“Loyalty to the country always, loyalty to the government when it deserves it.” –Mark Twain
Sometime in the past two weeks I found myself feeling patriotic in a way I don’t remember ever having felt before. I accounted for this feeling by invoking that old adage, “you don’t recognize what you have until you lose it.” The current federal administration has stolen my country from me. The America to which I pledged allegiance every morning in primary and secondary school, that America is being pillaged, plundered, and sold off for parts to greedy megalomaniacs and oligarchs.
Now that the nation is being destroyed, I realize that I’ve been bound to America my entire adult life. If I hadn’t felt those bonds before – except perhaps for a moment in the mid-1980s when I played “The Star Spangled Banner” for 25,000 bikers at Americade in Lake George, me alone on my trumpet, without the rest of the band – that’s because I’d taken the idea of America for granted. To invoke another cliché, just as the fish is oblivious to the water in which it swims, so I was not consciously aware of the freedom and dignity, of the liberty and justice for all, which made our national life possible.
I’d read our founding documents, The Declaration of Independence and The Constitution of the United States, decades ago. I knew about the Boston Tea Party, the midnight ride of Paul Revere, Washington at Valley Forge, all that and more, it was in my blood. And now…well, why don’t I just get on with it and tell my story.
What is patriotism? That’s tricky. You can’t see it, hear it, touch it, taste it, or smell it. It is abstract, like gravity, the unconscious, evolution, or spirit. Just how abstract concepts are defined and how we come to understand them, that is not at all clear.
Here’s what Claude 3.7 told me when I asked it to define “patriotism”:
Patriotism is a feeling of love, devotion, and attachment to one’s country or homeland. It encompasses a sense of pride in a nation’s achievements, culture, and values, as well as a commitment to supporting its interests and well-being.
True patriotism often includes:
- A deep appreciation for one’s country’s positive attributes while acknowledging its imperfections
- A desire to contribute to national improvement through civic engagement
- Respect for national symbols, traditions, and institutions
- A connection to shared national history and identity
Patriotism differs from nationalism in that patriotism is generally considered more moderate and inclusive, focusing on love of country without necessarily claiming superiority over others, while nationalism often emphasizes national identity and interests above all else, sometimes leading to an attitude of superiority.
Different people express patriotism in different ways – from serving in the military to participating in democratic processes, engaging in constructive criticism of government policies, or working to uphold national ideals like freedom, equality, or justice.[1]
That’s a mouthful, but not particularly difficult to understand. It’s that last paragraph that’s most important for this essay: What I have done that connects me with those ideals of freedom, equality, and justice?
How I experienced the nation as a child and an adolescent
When I started school at the age of six, I said the Pledge of Allegiance at the beginning of every school day. I did that for twelve years. Here’s how it goes:
I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one Nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.
At first those were just sounds that I repeated from memory, my right hand over my heart, and looking up at the American flag at the front of the classroom. What could these words possibly mean to a six-year-old: allegiance, republic, liberty, justice, and others? I can’t identify when those words became meaningful to me.
1957 was an important year. The Russians launched Sputnik in October. Sputnik was the first man-made satellite to orbit the earth. The launch was big news. It put the nation on alert. This was the height of the Cold War, and the Russians had just taken the lead in some race, the missile race, the space race, some Big Race.
That was also an important event for me personally. I was deeply interested in space travel, at least since seeing The Forbidden Planet the year before (1956), but probably even before that. That October evening when my father took me outside and pointed to the moving spot in the sky – “That’s Sputnik” – that’s when my personal mythology, my imagination, connected with world history. I don’t know how many pictures I subsequently drew of rockets and spaceships, not to mention the plastic models lining the shelves in my room.
Just what I thought about Russia and the Cold War, I don’t remember. I do remember that fear of nuclear war was real. Though I don’t remember ever doing “duck and cover” bomb drills in school, I know some people did. I saw the TV commercials. In my tween years I read articles about bomb shelters. Magazines like Mechanix Illustrated and Popular Mechanics even had plans for building bomb shelters. I’d picked out a spot in the back yard where I figured we, the family, should build our bomb shelter. I thought about how we should provision it, how cool it would be to go down into our personal cave.
I remember watching reports of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis on TV. I remember sitting in the school bus waiting for the trip home and hearing that President Kennedy had been shot, November 22, 1963. I’m pretty sure that by that time all those abstract words in the pledge had become meaningful and important to me.
