Marilynne Robinson on patriotism.
There’s an American flag at my house. It’s got to be decades old. The red is faded to pink; the blue is baby. And it’s enormous. It covers the whole side of a barn, and if you drive by, it’s the first thing you see. |
I can’t really imagine myself buying a huge American flag, climbing up a ladder and nailing it to a building. But what am I going to do now — take it down? Someone did the work to haul it up there. It probably doesn’t mean exactly the same thing to me as it did to him. But that’s OK. It’s my flag now. |
It’s a little, she says, like loving a family, in which everyone, by birth or choice, is deserving of recognition. It’s a lofty idea, expressed in a down-to-earth way. |
“As a liberal, I am loyal to this country in ways that make me a pragmatist,” she writes. “If someone is hungry, feed him. He will be thirsty, so be sure that he has good water to drink.” He shares your home, so acknowledge his worth as an equal. |
She sees a connection between the politics of suspicion and conspiracy, and the dissolution of that common-sense good will. “Over the past few years,” she writes, “President Trump has promoted the belief that a large share of the American people are endlessly productive of plots, frauds and hoaxes, that they are not to be heard out in good faith.” |
But “this is the aspersion, the fraud, the hoax, most corrosive to democracy. Once a significant part of the population takes it to be true that other groups or classes do not participate legitimately in the political life of the country, democracy is in trouble.” |
Marilynne has written, in the past, about “the bent toward malice and nonsense that is always present anywhere but seems harder to resist during periods of crisis.” This is a crisis, all right. |
“If the one civic exercise that gives legitimacy to our government defaults,” she writes about the coming election, we will “have to find another word than democracy to describe whatever we will have become.” |
I got my voter registration certificate from the mailbox this week and checked out my flag as I walked back inside. I’ve been a little worried about it, with the moths and the weather and the sheer old weight of it pulling it down. I was thinking, if it fell, I’d get a new one after all. |
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