For the Love of Country
C.C. Pecknold reflects on the resurgence of American patriotism, the flag, fireworks, and the goodness of the nation which is worthy of our affection and celebration.
Frederick Childe’s “Fourth of July 1916”
In my neighborhood, we’ve been hearing fireworks for days. I love it. I don’t even need to see them. Just hearing them go off is comforting. A few neighborhoods over, the City of Alexandria has banned fireworks entirely. The mayor prefers the colors of the rainbow to the dawn’s early light, and he would rather signal progress than celebrate our nation’s past. Liberals have also apparently decided that fireworks are bad for the environment or for their dogs, probably because their politics have become tied to abstractions rather than the real existence of the nation as such.
Yet I do think this Fourth of July feels different. The Kafkaesque “Pride Month” zoomed past with a kind of corporate embarrassment. Even in many “progressive” Northern Virginia neighborhoods the grotesque stripes representing so many competing identities are giving way to the stars and stripes. The aesthetic embrace of our national flag is a welcome sign of a nation recovering its sense of itself after a season of enormously stupid prodigality. Or so I hope.
To see the American flag flying, whether with or without rockets red glare, calls to mind the love of something real: the nation. As others have noted, it’s not an idea, but a people and a place. This means that the nation has a substance which “progress” does not. I suspect this is partly why we want visceral things like fireworks to celebrate something of substance, and also why the hatred of fireworks is somehow synonymous with the hatred of our past.
The word itself — nation — is a resonant body. In both the Greek and Latin etymology, the nation is bound up with the idea of birth, and begetting. In the old Greek, the nation is an ethnos, or a group of people who are “the same.” Thus also in Latin, a gentes comes from the verb to give birth, to beget — a nation is thus not created ex nihilo, but becomes “one thing” from “the same thing,” much like a person, or a family. The nation is thus something before it even has self-understanding, or self-rule, or sovereignty. The ancients understood their own origins in mysterious terms for this reason. Remus and Romulus tell Romans something more fundamental about their identity than does any particular moment in Roman history. This is also why the ancients regarded written constitutions as something which is a reflection of the substance, rather than the substance itself. To say that every nation is bound up with birth and begetting is an etymological way into understanding that a nation is nothing other than a family of families.
Perhaps it may seem pedestrian to point out that America existed prior to our declaration of independence, but it’s obviously true. We had already been “born” as it were — steeped in the histories of many great families and nations, and indeed, we were the beneficiaries of great Christian civilizations. The French, Spanish, and British Crowns were all integral to our “birth” as a nation. We did not spring forth from nothing.
I think all of this bears remembering amidst all the little sacramentals of our civic faith on this Independence Day Weekend. After a very long season of American “prodigality” — in which we temporarily lost our collective minds over the month of June, among other things — it feels like we are returning home. Just as July 4, 1776 marks one mature act of a young sovereign nation, it feels like the America that doesn’t hate itself is winning by being itself again. America is worth celebrating as a real and sovereign thing which is made for birth, which is made for the common good of families, and it is made for the constant renewal of the self-same good we call the nation. And the flags of progress will never compete with that in the long run.
Happy Fourth of July, America!