To be American on foreign shores is to know what it is to be disrespected. There have been times when one didn’t have to go abroad to acquire this knowledge. The Vietnam era was one of them. John Updike was perhaps a minority of one among the literary set to object to its pervasive anti-anti-Communism. He was by no means an uncritical supporter of his government’s policies in Indochina. And yet his revulsion from the assault by his peers on America and its bourgeois values led him to remain distinct from the doves. He writes of this experience in Self-Consciousness:
“To say that war is madness is like saying that sex is madness: true enough, from the standpoint of a sexless eunuch, but merely a provocative epigram for those who must make their arrangements in the world as given. In Sunday school, I had been much impressed by the passage where Peter denies Christ three times before the cock crows. My undovishness, like my battered and vestigial but unsurrendered Christianity, constituted a refusal to give up, to deny and disown, my deepest and most fruitful self, my [home-town] Shillington self… I was grateful to be exempted from the dirty, dreary business of maintaining the overarching order, and felt that a silent non-protest was the least I in gratitude owed those who were not exempted.”
This is well said. I’ve always found this unblinkered but unironic patriotism moving, and offer it today as a small appreciation to those brave souls who stand sentry on distant shores in defense of liberty.
