Todd Gitlin on American complexities
Words relevant to the Fourth of July were supposed to go out on Wednesday, but, um, didn’t, so here on Saturday is an entry on patriotism.
Todd Gitlin, who died two years ago, led Students for a Democratic Society in the early sixties and became a major thinker on the American left, finishing his career as a professor of journalism and sociology at Columbia. Among his most noted books are The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage and Media Unlimited: How the Torrent of Images and Sounds Overwhelms Our Lives. His comments on America are taken from his Letters to a Young Activist.
The influence of “the harder anti-Americans” and the “Noam Chomsky-Gore Vidal left” has left many
intellectually disarmed to entertain the possibility that power can be power for the good as well as for the bad, that it is frequently both, and that some sorts of power are worse — far worse, unspeakably much worse — than others.
Far better to acknowledge and wrestle with the strange and perverse dualities of America: the liberty and arrogance twinned, the bullying and tolerance, myopia and energy, standardization and variety, ignorance and inventiveness, the awful heart of darkness and the self-reforming zeal. . . .
In describing his “anti-anti-Americanism,” writing after 9/11, he explained that he and his wife hung an American flag from their balcony in Manhattan (something not done in their circles) to affirm their “solidarity with the lost and with the heroic rescuers, to declare that we belonged to a people and that our fate was bound up with theirs.” He continues:
Before condemning a whole nation that has reason to fear more massacres, ought we not trouble ourselves to understand America, this freedom-loving, brutal, tolerant, shortsighted, selfish, generous, trigger-happy, dumb, glorious, fat-headed, heart-broken and frightened powerhouse? . . .
Don’t sink into the assumption that the U.S. is a smoothly rounded, unified metaphysical entity. Face up to America’s self-contradictions, its on-again off-again interest in expanding rights, its clumsy egalitarianism coupled with ignorant arrogance. Argue about policies but discard the anti-American prejudice that musters evidence to suit a prefabricated conclusion. . . .
We must forgo the luxury of disdain and be citizens — which does not mean that we turn our backs on those who are not, but that we take our fellow citizens seriously and imagine ourselves responsible for them, as we would want them to be for us.
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