The Ritualism of Public Patriotism. Have we become the Yangs?
You have probably seen the episode of the original Star Trek call the Omega Glory. I saw it in re-runs as child in the late 70’s and several times since. The premise is that there is a planet where the apparently civilized Kohms are at war with the savage Yangs. As it turns out both names are a corruption of Communists and Yanks (Americans) who after an apocalyptic war have degenerated into primitive low technology civilizations. Capitan Kirk ends up in the Yangs encampment and eventually realizes that their incompressible prayers and rituals are actually a corruption of the American pledge of alegence and the Constitution which he proceeds to read and try to teach again to the savage Yangs.
Recently I attended a back-to-school day for my child’s middle school, prior to a welcome speech by the principle, we all stood for the pledge. As I was standing there observing this ritual unfold, this episode came back to me. As a parent of a school aged child I have attended many school activities, all of them begin with the obligatory ‘pledge’ from concerts, parent teacher conferences, to school board meetings. Like most Americans, I grew up saying the pledge every day in school and never much questioned it. It was so much a part of the culture and seemed a normal and healthy part of our republic. However later in life, I lived abroad and as an adult I have been away from situations which required this ritual. Seeing this played out now has been very jarring for me. It is repeated with such frequency that it dwarfs even standard public religious ritualism. I am sure most devout Christians don’t recite the lord’s prayer as frequently as we require school children to recite the ‘pledge’. The ritualism is so potent that I recall once when my child was younger, we were interviewing day care providers and happened on a fairly religious one. I watched in disbelief as they employed the pledge only changing the words a bit, replacing ‘flag and republic’ with the ‘Bible’ and ‘Jesus’. Apparently the ritualism of the pledge was so potent that even some religions saw fit to invoke it as a mechanism to indoctrinate their children.
This patriotic ritualism appears unique to the United States, my daughter recently commented after we had visited several countries in Europe and Asia, why people in America fly their flag so much. Every other house or business establishment has a flag. This is more or less absent in other countries, even ones notorious for their nationalism. Then of course there is every sporting event or concert which has to be proceeded by the national anthem. I have often attributed this to the fact that our country is not an ‘ethno-state’ like most countries are. We are held together not by, ethnicity or religion, but by belief in the ideals of our republic. Yet I don’t think Canada or Australia who are also non-ethno states engage in these sorts of displays as much.
Yet despite this ritualism and public display (or maybe because of it) the less moored the collective American psyche seems from the core principles of our country. These principles constitute a rebuke of tyranny especially those forms which victimize the minority. But still we see the passive acceptance of the establishment of all the apparatus for an effective police state, the knee jerk demonization of different ethnic, religious and racial groups. Then there is the rise of an insipid fear of ethnic, linguistic and cultural displacement. Have we now become the Yangs? Mumbling these ‘worship words’ incoherently constantly attached to the outer forms of patriotism without reflection on it’s portent?
Perhaps we have been the Yangs for longer than we know? There is one analysis put forward by Allan W. Austin, Professor of History at Misericordia University, which sees this episode of Star Trek as a critique of mindless nationalism born of cold war McCarthyism.