It was about that time, perhaps a little after, that a strange brother and sister showed up in school. She was in my class. I think her name was Ann, or Annie, but I’m not sure. I remember her as being of medium height, slender, straight dishwater blonde hair, perhaps just short of her shoulders. I see her wearing a conservative reddish-pinkish A-line dress from close around her neck down to her ankles, a style not at all common. She had a high nasal voice, wore glasses, and was cross-eyed. She seemed strange, tentative, fragile. Her brother was a couple years younger. He caused a stir when he showed up one day with his hair dyed red. How weird, we thought, how weird!
They were Mennonites, we were told. Mennonite? A conservative Christian sect, related to the Amish. I think they lived on a farm, but maybe not. Richland Township, where I lived, straddled suburbia and rural farmland, so it was possible. I could easily walk to one or two small farms from my house.
That’s all I remember about Annie and her brother. Did they have friends as school? I don’t know. I don’t think I talked with either of them. But I can still hear her voice in my mind’s ear, and I can see her squint. I felt sorry for her, a little tender as well.
The War in Vietnam and the Draft
Not too long after that the country entered into an undeclared war in Vietnam. I don’t recall just when or how I came to believe that war was wrong, but I certainly believed that by the time I entered Johns Hopkins University in the fall of 1965. I joined the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and marched against the war, say, a half-dozen or more times during my undergraduate years.
By that time a draft had been instituted. I registered for it when I turned 18, like every other 18-year-old male in the nation. Since, however, I was a college student, I was exempt from military service until I graduated. I graduated in 1969 and lost my student deferment. In December of that year a lottery was introduced. I drew number 12. I was certain to be called up for military service.
I weighed my options. The easiest thing to do was simply to enter the military. But I objected to that, not simply because it was inconvenient, but because I objected to this particular war and to war in general. I had become a pacifist. As a practical matter, with my education, I would not have been drafted into a combat unit. After I’d taken my preinduction physical examination I got a letter to that effect, asking me to volunteer. But I didn’t want to enter the military at all.
I could pay a psychiatrist to write a letter that would likely exempt me from service. I knew people who knew people and I was attached to one of the greatest universities and medical schools in the world. If I’d wanted to, I could have done this. But it was undignified and dishonest. I could also have gotten messed up on drugs the day before my pre-induction physical in hopes of failing the drug test. This was iffy at best, but rumor had it that it sometimes worked. This too was both dishonest and distasteful.
There was another possibility. I could become a conscientious objector. That was a status established by the Selective Service System for people who were pacifists through religious belief, such as the Quakers, Mennonites, and the Brethren Church. However, I had no conventional religious belief. While I wasn’t a member of any church and didn’t attend religious services, one didn’t have to profess conventional religious belief in order to qualify as a conscientious objector.
As a child of the sixties, I was attracted to mysticism, the idea that the universe is governed by an unseen and unknown power that pervades all things. Mystical beliefs had become highly developed in religions such as Hinduism and Buddhism, but not so much in the so-called “Religions of the Book,” Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. But one did not have to be an adherent of a recognized religion in order to be a mystic.
As I had worked with the Chaplain’s Office on some programs – two films series, a coffee house – I went to the Chaplain, Dr. Chet Wickwire for advice and counsel. He agreed to help me. He put me in touch with draft counseling provided through the American Friends Service Committee (Quakers). I worked with an AFSC lawyer to draft a petition to my local draft board to grant me conscientious objector status.
During that process I learned about the history of civil disobedience, which included such Americans and Henry David Thoreau and Dr. Martin Luther King. For example, I reviewed one of Plato’s dialogs, Crito. Socrates had been imprisoned and condemned to death for impiety and corrupting the youth of Athens. His wealthy friend Crito visited and offered to help him escape. Socrates refused, arguing that he had lived his life as an Athenian citizen and so was bound by its laws. They provided the framework that gave his life meaning. It would have been inconsistent of him to abandon that framework by escaping. He’d agreed to the framework and so must now accept the punishment it declared upon him.
