Patriotism Uncorked

Image Gallery Zina Saunders / www.zinasaunders.com

A few days after September 11, 2001, my wife and I walked down to the White House. The city was stilled with grief and fear. It was not yet clear that the danger had passed. The airport was closed. On television the doomed planes kept crashing into the towers and the doomed towers kept collapsing, until the horror began to feel a little unreal. The flood of words, the immediate eruption of understanding and analysis, the unseemly triumph over shock and silence were having a similar effect. To preserve the sting of reality, we left the house for the nervous city.

Lafayette Park was almost deserted. The quiet knew nothing of peace. The empty sky was an emblem of dread. There were snipers on the roof of the White House, which suddenly had the aspect of a target. We sat on a bench as a small expression of resolve, as an act of solidarity with the normal life that seemed under threat, and with the struggle that was to come. The American insulation had come undone. It was one of those moments—our strong and lucky history has spared us many such grim epiphanies—when you recognize again how much your country, how much this country, matters.

I thought of that bleak hour in Lafayette Park this May 1, when I stood in the same spot amid the reveling crowd. The news of Osama bin Laden’s death had brought thousands of people, and hundreds of flags, to the gates of the White House. They were young, diverse, and giddy. There were soldiers, Marines I think, among the cheering civilians.

One smiling young man carried a small piece of paper that read “A Happy Muslim.” Another sign, which caused no controversy, read “Brings the Troops Home,” as nearby a big black man with a tiny trumpet played “When Johnny Comes Marching Home Again.” A witty young woman held up the back of a pizza box on which she had written that Donald Trump wants to see Osama bin Laden’s death certificate. Almost everybody was Twittering their excitement. (A Twittering mob is a less terrifying mob.)

A lot of beer was drunk and spilled. The scene was boorish, of course. Triumphalism is often not a pretty thing. But still, distinctions had to be made. This crowd burned nobody in effigy, nobody’s flag, nobody’s books. It had assembled to celebrate an entirely defensible act, whose justice could be proven on more than merely nationalistic grounds.