist might obey the law, vote, be a good neighbor, and be involved in his community as well.

But a nationalist is not a patriot. A nationalist encourages us to be our worst, but then tells us that we are the best. A natonalist, “although endlessly brooding on power, victory, defeat, revenge,” wrote Orwell, tends to be “unintersted in what happens in the real world.” Nationalism is relativist, since the only truth is the resentment we feel when we contemplate others. As the novelist Danilo Kiš put it, nationalism “has no universal value, aesthetic or ethical.”

This last part means a lot to me, partly because I believe in art and literature and while I find the aesthetic values of MAGA repulsive, they have an attraction. (I plan to write about this later.)

I was listening to Ma Vlast by Bedřich Smetana, the great 19th century Czech composer, this weekend, and I admired this beautiful, stirring piece of patriotic music. Anyone who has listened to a lot of Eastern European classical music knows that in the 19th century, there was a broad movement to produce nationalist art—based on folk tunes and old hymns from whatever ethnicity the composer derived from. Smetana’s nationality was Czech, but his nation-state was the Austro-Hungarian empire (as was Antonín Dvořák’s and Bela Bartok’s), at least until 1919 when the empire was dismantled. Somehow art like this always makes me feel a little patriotic.

Thorton Dial, Don't Matter How Raggly the Flag, It Still Got to Tie Us Together, 2003, Mattress coils, chicken wire, clothing, can lids, found metal, plastic twine, wire, Splash Zone compound, enamel, and spray paint on canvas on wood

Thorton Dial (1928–2016) was a self-taught artist from Alabama and a great American. If being a patriot means supporting the artistic endeavors of the Thorton Dials of America, sign me up.

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