Hot Button Issues, No. 2: Patriotism

Our current First Lady remembers the time when she first felt proud of her country.  I remember the time when I first felt ashamed.

It was my first term as a graduate student, when I was studying abroad in England.  I had made friends with some of the senior graduate students, and we were at their house, putting coals on the fire in the fireplace (I remember this vividly; it was the first time that I had seen a coal fire).  Something came on over the radio about the newly breaking scandal: certain Americans high up in the Reagan administration had been caught selling arms in exchange for hostages in Iran and then sending the money to Nicaragua in aid of the anti-Communist Contras.  My friends erupted in disgust and smug criticism.  One was English, one was Canadian, the third was American, but all were united in their conviction that America was evil and Americans even worse.  The scandal (as they saw it) confirmed all of their worst suspicions about what America meant on the world stage.

At least, that is the way I remember feeling; I'm not sure exactly who said what.  What I do remember is feeling so horribly naïve as to have ever believed that my country was anything other than evil.  Oh, sure, as an undergraduate, I sneered with the rest of the intelligentsia at President Reagan when I saw him speaking on the television down in the college pub (this was before 1986, when the drinking age in Texas was still 18), but I hadn't ever really paid much attention.  Of course, Reagan was silly, with that silly drawl and those simplistic phrases: "Evil empire."  "Star Wars."  "American superiority."  The Soviets as immoral, believing in neither "God [nor] a religion."  But he was just the president, not what America meant.  My friends would have none of that.  Americans were doing this despicable thing, trading arms for hostages with the Iranians, sending money to the enemies of communism.  Americans like Ronald Reagan and Oliver North deserved to be shot down for their hypocrisy and lies.

I tried to explain this reaction when I went home the next spring, and my family erupted in disbelief.  "Nobody hates America, we're the good guys!" my brother said (or words to that effect; I just remember the disagreement).  To which I said, "No, no, they hate us, they all hate us, the Europeans."  This after being subject to yet further conversations (I think I am mixing my chronology a bit here, it all blends) about Chile and American imperialism.  All of this was news to me (yes, I was that sheltered), and all of it stung.  Really?  Was my country really the bad one?  Were Americans evil for intervening in world affairs in the way that we had?  "Oh, yes," my sophisticated friends assured me.  "America is the evil empire, not the Soviet Union.  Reagan is crazy and is going to get us all killed."

I am exaggerating somewhat; I can't remember all of these conversations very well.  What I remember was the loss of faith and dismay.  My country, my beloved country, the home where I had grown up, was evil.  How had I not known?  What about the national anthem, the star spangled banner, the rockets' red glare?  Was it wrong to feel moved when I heard that tune?  "No, no," I ineffectually protested.  "We've done lots of good things for the world."  "Name one," my interlocutors would sneer.  Helpless, naive, undereducated, I'd say something inept, like "McDonald's" (really, I was that helpless), and then the scorn would erupt.  "America has funded dictators.  America gives arms to topple other countries' governments.  America is the greatest threat to humanity on earth."  And there I would sit, certain that I was the one who was simple-minded and naïve, unlike my more sophisticated European friends.

And there I sat, more or less, for over twenty-five years, ashamed of ever having loved my country like the naïve schoolgirl I had been.*  Until this past summer when I started reading Mark Steyn.  Suddenly, blessedly, someone who was standing up for my country.  Even better, someone who was himself Canadian and who had grown up visiting his grandmother in Belgium.  And what did he say?  America is the world's last best hope for freedom and prosperity.  America is where immigrants from all over the world come to be free.  America is the reason that millions of people in Europe are no longer living under communism, thanks to that purported doofus Ronald Reagan (no wait, I'm conflating Steyn here with Ann Coulter; you get the drift).  Far from being the greatest threat to humanity on earth, Americans were heroes.  We were the ones standing up for freedom, not the ones oppressing the world.  As Mr. Romney put it in the most recent debate with Mr. Obama, "Mr. President, America has not dictated to other nations. We have freed other nations from dictators."

