The Partly Cloudy Patriot

by Sarah Vowell

  The most remarkable thing about the Mounties was their mandate: one law. One law for everyone, Indian or white. The United States makes a big to-do about all men being created equal, but we’re still working out the kinks of turning that idea into actual policy. Reporting to the force’s commissioner in 1877, one Mountie wrote of Americans in his jurisdiction, “These men always look upon the Indians as their natural enemies, and it is their rule to shoot at them if they approach after being warned off. I was actually asked the other day by an American who has settled here, if we had the same law here as on the other side, and if he was justified in shooting any Indian who approached his camp after being warned not to in advance.”

  Word of the Canadians’ fairness got around. Some northwestern tribes referred to the border between the United States and Canada as the “medicine line.” Robert Higheagle, a Lakota Sioux from Sitting Bull’s band, recalled, “They told us this line was considered holy. They called that a holy trail. They believe things are different when you cross from one side to another. You are altogether different. On one side you are perfectly free to do as you please. On the other you are in danger.”

  To Canada’s dismay, the northern side of the medicine line became an attractive destination for American Indians, including the most famous, most difficult one of all, Sitting Bull. On the run after Little Bighorn, Sitting Bull and entourage settled near Canada’s Fort Walsh, under the command of Major James Walsh. Walsh and, as he called him, Bull became such great friends that the Canadian government had Walsh transferred to another post to separate him from Sitting Bull. Sitting Bull was an American problem and the Canadian government wanted to boot him south. Walsh even defied orders and went to Chicago to lobby on Sitting Bull’s behalf, but to no avail, ensuring that Sitting Bull would die south of the medicine line.

  All the Sitting Bull complications make Walsh my favorite Mountie. But he’s a very American choice—he bucked the system, he played favorites for a friend, he defied policy, he stuck out. (Apparently, even having a favorite Mountie is an American trait. When I asked the twentieth commissioner of Mounties, Giuliano “Zach” Zaccardelli, who was his favorite RCMP commissioner in history, he answered Canadianly, “Every one of them has contributed tremendously to the legacy of the RCMP, and I hope that during my tenure I will be able to add some value to the legacy that those nineteen who came before me left for this organization.”) When Walsh heard that Sitting Bull had been fatally shot in Minnesota, he wrote, “Bull’s ambition is I am afraid too great to let him settle down and be content with an uninteresting life.” This strikes me as almost treasonously individualistic, with American shades of “pursuit of happiness” and “liberty or death.”

  Everyone knows what the individualistic American cowboy fetish gets us: shot. It all comes down to guns. The population of the United States is ten times that of Canada, but we have about thirty times more firearms. Two-thirds of our homicides are committed with firearms, compared with one-third of theirs. (Which begs the question, just what are Canadian killers using, hair dryers tossed into bathtubs?)

  The famous (well, in Canada) historian Pierre Berton, in his surprisingly out-of-print book Why We Act Like Canadians, informs an American friend that it has to do with weather. Having been to Edmonton in January, I cede his point. He wrote,

  Hot weather and passion, gunfights and race riots go together. Your mythic encounters seem to have taken place at high noon, the sun beating down on a dusty Arizona street. I find it difficult to contemplate a similar gunfight in Moose Jaw, in the winter, the bitter rivals struggling vainly to shed two pairs of mitts and reach under several layers of parka for weapons so cold that the slightest touch of flesh on steel would take the skin off their thumbs.

  Most of the time, I feel Canadian. I live a quiet life. I own no firearms (though, as a gunsmith’s daughter, I stand to inherit a freaking arsenal). I revere the Bill of Rights, but at the same time I believe that anyone who’s using three or more of them at a time is hogging them too much. I’m a newspaper-reading, French-speaking, radio-documentary-loving square. A lot of my favorite comedians, such as Martin Short, Eugene Levy, the Kids in the Hall, are Canadian. I like that self-deprecating Charlie Brown sense of humor. As Canadian-born Saturday Night Live producer Lorne Michaels once put it in a panel discussion devoted to the question of why Canadians are so funny at the Ninety-second Street Y, a Canadian would never have made a film called It’s a Wonderful Life because “that would be bragging.” The Canadian version, he said, would have been titled “It’s an All Right Life.”

  So I mostly walk the Canadian walk, but the thing about a lot of Canadian talk is that it sounds bad. When I went to Ottawa, the “Washington of the North,” to see the RCMP’s Musical Ride, which is sort of like synchronized swimming on horseback, I was telling a constable in the Mounties about a new U.S. Army recruiting ad. The slogan was “an army of one.” It aimed to reassure American kids that they wouldn’t be nameless, faceless nobodies, that they could join the army and still do their own thing.

  The Mountie was horrified. He said, “I think we have to try and work as a team and work together. If you start to be an individualist, then everybody’s going their own way. One person might be doing something and the other person might be doing something else and everybody wants to put their word in and thinks, I’m better than him or My idea’s better than his. You need conformity. You need everybody to stick together and work as a team.”

