Cheat Seeking Missiles

ime will tell whether patriotism matters, because we are busy setting up the test case.

Our schools, our intelligentsia, our media and our publishers are all busy setting up patriotism as an inferior, baser alternative to internationalism, and are painting soldiers of valor as victims of war, striving to create a whole generation that will believe as they believe: That America is not worth fighting for.

Tom Sowell, in what just may be the most important read of this 4th of July, shows us how history is supposed to be used - to keep us from repeating it - in his Real Clear Politics essay, Does Patriotism Matter? He turns to France in the years following WWI, when the teachers unions and academia fought to destroy patriotism in favor of internationalism, and to paint soldiers - all soldiers, French and German - as equal victims of cruel, unjustifiable war.

At the outset of the [German] invasion [of France in WWII], both German and French generals assessed French military forces as more likely to gain victory, and virtually no one expected France to collapse like a house of cards — except Adolf Hitler, who had studied French society instead of French military forces.

Did patriotism matter? It mattered more than superior French tanks and planes.

Did the American Left learn anything from this experience? Of course not! History, to them, is made to be rewritten, not learned from. So we see on this 4th of July, displays of patriotism on the Left like this one, at Daily Kos:

The Declaration of Independence was the laundry list of grievances stating America’s case for freedom. Its accusations against the King ranged from egregious (”He has plundered our seas, burnt our towns and ravaged the lives of our people”) to the trifling (”Sometimes when he sees us at a party he acts like he doesn’t know us”). But proud men would not take up arms against the Crown solely because the King had “erected a multitude of new offices.” The authors of the Declaration knew they would also have to appeal to man’s higher nature, to stir men’s souls. They needed something with some zazz. Enter a hot-shot tobacco executive from Virginia, Thomas Jefferson.

His task would be to synthesize the unique brand message of America down to something that would captivate the hard to reach “12-28 ragtag militia” demographic, all the while not offending traditional “Butterchurn Moms.” His first attempt at a Preamble was:

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AMERICA. A is for All the tea they taxed. M is for the Minutemen they shellaxed…”
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It tested poorly. But his rewrite would be win-win:

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“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.”
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In a scant 35 words, Jefferson had given the nation the kind of positive brand identity that tendered moot the issue of whether or not we had to live up to its ideals. Still, knowing the inherent contradiction between their noble words and the reality of a slave-owning nation, Jefferson and the Founders wisely decided to strike from the Declaration of Independence the phrase “or your money back.”

Oh, tickle me pinko. Or this, by Charles Karel Bouley at HuffPo:

I could write volumes about patriotism this July 4th. How many column inches in the last few weeks has been devoted to whether or not Barack Obama is patriotic enough, if a war record is on or off limits, and what the love of country truly means. Is anyone in government today truly patriotic?

I’m not I suppose. I don’t like the “Star Spangled Banner” as our national anthem. It’s too violent and too hard to sing for anyone except Whitney or Barbra or… get the point? I think “America The Beautiful” is a far better national anthem. So, I’m unpatriotic.

I question everything. I agree whole-heartedly with Gen. Wesley Clark about Sen. John McGoo’s war record and how just because you’re a POW doesn’t mean you’d make a good POTUS.

And I question our patriotism this July 4th. We, the People who should have seen this gas increase coming, who let a president bankrupt a nation once great, a failed war…Yes, I could rant and rave about that here for paragraphs and paragraphs.

He then links to a radio rant that is nothing but Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, of railing against the media for even questioning Obama’s patriotism - apparently an off-limits inquiry in a nation where patriots have died to protect free speech.

Contrast that with this, from 365 and a Wakeup, winner of this week’s Watcher’s Council contest:

In my first duty assignment I learned why our drill instructors focused so intently on hardening us. I needed that strength when we secured mass graves in Bosnia. I needed it when we faced refugee camps so crippled with famine that the fluid flow of the human body was reduced to hard, angular lines. And I needed that strength when we in countries where the only rules were the brutal laws of physics and ballistics. Exposure to these harsh realities could have broken our spirit, but there were joys to counterbalance the pain. Sometimes we would find it in the sing song lyrics of children chirping in high pitch squeals we couldn’t decipher. Other times we found our solace in the serenity our presence brought to areas where civilization had been stripped to its animal core. But mostly we found it in each other, and in the simple knowledge that our actions proved that life could triumph over death, if only for a moment.

Just because the Left wants to belittle and denigrate patriotism doesn’t mean we should allow it to; it doesn’t mean we can’t put up a spirited - patriotic - defense of it. We should, because if we don’t, we’ll sorrily find out the answer to the question posed in the headline of this post: Yes indeed, patriotism does matter. It matters very much.

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