by J. Thorn
What is patriotism? Is it love of one’s birthplace, the place of childhood’s recollections and hopes, dreams and aspirations? Is it the place where, in childlike naivety, we would watch the fleeting clouds, and wonder why we, too, could not run so swiftly? The place where we would count the milliard glittering stars, terror-stricken lest each one ‘an eye should be,’ piercing the very depths of our little souls? Is it the place where we would listen to the music of the birds, and long to have wings to fly, even as they, to distant lands? Or the place where we would sit at mother’s knee, enraptured by wonderful tales of great deeds and conquests? In short, is it love for the spot, every inch representing dear and precious recollections of a happy, joyous, and playful childhood?
Indeed, conceit, arrogance, and egotism are the essentials of patriotism. Let me illustrate. Patriotism assumes that our globe is divided into little spots, each one surrounded by an iron gate. Those who have had the fortune of being born on some particular spot, consider themselves better, nobler, grander, more intelligent than the living beings inhabiting any other spot. It is, therefore, the duty of everyone living on that chosen spot to fight, kill, and die in the attempt to impose his superiority upon all the others.
The inhabitants of the other spots reason in like manner, of course, with the result that, from early infancy, the mind of the child is poisoned with bloodcurdling stories about the Germans, the French, the Italians, Russians, etc. When the child has reached manhood, he is thoroughly saturated with the belief that he is chosen by the Lord himself to defend his country against the attack or invasion of any foreigner. It is for that purpose that we are clamoring for a greater army and navy, more battleships and ammunition.
The beginning has already been made in the schools. Evidently the government holds to the Jesuitical conception, ‘Give me the child mind, and I will mould the man.’ Children are trained in military tactics, the glory of military achievements extolled in the curriculum, and the youthful minds perverted to suit the government. Further, the youth of the country is appealed to in glaring posters to join the army and navy. ‘A fine chance to see the world!’ cries the governmental huckster. Thus innocent boys are morally shanghaied into patriotism, and the military Moloch strides conquering through the Nation.
This was written prior to World War I, World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Cold War, and the War on Terror.
At this point I must pause and make a very clear distinction between the ideology of patriotism and the humanity of veterans. I have many friends and family members who have served in past wars. I have a tremendous amount of respect for those who have given their health and lives to allow me to live mine. Patriotism is an ideology propagated by governments run by men who never have to see or deal with the ugly consequences of war. In fact, every soldier I know who has served during times of war says, to a man, that they hope their children never have to do what they have done.
The Dixie Chicks took as much heat for their stand as Goldman did for hers. Although it’s hard to compare the situations across time periods and situations, the principle is the same. When Natalie Maines said at a show in London, “Just so you know, we’re ashamed the president of the United States is from Texas,” she expressed some of the same sentiments as had Emma Goldman.
For generations, Americans have basked in God’s divine goodness. We sing songs about how special we are, and the president does not dare omit the obligatory, “God bless America” after a speech. Over the past two hundred years we have become the Promised Land, a place of hope for people here and those abroad yearning in their huddled masses.
However, patriotism comes with baggage. Even Natalie Maines could not escape it when she issued a written apology on the band’s website shortly after her comments at the show in London:
As a concerned American citizen, I apologize to President Bush because my remark was disrespectful. I feel that whoever holds that office should be treated with the utmost respect. We are currently in Europe and witnessing a huge anti-American sentiment as a result of the perceived rush to war. While war may remain a viable option, as a mother, I just want to see every possible alternative exhausted before children and American soldiers’ lives are lost. I love my country. I am a proud American.
Whether Natalie really considered war to “remain a viable option” or whether this was damage control is unclear. The point is that she still claims to love her country and to be a proud American, which defines the precursor of blind patriotism.
