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Ericka Andersen doesn’t: Does Barack Obama want what’s best for America? I believe he does. But alliances are powerful. [...] There is a certain influence and with this string of misfits already in tow, I just wonder who else is lurking in the background or around the next corner. Like whom, pray tell? And how, [...]
Filed under: foreign affairs, patriotism, politics
In my own case it’s a weird day to think about – I was in college at the time and didn’t have a TV, so we spent the day following things on the radio and it was only when I saw the papers the next morning that I really processed the fact that the towers [...]
Filed under: patriotism, personal
I know that I am rather late to the meme, but seeing as the discussion of Obama’s professed cosmopolitanism is still going on, I want to add one quick thought, which is that perhaps the best reason to object to talk of being a “citizen of the world” is that it simply has no meaning. [...]
Filed under: patriotism, philosophy, politics
Chaplain Sparks tells a story he heard from one of his fellow chaplains. He was on the floor, watching an airman who was tenderly washing the blood and sand out of a young soldier’s hair. He would later comb it carefully into place, but for now he concentrated on cleaning the dead man’s hair, rinsing [...]
Filed under: family, patriotism, war
My essay on George Kateb’s case against patriotism is now up at First Principles. I know that it’s a bit late in the game to be prolonging this discussion, particularly with such a great many words, but take a look anyway. In case you don’t have time, though, here’s the upshot: … it is when [...]
Filed under: patriotism, personal, war
Apropos of the recent debate between the Daniels about patriotism and nationalism, this column by Bill Kauffman (via Clark Stooksbury) is a must-read: … just as one cannot love the “human race” before one loves particular human beings, neither can one love “the world” unless he first achieves a deep understanding of his own little [...]
Filed under: conservatism, patriotism, war
Noah Millman wants to know how a non-nationalistic patriotism “would actually function in a world of states and nations rather than small freeholds”, and raises as a puzzle the “awkward question” of how, given that the US should never have been in Hawaii in the first place, we should have responded to the Pearl Harbor [...]
Filed under: patriotism, war
Via Rod Dreher, I see there’s an especially choice quote from the Joe Klein column on Barack Obama’s “patriotism problem” that deserves some attention: He talked about the Administration’s mendacity, its incompetence during Hurricane Katrina, its lack of transparency. But he never returned to the question of patriotism. He never said, “But hey, look, we’re [...]
Filed under: patriotism, politics
Think of how the strong isolationist movement in the U.S. in the 1930’s became instantly patriotic [my emphasis - JLS] after Pearl Harbor, even though some citizens knew beforehand that FDR was making economic life untenable for the Japanese and that he meant to involve the U.S. in a global conflict eventually and was waiting [...]
Filed under: patriotism, war
To Berns I ask the Kantian question: what would the world be like if no one in it were a patriot? If there hadn’t been German patriots, American patriots would not have had to exist. War isn’t like baseball: if there weren’t fans who rooted for, say, the Yankees and the Red Sox, there would [...]
Filed under: patriotism, philosophy, war