Couch Yourself Carefully

We sat watching Errol Morris, the documentary filmmaker behind The Thin Blue Line and The Fog Of War, discussing his upcoming film at the New Yorker Festival this past weekend. The new film, S.O.P.: Standard Operating Procedure, deals with the stories behind the photographs of abuse and soldiers pictured in them from the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq in 2003. Morris, a gregarious figure, sat on stage in conversation with his collaborator Philip Gourevitch, a staff writer for the magazine and author of the seminal We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families, a vivid collection of his journalistic accounts of the Rwandan genocide that occurred during the 1990s.

“I don’t want to say I’m a patriot, or anything grandiloquent like that,” Morris was saying. Gourevitch fixed me with a withering gaze. A few minutes ago, I’d asked about the semantic uses of patriotism in promoting a message that might contradict the current wielders of that tool. I must’ve bungled my phrasing, as Gourevitch laconically gave me the textbook “you have to be a patriot of sorts to care about this stuff” response and Morris had ducked the question altogether, so I was surprised to get an answer five minutes later, to someone else’s question, no less. “I think I just have an interest in this material... [and in] getting to the truth.”

It made me lean back in my chair. Wouldn’t the best way to get the truth out there be by couching the words in patriotic language? After all, couldn’t both of the men on stage say “This is my country, and to have my country engaging in torture as ‘standard operating procedure’ makes me, as a patriot, furious?” The short answer is the most depressing one: it’ll only make things worse.

Ever since the modern concept of a “nation-state” has existed, one of the best ways to make an effective argument is by appealing to some sort of national spirit. Elizabeth I did it when sending off her small fleet against the Spanish Armada in the late sixteenth century. John Adams & co. managed to suppress dissenting opinions with the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, placing himself firmly at the center of the fledgling United States’ evolving patriotic mythos. Woodrow Wilson’s White House went on to employ similar methods that were upheld in some of the first Supreme Court cases to deal explicitly with the First Amendment. Stalin and Mao both killed untold millions by transforming purportedly “international socialist” countries into ruthless nationalist dictatorships, buttressed by cults of personality similar to the one Vladimir Putin is now building in Russia. In short, it’s hard to go wrong with taking a patriotic tack.

The issue, as you can see from the above examples, is that disastrous results can occur when “my country, my view” enters the political vocabulary. In recent years, we have been told by the relentlessly flag-pin-wearing members of the current administration that everything is fine, that everything is relative except the strength of “our people,” or, worst of all, that dissent is unpatriotic. They’re far from the first and far from the last to take this road. But they did it exceedingly well.

Up against such opposition, in a climate of political fatigue, declaring oneself a patriot seems almost de rigeur if one wishes to challenge the status quo, but you then run the inevitable risk of a feedback loop, amping up a nationalistic argument that could prove disastrous in the long haul. It’s a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” situation.

Fortunately, there’s some semblance of middle ground. Given the exhaustive campaign schedule for the 2008 elections in this country, there’s a surprising opportunity this fall to begin targeting questions to candidates and pundits both around the concept of realizing one’s ideals. The question “Are you a patriot?” is one of the oldest threats in the book, but “What makes you a patriot?” is a way of getting to the heart of one’s political priorities. Rudy Giuliani can bark all he wants about being the “Mayor of 9/11,” as The Onion named him, and Hillary Clinton can project a monolithic aura of cool competent experience, but there must exist a rationale behind their goals in public service. From a “yes or no” question, we can develop a “why?” question, and from that “why,” there can be a “how”—as in, “How do you plan to act on your beliefs if elected?” or, in Errol Morris’s case, “How can we use the information you have painstakingly gathered to ensure that actions like this are prevented in the future, regardless of the circumstance or the party in power?”

There is an effective way to claim some semblance of patriotism in the service of a goal. Philip Gourevitch saw the dangers of identity and strife, as well as the uncaring of rhetoricians, on the ground in Rwanda. If expressing his patriotism “of sorts” in promoting his and Morris’ project can lead to practical solutions to the terrible problems their work presents, it is certainly worth couching solutions carefully in the language of practical patriotism.