  It hurt my ears when he said “you need conformity.” I know he’s probably right, and what organization more than a military one requires lockstep uniformity so that fewer people get killed? But still. No true American would ever talk up the virtue of conformity. Intellectually, I roll my eyes at the cowboy outlaw ethic, but in my heart I know I buy into it a little, that it’s a deep part of my identity. Once, when I was living in Holland, I went to the movies, and when a Marlboro Man ad came on the screen, I started bawling with homesickness. I may be the only person who cried all the way through Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead.

  The Mounties on the Musical Ride dress in the old-fashioned red serge suits and Stetson hats, like Dudley Do-Right. Seeing them on their black horses, riding in time to music, was entirely lovable, yet lacking any sort of, for lack of a better word, edge. I tried to ask some of them about it.

  I say, “In the States, the Mountie is a squeaky-clean icon. Does that ever bother you that the Mountie is not ‘cool’?”

  He stares back blankly. I ask him, “You know what I mean?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “There’s no dark side,” I tell him. “The Mounties have no dark side.”

  He laughs. “That might be one of the things that upset the Americans, because we’re just that much better.” Then he feels so bad about this little put-down that he repents, back-tracking about how “there’s good and bad in everybody,” that Americans and Canadians “just have different views,” and that “Canadians are no better than anyone else.”

  Another constable, overhearing, says, “Our country is far younger than the United States, but at the same time, the United States is a young country when you compare it to the countries of Europe.”

  “Yeah,” I answer, “but you’re a very well-behaved young country.”

  “Well”—he smiles—“that’s just the way my mum raised me.”

  The Partly Cloudy Patriot

  In the summer of 2000, I went to see the Mel Gibson blockbuster The Patriot. I enjoyed that movie. Watching a story line like that is always a relief. Of course the British must be expelled, just as the Confederates must surrender, Hitler must be crushed, and yee-haw when the Red Sea swallows those slave-mongering Egyptians. There were editorials about The Patriot, the kind that always accompany any historical film, written by professors who insist things nobody cares about, like Salieri wasn’t that bad a sort or the fact that Roman gladiators maybe didn’t have Australian accents. A little anachronism is part of the fun, and I don’t mind i
f in real life General Cornwallis never lost a battle in the South as he does rather gloriously in the film. Isn’t art supposed to improve on life?

  Personally, I think there was more than enough historical accuracy in The Patriot to keep the spoilsports happy. Because I’m part spoilsport on my father’s side, and I felt nagged with quandaries every few minutes during the nearly three-hour film. American history is a quagmire, and the more one knows, the quaggier the mire gets. If you’re paying attention during The Patriot and you know your history and you have a stake in that history, not to mention a conscience, the movie is not an entirely cartoonish march to glory. For example, Mel Gibson’s character, Benjamin Martin, is conflicted. He doesn’t want to fight the British because he still feels bad about chopping up some Cherokee into little pieces during the French and Indian War. Since I’m a part-Cherokee person myself, Gibson lost a little of the sympathy I’d stored up for him because he’d been underrated in Conspiracy Theory. And did I mention his character lives in South Carolina? So by the end of the movie, you look at the youngest Mel junior bundled in his mother’s arms and think, Mel just risked his life so that that kid’s kids can rape their slaves and vote to be the first state to secede from the Union.

  The Patriot did confirm that I owe George Washington an apology. I always liked George fine, though I dismissed him as a mere soldier. I prefer the pen to the sword, so I’ve always been more of a Jeffersonhead. The words of the Declaration of Independence are so right and true that it seems like its poetry alone would have knocked King George III in the head. Like, he would have read this beloved passage, “We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights—that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness,” and thought the notion so just, and yet still so wonderfully whimsical, that he would have dethroned himself on the spot. But no, it took a grueling, six-year-long war to make independence a fact.

  I rarely remember this. In my ninety-five-cent copy of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, the two documents are separated by only a blank half page. I forget that there are eleven years between them, eleven years of war and the whole Articles of Confederation debacle. In my head, the two documents are like the A side and B side of the greatest single ever released that was recorded in one great drunken night, but no, there’s a lot of bleeding life between them. Dead boys and dead Indians and Valley Forge.

  Anyway, The Patriot. The best part of seeing it was standing in line for tickets. I remember how jarring it was to hear my fellow moviegoers say that word. “Two for The Patriot please.” “One for The Patriot at 5:30.” For years, I called it the P word, because it tended to make nice people flinch. For the better part of the 1990s, it seemed like the only Americans who publicly described themselves as patriots were scary militia types hiding out in the backwoods of Michigan and Montana, cleaning their guns. One of the few Americans still celebrating Patriot’s Day—a nearly forgotten holiday on April 19 commemorating the Revolutionary War’s first shots at Lexington and Concord—did so in 1995 by murdering 168 people in the federal building in Oklahoma City. In fact, the same week I saw The Patriot, I was out with some friends for dessert. When I asked a fellow named Andy why he had chosen a cupcake with a little American flag stuck in the frosting, I expected him to say that he was in a patriotic mood, but he didn’t. He said that he was “feeling jingoistic.”