Why are you here? Most likely, you are a US citizen because of another’s action. Maybe your great-great-grandparents emigrated from Eastern Europe or maybe your mother huddled you to her chest as she escaped Cuba on an overcrowded raft. Chances are, you live here because someone else made that decision for you. Conversely, how did a citizen of Iraq become a member of that nation? Probably the same way, but with an even greater tie to the past. People in the Third World and developing nations rarely travel more than a few miles from their place of birth over a lifetime. Therefore, citizens of “rogue” nations or the supporters of the “Axis of Evil” simply had bad luck. They could have come into this world in Poughkeepsie but had the unfortunate luck to land in Pakistan. We inherit all of the identifying marks of culture. A child born into a poor, rural village in southern Iraq cannot choose to be a Christian living in suburban Houston.
When you boil patriotism down to its essence, it is an attitude of condescending superiority. Patriotism gives us the sense that our country has been preordained by God to morally guide the rest of the world on the course of heavenly goodness. And because of this designation any world leaders who dispute our path become our enemies and, as such, enemies of God. Unfortunately, we make no distinction between the leaders of countries and the citizens of them. Patriotism allows the use of terms such as “Gooks” and “Sand Niggers” because the “us vs. them” mentality can only work with an enemy, one we create with derogatory names used without substance.
Patriotism, like racism, must be taught. No child is born predisposed to love America. You probably cannot remember ever being taught patriotism in school, because it never happened. You were taught a prerequisite to patriotism that allowed you to swallow the ideology with nary a thought.
Let’s talk about pep rallies and school spirit!
***
If it were not for pep rallies, I would have never discovered “Shout at the Devil,” the single most influential recording in the history of the world. (Mötley Crüe’s “Shout at the Devil” may not mean that much to you, but it changed me forever. Keep reading, I’ll explain.) For that, I will be forever grateful to forced cheers and overexcited athletic directors.
Bobby Halloway scared the shit out of me. On some days he would crack jokes and make me laugh, and on other days he would punch my arm so many times that I would not be able to lift it at the end of the day. To this day I cannot figure out how he managed to make it through eight years of Catholic school, given that he was Satan incarnate. But then again, child-molesting priests seem to hang around a diocese for more than eight years, so there you go.
I doubt Bobby had parents. “Raised by wolves” is the term that comes to mind. If you were standing in line for lunch, Bobby would punch you in the stomach and not take your lunch money. He was so bad-ass that he wanted to inflict pain instead of settling for the standard steal-your-lunch-money bullying. Because of his predisposition to random violence and my fear of such violence, I did everything possible to keep Bobby from unleashing it on me. We sat next to each other at lunch and threw rocks at all of the popular kids during recess. Bobby and I would sit in the back of the bus during field trips and see how much shit we could throw out of the window before a teacher was forced to take notice. Bobby never said much, which made reading his body language on any given day difficult.
In October of 1983, at the impressionable age of twelve, Bobby and I sat next to each other in the bleachers. Our seventh-grade basketball team had finished playing, a
nd we were there to support the eighth-grade team. This is not entirely true but was the story I told my parents. Bobby and I used the opportunity to scope out chicks, although I doubt either of us would have known what to do if we scoped one.
Just prior to the tip-off, Bobby removed the headphones from his head and placed them over my ears. At first I heard nothing but the rhythmic grinding of the Walkman’s tape heads, which had obviously taken a beating. (They belonged to Bobby.) Within seconds, the most ghastly, horrific sounds filled my head. I can only assume it’s what hell would sound like if it really existed. After a brief incantation that had something to do with “all man’s sins,” the voice coming through a battered megaphone swirled upward. At that moment, the short pause record companies put between songs lurched forward, and I remember looking into Bobby’s eyes. If I were gay, this would sound romantic. In fact, it was terrifying. Bobby, knowing what was about to happen, snickered and nodded his head at me, the only indication of not wanting to kill me that I ever got from him.
