The morning of September 11, 2001 I was in my seventh grade geography class. Our teacher came in a few minutes late, and announced very simply, “Well, it's a bad day for this country. Someone flew a plane into the World Trade Center.” A room full of 12 year olds was silent. We were too young to process this. But we tried. My first thought was, “the same one we were just in last year for a field trip?” I had to contextualize it in my life. A thing that I had been in fairly recently had just been destroyed. The why of it all was completely beyond me at the time. It continues to be beyond me. The shock of it was clear on Mr. Forney’s face. Like many things in my young life, I had experienced far too little to realize how abnormal it all was. I just took it as a fact.
Somehow, we went through a full day. Some people were taken out of school early. I was not. I am not sure how our teachers made it through the day. I cannot conceive of what it took for Mr. Forney to step into that classroom, knowing that a world changing event this was, how horrific these events were. How do you walk your young students through hearing and digesting news you yourself cannot fathom? How do you explain terrorism? I have grown to admire Mr. Forney for his handling of this event. As the days went on, he continued to help us through it. I suppose he figured that, as the person responsible for teaching us about the world in which we lived, it was his responsibility to help us understand this strange moment. He walked through the fear, anger, and confusion with us. When a student suggested that when the people responsible were found (did we know it was Bin Laden yet?) we should put them in an airplane and crash it. Forney shut this down. We as a nation were better than that, he told us. We do not partake in cruel and unusual punishment. He empathized with the anger this student felt; I am sure he felt it too.
Following the events, he decided he was going to change the curriculum. When it was clear that this was terrorism, and war was, for some reason, called on Iraq, Mr. Forney felt that it was important for us to understand the culture of the Middle East. He did not want us to demonize the region, or to hate and fear it for no reason. It was critical that we had some kind of knowledge about this area of the world that continues to impact our foreign policy and world events. It was not something he had to do--but as an educator, he decided it was his moral obligation.
Immediately, the rhetoric was that the world was changed. But I felt the same. My world was not changed. I felt ashamed that I did not buy into the sudden surge of patriotism and renewed flag waving. One of my teachers had us sit and listen to the maudlin song “Where Were You When the World Stopped Turning?” by Alan Jackson. It was too on the nose, too simple. I was embarrassed by it.
I did not feel that I had been personally affected by this day. I did not know anyone in New York that day, I did not have a connection to the city at all. Not until very recently did I realize I was and continue to be touched by it every single day. So was every other adolescent who came of age in a world scarred by the sudden absence of the Twin Towers in fire and smoke, like the world’s darkest magic trick.
I see it every day in the fear that is peddled about those who are “other.” I see it in the bombardment of stories of veterans torn apart and disembodied, who return home only to be without home. I see it in the ever further encroachment of our privacy and civil liberties. For those who were teenagers then, the last generation to have lived life before cell phones and the internet, we have seen the promise of infinite knowledge and connection become the looming presence of corporate and government interests sorting through our most private information. I see it in the continued empty flag waving patriotism that demands more war, more martial law, more freedom for the white man to do as he pleases, at the expense of every brown man, woman and child. The cooption of national pride and the national anthem as some kind of slavish devotion to white identity--because ever since 9/11, to be brown, to be turbaned, to be anything but white and Christian and moneyed is to be an affront to American hegemony and its unique brand of Exceptionalism.
Since that day, this America that I love and do not love, has been at perpetual war, has seen the lives of countless men and women taken based upon lies and the premise that the white American Republican virtues of commerce, consumption, and righteous anger should be spread. Our major export has been drone strikes and ammunition--and the lives of our soldiers.
I struggle with the concept of patriotism, because I know that for some it is identified by maudlin country songs about the day the world stopped turning and beer and the idea that we can kill more brown people than any other country--and fuck you, I do what I want. That is American patriotism that we cherish. It is the American patriotism of Donald Trump and Paul Ryan
America’s ideals were not founded upon this idea that might makes right. But we have become King Pellinore--and war is our Questing Beast. War is our eternal hunt, and so we have had to define an “other” to oppose. Over and over. War on drugs. War on terror. War on poverty. War on Christmas. War war war. Just as Pellinore's search for the Beast spanned generations, so too does ours.