  Well, that was a long time ago. As I write this, it’s December 2001 in New York City. The only words one hears more often than variations on patriot are “in the wake of,” “in the aftermath of,” and “since the events of September 11.” We also use the word we more. Patriotism as a word and deed has made a comeback. At Halloween, costume shops did a brisk business in Uncle Sam and Betsy Ross getups. Teen pop bombshell Britney Spears took a breather during her live telecast from Vegas’s MGM Grand to sit on a piano bench with her belly ring glinting in the spotlight and talk about “how proud I am of our nation right now.” Chinese textile factories are working overtime to fill the consumer demand for American flags.

  Immediately after the attack, seeing the flag all over the place was moving, endearing. So when the newspaper I subscribe to published a full-page, full-color flag to clip out and hang in the window, how come I couldn’t? It took me a while to figure out why I guiltily slid the flag into the recycling bin instead of taping it up. The meaning had changed; or let’s say it changed back. In the first day or two the flags were plastered everywhere, seeing them was heartening because they indicated that we’re all in this sorrow together. The flags were purely emotional. Once we went to war, once the president announced that we were going to retaliate against the “evildoers,” then the flag again represented what it usually represents, the government. I think that’s when the flags started making me nervous. The true American patriot is by definition skeptical of the government. Skepticism of the government was actually one of the platforms the current figurehead of the government ran on. How many times in the campaign did President Bush proclaim of his opponent, the then vice president, “He trusts the federal government and I trust the people”? This deep suspicion of Washington is one of the most American emotions an American can have. So by the beginning of October, the ubiquity of the flag came to feel like peer pressure to always stand behind policies one might not necessarily agree with. And, like any normal citizen, I prefer to make up my mind about the issues of the day on a case by case basis at 3:00 A.M. when I wake up from my Nightline-inspired nightmares.

  One Independence Day, when I was in college, I was living in a house with other students on a street that happened to be one of the main roads leading to the football stadium where the town’s official Fourth of July fireworks festivities would be held. I looked out the window and noticed a little American flag stabbed into my yard. Then I walked outside and saw that all the yards in front of all the houses on the street had little flags waving above the grass. The flags, according to a tag, were underwritten by a local real estate agency and the Veterans of Foreign Wars. I marched into the house, yanked out the phone book, found the real estate office in the yellow pages, and phoned them up immediately, demanding that they come and take their fucking flag off my lawn, screaming into the phone, “The whole point of that goddamn flag is that people don’t stick flags in my yard without asking me!” I felt like Jimmy Stewart in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, but with profanity. A few minutes later, an elderly gentleman in a VFW cap, who probably lost his best friend liberating France or something, pulled up in a big car, grabbed the flag, and rolled his eyes as I stared at him through the window. Then I felt dramatic and dumb. Still, sometimes I think the true American flag has always been that one with the snake hissing “Don’t Tread on Me.”

  The week of the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, I watched TV news all day and slept with the radio on. I found myself flipping channels hoping to see the FBI handcuff a terrorist on camera. What did happen, a lot, was that citizens or politicians or journalists would mention that they wonder what it will be like for Americans now to live with the constant threat of random, sudden death. I know a little bit about what that’s like. I did grow up during the Cold War. Maybe it says something about my level of cheer that I found this notion comforting, to remember that all those years I was sure the world might blow up at any second, I somehow managed to graduate from high school and do my laundry and see Smokey Robinson live.

  Things were bad in New York. I stopped being able to tell whether my eyes were teary all the time from grief or from the dirty, smoky wind. Just when it seemed as if the dust had started to settle, then came the anthrax. I was on the phone with a friend who works in Rockefeller Center, and he had to hang up to be evacuated because a contaminated envelope had infected a person in the building; an hour later, another friend in another building was sitting at his desk eating his lunch and men in sealed plastic disease-control space suits walked through his
office, taking samples. Once delivering the mail became life-threatening, pedestrians trudging past the main post office on Eighth Avenue bowed their heads a little as they read the credo chiseled on the façade, “Neither snow, nor rain, nor heat, nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.”

  During another war, across the river, in Newark, a writer turned soldier named Thomas Paine sat down by a campfire in September 1776 and wrote, “These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.” In September and October, I liked to read that before I pulled the rubber band off the newspaper to find out what was being done to my country and what my country was doing back. I like the black and white of Paine’s words. I know I’m no sunshine patriot. I wasn’t shrinking, though, honestly; the most important service we mere mortal citizens were called upon to perform was to spend money, so I dutifully paid for Korean dinners and a new living room lamp. But still I longed for the morning that I could open up the paper and the only people in it who would irk me would be dead suicide bombers and retreating totalitarians on the other side of the world. Because that would be the morning I pulled that flag out of the recycling bin and taped it up in the window. And while I could shake my fists for sure at the terrorists on page one, buried domestic items could still make my stomach hurt—school prayer partisans taking advantage of the grief of children to circumvent the separation of church and state; the White House press secretary condemning a late-night talk show host for making a questionable remark about the U.S. military: “The reminder is to all Americans, that they need to watch what they say, watch what they do, and that this is not a time for remarks like that.” Those are the sorts of never-ending qualms that have turned me into the partly cloudy patriot I long not to be.