Ashamed of Patriotism. By Charles C. W. Cooke. National Review Online, July 30, 2013.
Cooke:
The 9/11 museum director’s revulsion at
patriotism is part of a larger collapse in national confidence.
History
shows that great and dominant societies can survive a great number of awful
things without succumbing to collapse, but that they rarely outlast the gradual
disintegration of national self-confidence. With this in mind, consider the
words of one Michael Shulan, who “really believes” that “the way America will
look best, the way we can really do best, is to not be Americans so vigilantly
and so vehemently.” Mr. Shulan, who is the creative director of the 9/11
Memorial Museum, also expressed his distaste at what he called the “rah-rah
America” instinct.
The
news that a New York City–based “creative director” is disheartened by muscular
American self-assuredness will presumably not come as a hefty surprise to many.
Nevertheless, I might venture that if one’s sole job is to memorialize for the
nation the revolting attack that unrepentant barbarians perpetrated on the
United States on September 11 of 2001, one’s calculations as to what level of
patriotism is and isn’t seemly should change a touch.
And yet
they haven’t. In Elizabeth Greenspan’s new book about the rebuilding of the
World Trade Center, Battle for Ground Zero, the author relates a disquieting incident in which Shulan huffily
objects to a photograph of three ash-covered firefighters raising an American
flag amid the mangled remains of the World Trade Center. Per Greenspan’s
account, Shulan’s displeasure was mollified only after he and his colleagues
reached a “compromise” and a couple of other photographs of the flag were added
to the museum’s collection. “Shulan didn’t like three photographs more than he
liked one, but he went along with it,” Greenspan reports.
The job
of a curator is to curate, and nobody would expect Mr. Shulan to remain quiet
if he had legitimate artistic differences. But the interesting question here is
why Mr. Shulan — or anyone, for that
matter — would find distasteful or “simplistic” the inclusion of photographs of
American firefighters responding to mass murder in an exhibition that venerates
the very same.
“My
concern,” Shulan explained, “as it always was, is that we not reduce [9/11]
down to something that was too simple, and in its simplicity would actually distort
the complexity of the event, the meaning of the event.”
The
never-ending search for complexity where it neither exists nor belongs is the
unlovely signet of the pseudo-intellectual. What, precisely, are America’s
flag-waving rubes missing about the
events of September 11, 2001? What does the photograph show that “distorts”
anything? If Mr. Shulan disagrees with Rudy Giuliani’s admirably Manichean
statement that, the attacks of 9/11 being “an attack on the very idea of a
free, inclusive, and civil society,” “we are right and they are wrong,” then he
should say so. He might tell us also what he conceives to be the apparently
unknowable “meaning of the event.” Absent an explanation, we should presume
that the curator of the 9/11 Memorial Museum considers that there was a better
time for firemen to be “vigilantly and so vehemently American” than the day
their city crashed down around them. This is unacceptable.
Even
America’s fiercest critics appear capable of treating as separate their wider
political disapprobation and the innocent bystanders of lower Manhattan, rural
Pennsylvania, and Washington, D.C. Why not Mr. Shulan? One presumes, for
example, that he would not object to a museum’s featuring L. Bennett Fenberg’s
beautiful video of American troops blowing up the vast swastika that stood
above the rally grounds at Nuremberg on the grounds that it “simplified” the
complex Nazi state or abridged the Second World War? Is 9/11 really so
different?
In
recent years, “patriotism,” “ideology,” and “nationalism” have acquired a bad
name among our betters. This is a dangerous shame. My first instinct upon
reading about Shulan was, “Well, for goodness sake don’t put this man in charge
of the Anne Frank Museum . . . ” Alas, that was before a reader wrote to tell
me that even the Amsterdam museum honoring the young Holocaust victim has
succumbed to such sloppy thinking: I am told that a display on the wall asks
visitors to consider if they are “Guilty of patriotism or nationalism?”
Such a
question might sound wise, but it is no such thing. The problem with the German
people in the 1930s and early 1940s wasn’t that they loved a country or that
they thrilled to an ideology but that they loved Germany and thrilled to Nazism.
Even George Orwell recognized the dangers of nihilistic detachment. While
Orwell was embarrassed that “God Save the King” continued to stir something
primeval in him long after his conversion to socialism, he would, he wrote,
still “sooner have had that kind of upbringing than be like the left-wing
intellectuals who are so ‘enlightened’ that they cannot understand the most
ordinary emotions.”
Previously,
I have drawn fire for contending that the West is not only morally superior to
the rest of the world but that, within the West, the Anglosphere is objectively
better than the rest of the West and that, within the Anglosphere, the United
States stands out. This is to say neither that the United States is beyond
criticism nor that it is perfect. But a nation in which every man is Tacitus
cannot and will not stand for long, especially if its cultural institutions are
overrun by the hostile and the apathetic.
There
is a pernicious school of thought in America that holds that the country cannot
possibly be the “best in the world” because it is third in grain exports or
seventh in state-run education or because the government doesn’t do exactly
what one wishes that it would. This misses the point completely. The United
States is paramount among nations because it is based on the best of values and
because it is prepared to defend them for itself and for others with force.
The
photograph of the flag being raised at Ground Zero is of a piece with the film
of George W. Bush embracing the firemen and with Rudy Giuliani’s immediate
resolve to rebuild; and together they serve as the overture to a robust and
admirable American defense of self. One rather suspects that it is this, and not a particular picture, to
which Mr. Shulan ultimately objects. And that being so, one has to ask: What
drew him to the job in the first place?
