You Can Hate Your Country and Love Its Rituals

It’s well-established that I’m not a fan of the United States. I’m sure the comments are going to fill up here to tell me why I’m wrong, but I’m steadfast in this. Our history in the world, the history of the CIA and the defense department and the whole apparatus, is written in blood. Hell, what we did in Albania is probably not among the top 25 worst things we’ve ever done, and we were trying like hell to put people who sent Jews to Auschwitz in power. Read Legacy of Ashes if you have any remaining sense that the United States has been a benign force in the world. In part because of these feelings, Burroughs’s “A Thanksgiving Prayer” has always been a favorite of mine.

Also, I love Thanksgiving. Love it. I love late fall. I love getting the family together. I love the harvest imagery. I love the food. I love that there’s no pressure related to gift-giving. I love football and I love my post-meal nap. I even love that people are forced to talk to other people who are very much not like them, as much as that spawns annual bellyaching. I love pumpkin pie. I especially love the essential notion of a holiday dedicated to feeling gratitude.

Is that hypocritical? I don’t think so, no. Everyone makes of holidays what they will. Many or most American atheists celebrate Christmas, and many Jews, even some observant Jews, participate in the holiday in some way or another. People with no attachment to Christ put out Easter baskets. Little memorializing goes on during Memorial Day. Halloween’s origins could not be less important in the minds of a child who’s delirious from candy. St. Patrick's Day is a celebration of Irish culture, but for most of its celebrants it's mainly green Jell-O shots. People are forever changing or removing or evolving holiday traditions. (And adding them, sadly - I’m looking at you, Elf on the Shelf and Trunk or Treat.) It’s of course always the lament of the observant that “the reason for the season” has been forgotten. Demands that we keep the Christ in Christmas are the Platonic form of such gripes. But clearly, it’s not the reasons that keep holidays going, but the rituals, and like all cultural goods, rituals change. I see no particular reason why I can’t keep the love for family, turkey, and rooting against the Dallas Cowboys and leave behind the now frequently-refuted notion of a prelapsarian American past.

But it’s deeper than that. I can enjoy a holiday that (at least to a degree) celebrates the United States while protesting the United States and its genocide of the native Americans because protest is a part of the United States. The cynicism in Burroughs’s words seems to me to be part of a great tradition in this country, a proud tradition of rejection and refusal and gimlet-eyed protest. The tradition of Frederick Douglass and Mother Jones and Phil Ochs. Who could be more American than William Burroughs, that wife-killing Army enlistee and beatnik freak who maintained a heroin addiction for more than a half-century? He too is America, and so am I. He is a part of the pantomime, as are the decent church-going women with their mean, pinched, bitter, evil faces. As am I, as am I. I’m an internationalist and hope that someday the fiction that is the nation-state is terminated. But for now, I am American, and my jaundiced view of this country is American too.

I’m off the rest of the week. I’ll have a digest post on Saturday. I hope the Americans among you enjoy your Thanksgiving, here in these United States, the last and greatest betrayal of the last and greatest of human dreams.