While the Caissons Go Rolling Along
I can still sing the battle songs of every branch of America’s armed forces. I am also usually the only person in our crowd who, when we gather around the Christmas tree, knows the words to the second verse of just about every Christmas carol.
I went to public school, had no religious education, but I’m pretty familiar with the Bible because 10 verses of it were read at every high school assembly I attended.
This was all part of the public school education that turned a child of Eastern European Jewish immigrant parents into a patriotic American. It didn’t occur to me that the “land where my fathers died …” was actually disputed territory — sometimes Russia or Ukraine or Poland or Lithuania — and that they died more often in pogroms than in military campaigns.
Songs stick with me for a long time. I can still sing “Negaraku” (English: My Country), the Malaysian national anthem, which I learned as a Peace Corps volunteer in my early 20s. It’s a beautiful tune, originally a love song popular in Europe and Southeast Asia.
It describes a land blessed by God with unity and prosperity, and protected by its benevolent king. Malaysia was a new nation that had only recently freed itself from British rule. Half the population, Chinese and Indian immigrants, did not speak Malay or understand the words of the national anthem. Ethnic divisions were deep and sometimes violent. It struck me that the song described a country that existed only in the aspiration and imagination of its leaders.
I returned from Malaysia to the United States on Jan. 1, 1966, as this country was starting to tear itself apart over the war in Vietnam. Flags and draft cards were getting burned. A year later in Chicago, I walked in a protest march led by Benjamin Spock and Martin Luther King, Jr. I heard Dr. King deliver his first anti-Vietnam war speech, in which he identified American imperialism as the root cause of poverty, racism and war.
Years later, I met Clarence Jones, King’s personal lawyer, who told me that King delivered that speech against the advice of all his closest advisers, who warned that it would cost him access to Lyndon Johnson’s White House, where great strides were being made in the war on poverty. King was assassinated a year later.
There are many varieties of patriotism. Our current leaders insist on a story that celebrates blood and soil. They imagine a White Christian nation, destined by God to rule the world. Their story erases vast swaths of America’s actual experience: the struggle of women to achieve equality and autonomy, of slaves and their descendants fighting for freedom and fundamental human rights, of the indigenous people who survived genocide for their sovereignty, of the working men and women who still organize and fight for a living wage.
As we celebrate our country’s 250th birthday, even as we enjoy the fireworks and parades, it might be a good time to remember that our story is not simple or one-dimensional. Nor is its final chapter written.
Allan Katz lives in Eureka.