How can one be proud of a nation that has betrayed every promise it has made? These truths that we claim to hold as self-evident-- that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, that among them are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness-- these truths do not hold. When patriotism is conflated with blind loyalty to morally reprehensible status quo and the premise that strength is to be admired above all, then patriotism has no meaning. This American patriotism is synonymous with American masculinity--it is fragile, aggressive, threatened by that which betrays vulnerability.
Perhaps I cannot buy into this brand of American masculine patriotism, because I have struggled with this toxic masculinity for much of my life. I have stood outside it, wondered at it, been hurt by it, tried and failed to attain it, and been destroyed by it. This toxic masculinity is fueled by the persecution of the weak by the strong. This masculinity is affronted and appalled by that which it does not recognize in itself. Because this masculinity is embraced by men who have never been betrayed by their bodies, by their society, the sick and the poor disgust them. To be sick or to be poor or to be Muslim or gay is simply the result of weakness and disorder.
This masculinity views justice as a set of transactions which presuppose they deserve to be rich, to be powerful, to be strong. And when they see those who are not rich, or powerful, or strong, they oppose it. Not as an abstract set of societal forces, but as a group of people who must be set opposite of them. And because these men have never felt their bodies fall apart and weaken them, have never had their stomach cut open and their insides removed, they see it as justice for the sick to pay their own way. These men received the strength and the health that they deserved, and so they do not need to worry about the cost of a failing body. They work for their money, and how dare the sick and poor who do not deserve their money insist that the health of the individual is the burden of the nation.
Their money is their strength, and those who are on the street deserve their lot. By God, they pulled themselves up by their bootstraps and bought a house and got a job. So woe upon the millennials born into the worst economic downturn since the second World War, for they are not responsible enough to afford a home. They do not deserve it if they couldn’t afford to pay for their unjustifiably inflated college tuition.
And damn the poor black man, condemned to Camden and Kensington, Watts and Compton, who did nothing but be born the wrong skin color in the wrong part of town. Damn the heretic Muslim, for their religion is a religion of death. Not at all like their supply side Christianity, that tells them, “woe to those who are poor, for the rich shall inherit the earth.” Their Christianity is the religion of the Chosen, and those who are not Chosen are enemies--and their Jesus compels them to hate their enemy, not to love them as they themselves wish to be loved.
This patriotic masculinity founded upon the idea that men should be strong and opposed to anything that is not is the same force that empowered the boys who locked me out of school in the rain and laughed when they finally let me in, wet and ashamed. It was their masculine duty to be opposed to me because I was weak and small and did not like sports. I was an unacceptable reminder to them that their health and strength was not deserved, and so they tortured me, reminded me every day that I was different and less than them. My body did not work correctly, though they did not know that, and so I was marked at an early age and set aside as a different breed. I was not tough or masculine, and so I was defined as tiny and short and weird. Those masculine boys set the rules, and so the girls followed, and so I was alone. This masculinity meant that those boys who reveled in my quarantine were not punished, because that is how teenage boys behave, and so the teachers and the counselors and the principals confirmed that might, indeed, does make right.
And so our country enacts laws and conducts diplomacy in this masculine way and calls it patriotism. Strength is the same as knowledge, might the same as justice.
I cannot love this nation. I cannot wave a flag or support a government that conflates patriotism with the domination of the weak by the strong.
But if patriotism is linked to the values that were laid out in those earliest days--values that even those who wrote it knew that they could not live up to--then patriotism means questioning and dissent. It means standing outside of this destructive code of masculinity and saying that our nation’s strength has always been in its unfinished promise that those who reside in this place deserve the liberty to live their life without persecution. This justice--a justice that says our resources are to be apportioned so that those who are born with less can provided an opportunity for more--this justice is worth calling patriotism. It is a patriotism that says this is the land of the free, and I have the right to speak out against policies and politicians who try to make it otherwise.It is a patriotism that says “America is better than this, we do not believe in cruel and unusual punishment.” And that does not make me Unamerican or less of a man; it makes me patriotic, and it makes me fully human. And you cannot call me, or my fellow Americans--the black, the Muslim, the Latino, the homeless, the gay, the woman, the sick-- less than. You cannot wage your endless war upon us. We are this tapestry of a nation just as they are, and that is an America that I can love. That is a maudlin song that I can sing, even if it may never be in my lifetime.