And then the riff, sweet mother of Jesus. Lovers of music can often use songs to mark milestones in their lives. I have always been this way, and if you are too, you will understand this moment better than those of you who are shaking your heads in total bewilderment. Mick Mars ripped a sustaining chord while Tommy Lee’s cymbals shined like the lips of Satan. After a few passes on the chord progression, the gang vocals led by Vince Neil thundered through my prepubescent head. “Shout! Shout! Shout! Shout at the devil!” I do not know who is shouting at Satan and why they are shouting at him, but he is apparently hard of hearing.
“He’ll be the love in your eyes. He’ll be the blood between your thighs. And then have you crying for more.”
At twelve years of age I had no idea what Nikki Sixx meant with these lyrics, but it sounded dangerous, filthy, and so righteous. The song lasts a paltry three minutes and sixteen seconds, and I cannot remember anything that happened during my first listen on Bobby’s Walkman. The roof could have collapsed, the cheerleaders could have stripped naked, or Bobby could have kissed me on the lips and I would not have noticed.
In retrospect it sounds cheesy to admit that a Mötley Crüe song changed my outlook on life, taste in music, and overall attitude. But I will, because it did. The album Shout at the Devil exists as a thirty-four minute “fuck you” to the status quo. It became my rallying cry against the popular-crowd mentality of suburban Pittsburgh in 1983. I remember playing records my parents owned, like Kenny Rogers’ Greatest Hits and The Beach Boys’ Endless Summer before my introduction to the Crüe. Shout is one of the few albums I can listen to and enjoy like a twelve-year-old boy. It does not sound nearly as dated and stupid as other albums from that time. When I began to find others who took pleasure in the Satanic imagery and razor-sharp sound of early Crüe, I realized I was, and would forever be, a Metalhead.
Another benefit of this defining moment in my life, and there are many benefits, is that it made me realize I did not have to live like everyone else. I had the right, nay, the responsibility, to question everything. I recognized that I thought differently from many others, including my parents and siblings, and that this was not only OK but vital and necessary. Journey was selling millions of records at the time, and I fucking hated Steve Perry. The popular kids played “Faithfully” three times in a row at one dance, which made me throw up a little a bit in my mouth. I saw the truth in the sleazy rock of the Sunset Strip, and I would embark on a journey of spreading it that continues to this day. Mötley Crüe did not turn me into a disciple of Mötley Crüe or of hair metal. Heavy metal validated the idea of being an outsider, one who doesn’t want to do what everyone else does.
And it really made me hate school spirit.
***
Schools foster blind loyalty in much the same way the Olympics do. Chuck Klosterman says the “Olympics are designed for people who want to care about something without considering why.” I would add that school spirit serves the same function. The institution desires to have the student body care about it without logic. In fact, as Klosterman says later in his essay, “I Do Not Hate the Olympics,” it’s the same kind of “antilogic you need to employ whenever you attend a political convention or a church service or movies directed by Steven Spielberg.” He means that whether it’s patriotism, rooting for a team, or cheering a school, it is ultimately a lesson in non-thinking. If you want to non-think, you do not need a school to do that.
Ironically, this is one of the cornerstones of modern education. Every district, school, administrator, and teacher will say that they want to teach kids “how to think.” Asking them to blindly cheer at a pep rally teaches them how to conform. Schools are rife with conformity masked by such things as schedules, rules, lockers, procedures, lines, and more. There is no room for the child who questions authority or seeks an alternative path. Teachers and administrators create programs within this rigid conformity that attempt to placate the outsiders, but those efforts are not taken seriously by the kids they aim to help. There are certainly more pressing issues in education today, and I do not mean to scapegoat school spirit for the decline of the quality of education in this country. However, it matters. It matters because kids learn more from what we model than what we say.
Pride only works if others know you have it. It is a feeling validated by external factors and does not exist unless it is recognized. That is not to say students should not have respect for their school. Respect is different. Respect allows an individual to value without being dependent on validation.
