I’d like to clarify the use in my post “Will the Real Uncle Sam Please Stand Up?” of Chesterton’s quote about my country right or wrong being the same as my mother drunk or sober. Specifically I’d like to clarify my position in light of this comment, posted by “Jamie”:
I’m OK with My Country Right or Wrong AND with My Mother Drunk or Sober. That doesn’t mean that I wouldn’t work to reform either. But I would certainly continue to defend them before their enemies and support them and work for their good. Loyalty is virtue too, and it imparts lovableness to it’s object, enabling us to love the unloveable. However loyalty is different from enabling or being a doormat. Being a big Jackson fan, I’m sure he never had a hair splitting thought like this going through his cowboy hat, but I’m sure he’d agree with it.
First, I’d like to make it clear that I was not indicating that we should stop loving our country when she’s wrong or our mother when she’s drunk. Chesterton’s point, and mine, is that we have the same duty to our mother that we have to our motherland, which is to correct them when they’re wrong and not to endorse their wrong behaviour by saying nothing or, worse, by actively joining them in their destructive behaviour. We are not doing our mother or our motherland any favours by encouraging their drunkenness, their wantonness or their wrong-headedness. I think or hope that Jamie’s reference to loyalty being “different from enabling or being a doormat” indicates his substantial agreement with GKC and me.
As for Alan Jackson never giving “a hair splitting thought” to these issues, I need hardly remind us that Jackson’s otherwise moving song about the 911 attacks includes the confession that he doesn’t know the difference between Iraq and Iran. The trouble is that the cowboys who run US foreign policy don’t know the difference either. They clearly didn’t seem to know that Iraq was Iran’s greatest enemy and that the secular Saddam Hussein fought a bloody war against the Islamist Iran in the 1980s. Having destroyed Saddam’s regime, which had served as a defensive buffer zone against the power of Iran, the know-nothings in Washington were then seemingly surprised when Iran began to flex its muscles as soon as its vigilant enemy was destroyed.
In similar naive fashion, those who shape US foreign policy forgot that Afghanistan was the one part of the British Empire that the British could never bring under control. They also forgot that the Soviet Union could not bring the Afghan Taliban under control or that the Taliban and Saddam Hussein were both backed by the Americans in their earlier wars. Such nonsense is the consequence of our motherland being drunk and wrong. It is the duty of all true patriots to sober her up and teach her what is right and wrong.
Indeed.
I;m old enough to remember our support of a revolutionary named Fidel Castro who was trying to overthrow the corrupt government of Batista. Our support, by the way, was Very Large.
But have you ever thought about all these embarrassing hindsights from another angle?
All those “supports” were conjured from motives that were political.
Maybe the toxic inebriation that mother needs to sober up from is politics–heady stuff, that.