Let us love America, not be “in love” with it

(This blog entry was drafted in January 2003 and never posted until now.)

Upon the death this past week of the estimable author and speaker Balint Vazsonyi, National Review Online ran the following headline:

JOHN J. MILLER: Balint Vazsonyi was a man in love with America.

Oh, spare me people who say that they—or other people—are “in love” with America. Can you imagine someone saying of George Washington or Abraham Lincoln after his death: “He was in love with America”? It would be ludicrous. The whole point of being in love is that one is drawn to an object that is external to oneself. Thus a man might say that he is in love with a woman who is not himself, or perhaps an American might say that he is in love with Ireland which is not his country. But it is as inappropriate for a person to say that he is “in love” with his own country as it would be for him to say that he is “in love” with his own family. In saying it, he places himself outside his country or his family, as an object he pursues and admires, rather than as a larger entity in which he participates. In fact, the phrase, which was not the late Mr. Vazsonyi’s (a search of his articles archive turns up no instance of the phrases “in love with America” or “love affair with America”) but National Review’s, perfectly expresses the neoconservative mindset, which is to see America as an external idea (or, alternatively, a supplier of commodities) to which we are fondly attached and the benefits of which we seek to propagate to and share with the whole world, rather than as a concrete historical entity to which we belong and owe permanent obligations.

Thus, beneath the sentimentality, there is something imperialistic about being “in love” with America, as though America were an object one were enjoying and possessing, and in the act calling attention to oneself and one’s expansive emotions, rather than being devoted to something greater and more enduring than oneself. Whenever I hear an immigrant or minority say he is “in love” with America, I am reminded of the unintentionally ominous words of the Indian-American novelist Bharati Mukherji, telling Bill Moyers in a tv interview years ago:

I want to reposition the stars…. I want to conquer, I mean, I want to love and possess this country.

To which I reply: Such “love” we can do without, thank you!

Posted by Lawrence Auster at October 30, 2006 07:32 PM | Send