“Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.” — British philosopher Samuel Johnson, 1775.
These were harsh words from a great 18th century thinker and philosopher, but they become relevant in developments that arise these days. Patriotism is a wonderful thing when it means to honestly love your country, but it can be really awful when it’s used to deceive people.
Patriotism most often is an emotion, so it can be manipulated, just like marketing and advertising, to get people to do something they may not normally do.
Front and center at the State of the Union address last Tuesday night was the widow of a slain Navy Seal, who was singled out and praised in front of Congress and in front of a multitude of citizens watching on television. I wouldn’t dare saying anything disparaging about the grieving woman, but I honestly think she was used as a prop by a political system that promotes not freedom, but hubris.
President Donald Trump was using her grief and Americans’ sympathy to score political and public relations points in a game long on deceit and flattery and short on the truth.
But Trump certainly is not alone. Such marketing and public relations tactics were employed often by many of his predecessors speaking at the State of the Union, particularly Bill Clinton. And every time I see and hear it, I come to the unpleasant understanding that we collectively are being worked like a used car salesman in another dog and pony show. It’s why we so often say we don’t like politics and politicians.
Our political system, once described as a democracy or a republic, has been drowned in a sea of marketing and advertising. Practitioners of this process very simply identify where we voters and consumers are vulnerable and they exploit it to get what they want.
There are many emotional issues, the most successful of which is abortion. I’ve known too many people who disagree with Trump and his ilk on just about every issue, but they vote for him to “save the babies.”
Virtually all politicians have their pictures taken with an American flag in the background as a prop. Many like to wear American flag lapel pins, but rather than expressing patriotism, they’re just using a prop.
Just about everybody knows how race is played to inspire fear in white voters. Remember Willie Horton? Remember Bill Lucas, the GOP gubernatorial candidate in 1986?
Other politicians like to exploit voters’ feelings about gays and transgender people, all of a sudden becoming champions women in bathrooms where very few if any such problems exist.
The flag-burning issue, though settled by a Supreme Court decision in 1989, keeps rearing its head. We have a right to be offended by the act of burning a flag, but we don’t have a right to put such people in our already overcrowded prisons.
We have a right to be offended when people don’t stand at attention for the playing of the national anthem or the Pledge of Allegiance. I always stand myself because it’s a matter of good public manners. Those who don’t shouldn’t be arrested.
Over all these years we have allowed emotional issues get the best of us and cloud our collective ability to think things through. And politicians and advertising and marketing people are very good at taking advantage of these vulnerabilities to sell us goods and services we don’t want and vote for politicos who don’t represent us.
I recall the great African American author James Baldwin, the subject of a new documentary, “I Am Not Your Negro,” who once said:
“I love America more than any other country in this world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.”
PHOTOS: Samuel Johnson James Baldwin