While there had never been a moment when I was asked to adhere to the laws of the United States in the way the immigrants must do when they become citizens, I could have fled the country, as indeed some had done. I chose to stay and petition to become a conscientious objector. If my petition had been denied, I faced going to prison, which happened to 6000 men during World War II. My petition was accepted, and I performed two years of alternative service in the Chaplain’s Office at Johns Hopkins.[2]
Three decades later, after I’d finished my Ph.D. at SUNY Buffalo, after I’d spent seven years on the faculty at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y., after I’d spent a summer with NASA advising them on how to incorporate AI into their operations,[3] after I’d been a technical writer with MapInfo, a computer mapping company, after I’d free-lanced at this and that other in the Capital District in upstate New York, after I’d opened for B.B. King with one band (The Out of Control Rhythm and Blues Band), and for Dizzy Gillespie with another (the Afro-Eurasian Connection), after I’d failed at saving a small social services agency in Troy, New York, after I’d attended a trade show in Orlando, Florida, and zipped over to visit Kennedy Space Center on Cape Canaveral, after the start-up that sent me there went bust, after all that, I published a book about music: Beethoven’s Anvil: Music in Mind and Culture (2001).
I had high hopes for that book. Oh, it got reviews, in both Science and Nature, and a dozen other places. But I was hoping for it to put me on the map, as it were. Alas, it failed even to sell-out the first printing. And I only got three speaking invitations, one from Auburn University in Alabama, one from Texas Lutheran University in Sequin, Texas, and Goshen College, in Goshen, Indiana.
That last invitation was special. It had been extended to me by David L. Mosley, Professor of Music and Humanities. In his letter he said, “While I simply accept your scientific arguments on faith, I am entirely convinced that you and I ‘hear’ music the same way.” David Mosely was a Mennonite and Goshen College is a Mennonite school.[4]
We’ve encountered Mennonites before, that odd brother-sister pair from my school years, but also all those Mennonite men who had resisted military service during World War II, thus making it possible for me to refuse military service during the Vietnam war without having to go to prison. I owed a moral debt to the older male relatives of the Mennonite students I would be addressing.
When I arrived at whatever airport served Goshen, Indiana, I was picked up by a student. The war in Iraq had just started – this was mid-April 2003 – and we immediately began talking about the war, Mennonite pacifism, the debt I felt that I owed to the Mennonites, and of course, music. I had been invited to deliver the keynote address at an undergraduate research conference, that is, a conference where all the papers were delivered by undergraduates at Goshen and several other schools. I also attended a class on some the Old Testament topic where I listened to a delightful young goth woman deliver a paper on feminism in the Book of Ruth. My visit ended with a delightful dinner that Dr. Mosley hosted for me and a half-dozen students of so. I don’t remember what we talked about – music, certainly – but I have a vague image in my mind’s eye of Mosely across the table from me and students on either side of us.
As for my address, it was entitled “Magic of the Bell: Music and the Making of Community,” and was about how, when engaged in making music, people’s brains are coupled into a single collective entity that transcends their individuality. That’s more or less what I argued in Beethoven’s Anvil, that it was music that allowed bands of clever apes to transform themselves into human beings, and it is through music that individuals bind themselves into a community. That’s how the Mennonites use music. It is central to their religious life.
Let me quote from Martin Luther, an important precursor to Mennonite belief. In a forward to a collection of chorale motets published in 1538, Georg Rhau’s Symphoniae, Luther said:
I, Doctor Martin Luther, wish all lovers of the unshackled art of music grace and peace from God the Father and from our Lord Jesus Christ! I truly desire that all Christians would love and regard as worthy the lovely gift of music, which is a precious, worthy, and costly treasure given to mankind by God. The riches of music are so excellent and so precious that words fail me whenever I attempt to discuss and describe them…. In summa, next to the Word of God, the noble art of music is the greatest treasure in the world. It controls our thoughts, minds, hearts, and spirits… Our dear fathers and prophets did not desire without reason that music be always used in the churches. Hence, we have so many songs and psalms…. if one sings diligently with skill and application, then music can make man good and at peace with himself and his fellows by providing him a view of beauty. Music drives away the devil and makes people happy; it induces one to forget all wrath, unchastity, arrogance, and other vices, quia pacis tempore regnat musica (for music reigns in times of peace).
When David Mosley said that I hear music as the Mennonites do, that is surely what he meant. Music can restore one’s heart and transform one’s soul. That David Mosely understands music to work through God’s grace while I understand it to work through the operations of human nervous systems, that is an important difference. In the context of this essay, however, our mutual commitment to the music itself is more important than our different ways of talking about it. [reference Mary Douglas]
Five years before I published Beethoven’s Anvil I traveled to Orlando, Florida, for some commercial conference about software. At that time I was working for Metalogics, a software company founded by a friend from graduate school, Bill Doyle. I was demonstrating our software (for something called configuration management). The conference ran for three or four days, but the last day looked like it was going to be a slow one. I took the last day off so that I could see Kennedy Space Center.