The underlying assumption of school spirit is that yours is better. But why is this so? Is the rest of the world screwed because God blesses America? Do Clevelanders suck because they live in Cleveland, a city with a football team that constantly gets pounded by the Pittsburgh Steelers?
***
Bobby allowed me to borrow his Shout at the Devil cassette. My grandfather, the one buried with the Terrible Towel, had a dual tape deck in his spare bedroom. For a twelve-year-old kid in 1983 the dual tape deck was only slightly less shocking than if he had the command center of the Space Shuttle in there.
I asked him to “dub” me a copy of Shout at the Devil. I made sure to hand him only the white plastic cassette and hide the cover, the original complete with the boys in the Crüe looking like Lucifer’s minions and surrounding a pentagram. My grandfather looked at the tape, and as he slid it into the player, he turned to me.
“We’re skipping this track.”
I felt my face catch fire.
Too bad, because “Bastard” was one of the best songs on the album.
Thoughts on Social Engineering
Dan Slaney sucks. Ours was a friendship of convenience and, as it turned out, not all that convenient for me.
***
In early summer, all of the schools in western Pennsylvania choose a Saturday for their “Kennywood picnic.” Each public school district enjoys its designated day at Kennywood amusement park outside of Pittsburgh. If you have never been there, you owe it to yourself to visit. Unlike the manicured, sanitized, plastic parks of Disneyreich, Kennywood is authentic. It opened in 1898 and is one of only two amusement parks in the country listed on the National Register of Historic Places (the other being Rye Playland Park, which is not in Pittsburgh and not at all relevant to this story, although I am sure it is a wonderful park, too).
The Kennywood picnic was a time of careful maneuvering. Those at the top of the social ladder had no real concerns. They brought strips of tickets and gaggles of friends and moved through the park like locusts, devouring junk food and game-booth souvenirs at an exponential rate. Because they entered Kennywood in prearranged groups, it became interesting to see which boys “rode” with which girls. “Riding” is not a euphemism for sex. We were twelve, you pervert. A boy asked a girl to ride with him on La Cachot, or a ride equally as dark, smelly, and prone to a slip of the tongue, such as the Haunted Hideaway. (I had the unfortunate experience of returning to Kennywood last
summer with my young children. For the most part, there are a lot of rides that remain from my childhood. Unfortunately, the Haunted Hideaway did not make it. The building and the slimy, green water remain, but it’s been converted to a kind of “scary cartoon character” theme, much too much like Disneyshit, in my opinion.)
My greatest conquest at the Kennywood picnic came a year later, when I managed to (1) get Susan Mayfair to ride with me on La Cachot and (2) snuck an arm around her as we came out of the ride, which gave my social standing quite a boost.
But I digress. The sixth-grade year (and the previous five) I had spent at a Catholic school. We shall leave that experience for another essay. Dan Slaney lived across the street from me and was in seventh grade at the local junior high, a building that held 187,000 kids in grades seven and eight. Dan was big and played football. Although he was not part of the in-crowd, he managed to hang on the edge, which meant his friendship would be strategic for me. Because we were neighbors, we often played together. Dan would calm my nerves, telling me wonderful stories of life at our junior high school. He claimed that new students were often beaten by roving gangs and left for dead and that uncaring teachers would often spit on the corpses.
A week prior to Kennywood picnic in 1983, Dan and I agreed to go together. This unwritten pact meant that our parents would drop us off at the gate and we would spend the entire day, usually from eleven in the morning until midnight, riding, eating, gorging, and occasionally standing under rides that might give us a chance at seeing panties (not those of mothers or sisters unless they were Dan’s. I’d have to sneak peeks at his younger sister, Stacey, while pretending I didn’t know it was her). We spoke all week about the greasy fries we would get at the Potato Patch or how we would try our best to get each other wet on the Log Jammer (no sexual connotation, pervert). You had to go to Kennywood with an even number of people as most rides held pairs.