The problem with most patriotism is that it fails to go far enough. A true love for country would embrace the political system and all its contradictions, the battles waged by partisans, the failures and flaws and all the lost causes of our national drama. Moreover, a true patriotism - what I sometimes call deep patriotism - would encompass our own resistance to national traditions as well as the tradition of resistance in our nation. After all, a great part of the American story is the tale of challenges to the status quo. Abolitionists, unions, suffragettes, and greens; even the founders themselves were in many ways radicals who entered the political center from out of the margins. And a great part of the American story has involved the innovators, eccentrics, populists, and wing nuts that while adding renewal have been treated as decay. To embrace our country is to embrace its contradictions and the way dissent is woven through our lives.

Historians occasionally capture this sentiment. It is a love for the story we are co-creating and an awe of the process. An Adams or a Lincoln is a bit too distant to become agitated with and yet close enough to inform and inspire and challenge us to think. The problem with too much patriotism is that it is based on hate - a hatred for the world of nations which rounds out our horizons, a hatred for the margins of debate and the perpetual challenge to consensual meanings, a hatred for our own personal maladaptions. Being American is so much more than most of us have been lead to believe.

Yet, the world of American politics is, to loosely paraphrase Thomas Hobbes short sighted, nasty, and brutish. It is ironic but apt that hatred of government has now become a patriotic political doctrine. A disengagement from this fetid milieu all too often signals a retreat from political participation. And yet, there are forums, removed from petty politics and the parties of discontent, which might still contribute to the national anthem each generation works anew. What I want to explore is whether we can step outside the day to day affairs of political conflict and still contribute to the song. What I want to know is whether we can say our piece and then listen for the echoes in reply as we harmonize our voices to the balance of debate. There is a symphony building in our moral struggles, a cadence to our reasons, and poetry in our politics. Listen too closely and it is mere cacophony, like snippets out of Stravinsky’s, The Rite of Spring or a few sentences out of Joyce. Yet, in surmising the whole, like some Shakespearian comedy, enemies might appear as friends, downfalls as developments, and all the world a mere stage of progress in some grand dialectical transmutation.

So, is it possible to love our country even as we seek to transform it? And to push the question further, is it true that even in our dissent from our own cultures, our rebellion will tend to play itself out in culturally ascribed forms? Finally, if even our rebellion were itself cultural form, what would this make of the rejection of our own culture?