The yard sign displayed in my post regarding No Kings 3.0 elicited two prompt and insightful comments (acknowledged at the end of this post). As my earlier post noted, I was uneasy about the sign’s assertion that fascism is “un-American” when far too many Americans are fascists or their enablers. In one important sense of the word [un-American], however, the sign’s assertion is still true and still worth declaring with fierce simplicity on Memorial Day (rather than with details that cannot fit in a readable yard sign).
As was true last year, Memorial Day this year is a time to fly the flag while calling out American fascists because they desecrate the memory of those who died to defend American values against a succession of tyrannies, from taxation w/o representation to slavery to 20-th century fascism to communism to 21-st century fascism to whatever abominations may lie ahead.
Yes, Americans can be un-American, just as Christians can be un-Christian, Jews can be un-Jewish, and so on. The -ism suffix helps name many religions and philosophical stances, not just ideologies and turns of phrase. Religions have moral imperatives that can be difficult to obey, and so does Americanism. We are all sinners and hypocrites, to varying degrees. One of the American imperatives is that issues of governance must be settled by civil discourse and fair voting, not by who has the biggest checkbook or the nastiest goons or the most skill at gerrymandering.
I don’t mean to suggest that the values and virtues of Americanism were solidly established before DJT’s ferocious attacks on them. The phrase “liberty and justice for all” in the Pledge of Allegiance was always an aspiration, not a fact. But it was an aspiration that seemed to be on a steep and rocky path toward becoming real for everybody, not just well-off white males.
I don’t mean to suggest that the values and virtues of Americanism are exclusive to Americans. Notable Americanists who were not American include the 18-th century Corsican leader Pasquale Paoli, who was admired by contemporaries in America. In our own time, many Americans should be ashamed that so many Ukrainians are more American than they are. Ukrainian grit, courage, and ingenuity against Putin’s empire will be honored as long as anybody honors the same qualities in many 18-th century Americans against the empire of George III.
With its use of the prize-winning Joe Rosenthal photo of US marines raising the flag, my revised sign is still simplistic in leaving the naive reader to surmise that Americans defeated the Axis in WW2 w/o much help from the likes of Hitler’s blunders, Churchill’s Britain, and a Faustian bargain with Stalin. It’s only a yard sign, not a historical tome. I trust that the oversimplification will be forgiven by those aware that American military prowess was not the whole story in winning WW2 (and that military prowess is not all there is to Americanism).
|Stars and stripes now wave
|atop Mount Suribachi.
|Iwo Jima falls.
Here are shout-outs for the comments mentioned at the start of this post. Both are good reads. (The WordPress links below may need a little scrolling to reach the actual comments.)
Greenpete58 remarks that the old sign by itself gives America too much credit. DJT is a fascist who did win the popular vote in 2024, so it’s a stretch to claim that fascism is un-American in the sense of rare among Americans. (But it’s not clear how many of those who voted for him were consciously fascist and how many were low-info voters made gullible by desperation and the American propensity for historical amnesia.) I agree with the assertion in the alternative wording that greenpete58 suggests: “Fascism Should NOT Define America!” Why didn’t I just use it in my new sign? Like most “should” statements, it presupposes a set of values. While greenpete58’s values and mine clearly have a lot of overlap, the values of DJT (and those who knew what they were getting when they voted for him) are radically different from our shared Americanism. I decided that my new sign should be explicit about fascism clashing with Americanism; that seemed clearer than calling it “un-American” or being silent about the values behind a “should” statement. Of course, the sign has no room to elaborate. The body of this post mentions the sacredness of civil discourse and fair voting, w/o trying to go into more detail. Expounding on my big-tent view of Americanism would take too much space here, let alone in the sign.
Speaking of big tents, the second point made in Sandy Randall’s comment is an eloquent statement of the spirit I read into the Latin of E Pluribus Unum on our coins. Americanism balances unity with diversity, neither complete fragmentation nor the sameness of TR’s crude “melting pot” metaphor. Sandy sees our diversity as a source of strength, and so do I.
Sandy’s first point admonishes me not to overthink a simple sign. As one who often suffers from paralysis by analysis, I welcome the admonition. And yet …. My old sign was too weather-beaten for further use, so I needed to make a new one anyway. Might as well think about what I wanted to say now, not laboriously copy what I wanted to say when Minneapolis was in the headlines. Might as well try to be less verbal and more visual, with an iconic image from WW2.
– above post (on phone) or beside it (on desktop). –
Mellow Curmudgeon 