{"id":2000,"date":"2004-05-02T16:57:28","date_gmt":"2004-05-02T20:57:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2004\/05\/02\/2000.html"},"modified":"2018-03-12T16:46:04","modified_gmt":"2018-03-12T21:46:04","slug":"loyalty-day-belated-again","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2004\/05\/02\/loyalty-day-belated-again\/","title":{"rendered":"Loyalty Day, belated, again"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Last year, when Your Humble Blogger found that he had missed Loyalty Day, it was the occasion for a note<\/a> about the recent Loyalty Day proclamations, and what they revealed about Our Only President and his immediate predecessor. This year’s proclamation<\/a> is more of the same, so I won’t go over it, but rather go on to something else.\n

Loyalty, for my money, is a tricky business. Adherence to anything unpredictable is tricky. I’m not against loyalty, I’m just ... wary of it. I find it easier to deal with loyalty to a person than to an institution, but even there it’s problematic. The question is what loyalty obliges me to; if I’m going to be loyal to a friend, does it just mean I need to be friendly with him? Or does it mean I have to shield him from just prosecution? I mean, if my friend commits a heinous crime, and asks me to hide him, what does my loyalty entail? Yes, I know, no true friend of mine would commit a heinous crime. I think.\n

Taking this back to the national level leads me to a distinction that I like to make between patriotism and nationalism. Patriotism, to me, is love of country, and I am a patriot. The USA, for good and ill, is my country, and I am an American. I care more about America and Americans than I do about other people. It’s not rational, but there it is.\n

Your Humble Blogger has a brother (actually, two brothers and two brothers-in-law, but they are no good to my rhetoric at present). As it happens, he’s quite clever, a good writer, and a nice guy. That’s not why I love him, though; I love him because he’s my brother. I don’t pretend there aren’t nicer, cleverer, better writers. I don’t expect other people to care about him, particularly, or to follow his career, or to seek out his stuff. If you, Gentle Reader, have a brother who writes, I certainly don’t expect you to prefer my brother’s stuff to yours, although of course I’m proud if you do. Frankly, even if his stuff were crap, I’d read it. He’s my brother. And he’s important to me. He’s more important to me than your brother is, Gentle Reader (probably—you never can tell who’s reading this), and I hope your brother is more important to you than mine is. If only one of the two is going to be happy, I expect we would submit different ballots.\n

To me, patriotism is the way in which nation is like family. Yes, they drive you crazy, but they’re yours, and you’ll stick with ’em. Nationalism, on the other hand, is the odd belief that your country is somehow better, in some essential way, than other countries. More important. Not more important to you, but more important absolutely. And, you know, that’s easy to fall into when your own country is the hegemon. The US is, in a lot of ways, more important than other countries, in the sense that it has more influence over other countries than other countries have over it. But that wasn’t always true, and it may not always be true. And if whether or no, it’ll still be my country.\n

Look, if there’s a choice about the residents of China or the residents of America being happy, my instincts will be to the Americans, despite the greater number on the other side. But I certainly would not resent someone from Beijing having a different opinion, nor would I resent a Parisian, a Berliner, or a Sao Paulan (Sao Paulian? Sao Paulerino?) disagreeing with me. And, if it came down to it, I might well shout down my own instincts, just as if, the Lord forbid, my brother committed a heinous crime, I might well turn him in.\n

Americans can be brutal, and vicious, and criminal, and awful in every way, and still be my countryman. They can shame me, and still be my countryman. I can’t disown them; that, to me, would be disloyal (I can, of course, loathe them—heck, I could loathe my brother, and have, now and then). I can work against my countrymen and their interests, and can badmouth them as well, while still acknowledging their connection to me. That’s what loyalty is to me, and I suppose May Day is as good a day for it as any.\n

                    ,
-Vardibidian.\n<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last year, when Your Humble Blogger found that he had missed Loyalty Day, it was the occasion for a note about the recent Loyalty Day proclamations, and what they revealed about Our Only President and his immediate predecessor. This year\u2019s…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[201],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2000","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-navel-gazing"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2000","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2000"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2000\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17006,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2000\/revisions\/17006"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2000"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2000"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2000"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}