Could it be true?  Could it really and truly be true?  My country, the good one?  My country, the homeland in which I could be proud?  If only I had listened to my father when he railed against what happened to us in Vietnam.  Not that we lost, but that our own government betrayed us by insisting that we should.  At least, now thanks to Ann Coulter, I recognize this is what he was saying (in between drinks and taking care of the veterans at the VA).  He should know, he served in Thailand in 1971-1972 as a surgeon for the Air Force.  He was actually there.  But, no, my sophisticated friends would insist, we lost, and serves us right, sticking our nose into other peoples' affairs. Well, excuse me, but bullsh*t, as President Obama likes to say.  We didn't lose; we abandoned our allies because the Democrats, as always since World War II, lost their nerve. 

This is the way Coulter tells it (sorry, this is a long passage for an essay post, but it is rewriting everything I have ever believed about my country since my childhood--bear with me):

Nixon had been elected in part based on his promise to end the war [in Vietnam] honorably.  He would have done so, too, but for Democrats in Congress.  In January 1973, the Nixon administration negotiated a truce between Hanoi and Saigon, known as the Paris Peace Accords.  The war was over and our ally would be safe as long as the agreement was enforced.  The U.S. retained three trump cards to play if the Communist North violated the truce and invaded South Vietnam: Keep Haiphong harbor mined, furnish military and economic aid to South Vietnam, or resume the bombing.

In the most dishonorable chapter of the nation's history, the Democratic Congress led the United States to double-cross an ally.  Using hysteria over Watergate as cover, congressional Democrats openly turned their backs on the South Vietnamese, leading to a total Communist conquest of Indochina.  In August 1973--the height of liberal frenzy over Watergate--Congress demanded that the president seek their approval before resuming any bombing in Vietnam.  Within a matter of months, North Vietnam invaded the South.  Congressional Democrats refused to appropriate any aid for South Vietnam.  Still, with no U.S. support, the South Vietnamese valiantly held off the North for well over a year.

But by 1975, the situation was desperate.  Even President Gerald Ford, as weak a Republican as there ever was, repeatedly pleaded with Democratic Congress not to forsake our ally, the South Vietnamese.  Ford said, "American unwillingness to provide adequate assistance to allies fighting for their lives, could seriously affect our credibility throughout the world as an ally."  Congress didn't have to send troops, just aid.  The Democrats ignored Ford's pleas and abandoned the South Vietnamese.  Before the year was out, North Vietnamese tanks rolled into Saigon.  In a triumph of liberal foreign policy, Marine helicopters had to be dispatched to airlift American officials and a few fortunate Vietnamese from the roof of the American embassy in Saigon.  It was, historian Paul Johnson writes, "the gravest and most humiliating defeat in American history."**

In Coulter's words: "The Democrats did that."  Perhaps Mr. Romney should have said not "we have freed other nations from dictators," but "we when acting as Republicans have freed other nations from dictators."  My whole adult life I've believed the Democratic bullsh*t, that Europeans know better than Americans do about how to keep the world free.  That Europeans are right to sneer at us when we go the aid of our allies.  That Europeans are the more civilized, the more sophisticated, the more in touch with the complexities of world politics.***  Well, not any more. 

So you will forgive me, I hope, if I am a bit snippy at the moment.  Likewise, if I agree with Mr. Romney that it is time for America to stop apologizing to the world for standing up for our freedom and the freedom of the other peoples of the world.  I will quote him again in case it wasn't clear: "Mr. President, America has not dictated to other nations. We have freed other nations from dictators."

And, by the by, it was Ronald Reagan, not Mikhail Gorbachev, who won the Cold War.

*And busy studying European history, because that was what the cool kids did.  Well, sort of.  The cool kids were studying modern European history; I was still a geek for being more interested in medieval.
**Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism (New York: Crown Forum, 2003), p. 131.
***And, okay, I'm being less than subtle here.  Great Britain has stood by us numerous times.  I'm talking about the way liberal, particularly Democratic Americans tend to imagine "Europe," not what Europeans actually think.