I drove east through central Florida, which was like a desert except that it had lots of plants. I arrived at Kennedy Space Center around noon. I parked the van, walked past a parade of rockets on display, and purchased a ticket for one of the standard tours. The NASA guides took us through some launch pads, around and even up into a couple gantry towers, and we saw a couple control rooms. One of them mocked up as though a mission were in progress.
And then I saw it, a Saturn V suspended from the ceiling of a long, low building. The physical scale was humbling, but my awe as not a response to scale alone. Big is big – that Saturn V was the length of a football field – but this earth and these buildings birthed journeys that took us to the Moon. I sensed a sacred energy in that soil and those structures where humankind ventured beyond ourselves, not merely into space, but into an almost living presence above and beyond.
That is what floored me. This ground, this very ground where I was standing, was once tangibly connected to the moon 238,900 miles (384,400 km) away. Men had suited up in a building on this site, gotten into a small capsule atop a large rocket, and four days later got out and walked on the, here and now beneath our feet, on the moon. And then – How they ever did it I’ll never know because when you’ve been there how do you ever return but you have no choice, do you? You want to live, to see your wife and children again – they got back into their spacecraft, took off from the moon, and returned to earth in another four days. Eight days from the earth to the moon and back.[5]
Incredible.
Now, I am not naïve. I don’t need Neil deGrasse Tyson to tell me that, when Congress authorized the Apollo Project, that it was NOT funding a grand scientific adventure. The checks had been written to beat the Russkies in the Cold War.
That notwithstanding, in 1969 Neil A. Armstrong, Michael Collins, and Edwin E. Aldrin Jr. went boldly where no man had gone before. And on July 20 Neil Armstrong stepped out of Eagle, the lunar lander, and proclaimed, “That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.”
I am not so cynical as to believe that because the funding was justified by the exigencies of great power politics, that the grand scientific adventure was therefore but a ruse, a sham. Members of Congress may not have thought in those terms, but the NASA scientists and engineers who did the work, they thought in those terms. The adventure and the science were real, and remain so to this day.
What Happens to the ideals on which the nation was founded?
I don’t know what will happen to the nation in during the rest of the Trump administration. He, his allies, enablers, and sycophants have already inflicted grievous harm on the body politic. It is possible that the Democrats will do well enough in the mid-term elections to put a brake on the destruction. If the Republicans manage to win the next presidential election, however, then it is possible that the United States will never again be home to Liberty and the Pursuit of happiness. Even if the Democrats should win, though, it will not be possible to return to the way things were a year ago. That is gone forever.
It is of course that something new will rise up out of the ashes, that is always possible. That is what I hope will happen. But that will require political imagination and inventiveness that is not yet in evidence. I see no reason why that would not be possible. Moreover, looking over the history of humankind to date, I see reason to believe that political transformation and rebirth is quite possible. But it may take a generation to happen.
[1] That is how I began my discussion with Claude, but we went on. For the full discussion, see What is patriotism? New Savanna, April 11, 2025, https://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2025/04/what-is-patriotism.html. I also asked Claude about nationalism and its difference from patriotism. You can find that in this post, along with some examples of specifically nationalist behavior, Nationalism, New Savanna, April 16, 2025, https://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2025/04/nationalism.html.
[2] I discuss these events in more detail in, I became a conscientious objector during the War in Vietnam, New Savanna, April 14, 2025, https://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2025/04/i-became-conscientious-objector-during.html.
[3] For more about that, see this blog post, Summer 1981, When I advised NASA on their computing infrastructure, New Savanna, Sept. 7, 2017, https://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2017/09/1981-my-summer-with-nasa.html.
[4] I felt a bit apprehensive about addressing students of a church-affiliated college, so a wrote a long letter to the late Mary Douglas about it. Why her? Because she was a devout Catholic. You can find that letter, and her short reply, here, A Letter to Mary Douglas about God, Religion, and Music, New Savanna, April 6, 2025, https://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2025/04/a-letter-to-mary-douglas-about-god.html. Here’s most of her reply: “I don’t really see the problems that loom in your mind about science and God. If we are his creation, we should be this complicated and exciting, especially the brain.”
[5] See this blog post for more, A Child of the Space Age, New Savanna, May 27, 2020, https://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2013/10/a-child-of-space-age.html.
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