symposium

0 Comments | Insight on the News, June 4, 2001 | by Don Feder, | Kirkpatrick Sale

Q: Is a renewal of patriotism necessary for America's survival?

Yes: Reverence for shared patriotic ideals will unite a growing, diverse population.

Dec. 7 marks the 60th anniversary of the United States' entry in to World War II. On May 25, Touchstone Pictures will release the movie Pearl Harbor, in tribute to what many have called the "Greatest Generation."

Those who served their country so nobly from 1941 to 1945 knew what they were fighting for -- their homes and families to be sure, but also something greater.

They were fighting for a vision of humanity and its relation to government embodied in a document signed in Philadelphia in 1776, for the more perfect union enunciated in the same city in 1787 and for the tall, gaunt figure who became a martyr to the preservation of the union in 1865. They were inspired by the heroism associated with names such as George Washington, Andrew Jackson and Teddy Roosevelt. They fought to preserve the ideals of equality before the law, liberty, justice and decency.

Those young men paid again for our freedom in blood, terror and pain in places with names such as Normandy, the Bulge, Guadalcanal and Iwo Jima, in a conflict in which there were more than 1 million American casualties and 440 Medals of Honor awarded.

James Bradley, author of Flags of Our Fathers, is the son of one of the Marines who raised the Stars and Stripes atop Iwo Jima's Mount Suribachi, immortalized in the famous photograph. After his father's death, Bradley learned that days before the flag raising his corpsman father had been awarded the Navy Cross. The writer explained that his father received the Navy's second-highest decoration after "a shell drove hot shrapnel into his legs, hips and feet. His pants were shredded and soaked with blood. But eyewitnesses said he would not tend his own wounds as he continued to care for those around him."

Only a sense of duty and a deep love of country can inspire such devotion. When the United States goes to war again, will other young Americans be instilled with the same spirit?

Not if we continue on our current course. Patriotism is dying a slow death, poisoned by revisionists, multiculturalists, advocates of hyphenated identity and an elite that disparages our history and heritage and rejects our ideals (a worldview that used to be called "the American way").

Thanks to their ceaseless efforts, young Americans no longer learn their history, celebrate their heroes or grasp their nation's uniqueness.

In a December 1999 study conducted by the Center for Survey Research and Analysis at the University of Connecticut, only 23 percent of seniors at 55 of the nation's most prestigious colleges and universities correctly identified James Madison as the principal framer of the Constitution. Almost 80 percent earned a grade of D or F on a 34-question, high-school-level, American history test.

While it's true that not one of these schools has an American history requirement, the problem originates with public education. For instance, James C. Rees, the overseer of Washington's estate at Mount Vernon, discloses, "George Washington has been virtually eliminated from elementary-school textbooks." Washington -- the indispensable man in the War for Independence, who chaired the Constitutional Convention, shaped the office of president and guided the republic for the first quarter-century of its existence -- purged from grade-school textbooks? How can this be, even in an age given to citing patriotism as a last refuge of scoundrels or a synonym for jingoism?

Apparently, American schoolchildren are too busy studying ancient Incas and Ibo tribesmen and paying homage to the icons of feminism and racial identity to bother with the story of the father of their country. Or could the omission be intentional?

Our institutions have been turned against us. Hollywood, academia, museums and the news media all teach contempt for our past. In movies such as Platoon and Casualties of War the entertainment industry portrayed the Americans who stemmed the communist advance in Southeast Asia as baby killers, addicts, rapists and degenerates. We've gone from Sergeant York to visions of noncommissioned officers with necklaces of human ears.

In the 1970s even the movie Western, a cinematic staple since the silent-film era, was replaced by the anti-Western -- movies depicting pioneers, settlers, cowboys and soldiers as thieves, thugs and spoilers. This is best illustrated by Dances With Wolves, with its saintly, environmentally correct Indians and its crude, barbaric cavalry men. There's no more effective way to kill national pride than to convince a people that their past is a chronicle of crimes against humanity.

Perhaps the epitome of establishment anti-Americanism were left-wing excesses at the taxpayer-supported Smithsonian Institution, where radicals ran the shows through most the 1990s. After its 1991 art exhibit, "The West as America," which presented our westward expansion as a tale of genocide, ecocide and unrestrained avarice, the Smithsonian hit its stride with a 1995 exhibit on the end of World War II in the Pacific.