I have never been sure whether it is the first or the last refuge of a scoundrel but, in my experience, patriotism and its tunes attract scoundrels much as the sound of a flushing toilet draws a sewer rat from his hideaway.
My revulsion at the displays and demands of patriotism probably owes much to the apartheid era. It was not difficult to ridicule the pretence at dignity and morality staged by those miserable white men in black hats who purported to lead us in the rituals of homage to the country, its past and future.
What was difficult, though, was to endure the spectacle of many otherwise decent white friends and family deriving real meanings from those sorry parades. It is never a kind experience to witness, particularly from a position of some isolation (as was often the case in those days), a close friend’s or family member’s moral humiliation of him- or herself.
When I, like many others, joined the African National Congress in the early 1980s, I tried to identify with a new patriotism. This was the new nation-in-formation, borne of common hopes, unity in action and quite a bit of suffering. The black, green and gold was the standard around which I and others could gather with moral confidence. It seemed I could accept the dulling of the intellect and the compromises to individual integrity that the demand for “unity” invariably requires.
But it only “seemed” so. I could not. “Love makes fools,” said the late French writer Paul Léautaud, “marriage cuckolds, and patriotism malevolent imbeciles.” And so it did -even in the ANC.
It is the image of the malevolent imbecile that most readily springs to my mind when, in the wake of the atrocities in New York and Washington on September 11, I see the flag-waving, hear the war hype and read that George W Bush has recoined one of the more celebrated and dangerous idiocies to scar human history: if you are not for us, you are for them.
I feel some of the anguish of those who lost loved ones on September 11; I feel considerable respect for Americans’ anger; I agree with Bush’s mission – though I hope sane voices help him understand that to wipe out the terrorist threat will require more creative political dialogue with the terrorists’ potential support base than it will military force.
Yet there seems to be something profoundly sick in the collective willy-wag in which world leaders have striven to join in response to the atrocities of September 11. Seeing Tony Blair playing at being an adult, and a tough one at that, has been among the more absurd images to emerge from this tragedy.
We will have to watch this drive to patriotism, to purpose, to war. It risks making imbeciles of us all.