pynchon-l-digest V2 #2240

[MalignD at aol.com]

<<It's not hypocritical that we sing God Bless America now.  It never was a 
song that took into consideration those at the other end of the rocket's 
trajectory.  The title says it all--God Bless America.  Not other countries, 
not other lands, not other people.  Just us.  It's always been just us.  Now 
if you'd like to take issue with that sentiment, I'd be with you 100 
percent.>>

I'm by nature a cynic.  "Patriotism" is a word that I've generally loathed 
and have avoided expressing and I don't believe in the God who supposedly 
blesses America.

That said:  It is cheap and unfeeling to describe American behavior since the 
destruction of the World Trade Center as sentimentality.  Thousands of 
Americans--not soldiers and not selected for any belief system--were 
slaughtered.  What comes out as patriotism (interpreted here by some as 
jingoism) is a  joining of emotions not common for Americans to experience in 
tandem:  the massive death of innocents; and that death a result only of 
their being Americans (or non-Americans in the wrong place at the wrong time, 
tough cheese).  So those who, in many cases, suffered personal losses are 
joined by the many Americans who realize it could as easily have been them.  
The form this takes is patriotism: empathy and shared grief because of 
nationhood. 

There are in New York people who, in the name of this patriotism, are 
working, without compensation, fourteen-hour+ days; people who have left 
their jobs and previous lives to support the effort to clean up the the Trade 
Center site.  Some left their previous lives the day of the attack, have been 
here, uncompensated, for two months.  It is extraordinary and makes me feel 
shabbby for not having done the same, for my relative lack of patriotism.  

Today, two months later, temperatures still reach 1100 degrees at the site 
from fires still burning and every day workers show up to this, their 
assignment.  As do the volunteers   This will go on for probably a year.  
Move on, someone said?

So, no, I'm not pleased to see this described as the bleeting of doomed sheep 
or dismissed as mere sentimentality, nor do I give a flying fuck whether the 
dismisser is a Vietnam vet.  And I see no hypocrisy or short-sightedness on 
the parts of people who, in light of all this, care and mourn for their 
own--first, foremost, even exclusively.