ABSTRACT
A couple of years ago I watched part of a U.S. Memorial Day celebration broadcast from Washington D.C. From the perspective of its participants, this is an annual celebration of benign patriotism, a ritual on the nation’s so-called civil religion calendar, that commemorates those long since past who gave their lives for the sake of freedom and democracy. Although I would never contest those participants who characterize such holidays in just this manner – judging by my father, who is a Canadian World War II veteran, they quite sincerely intend to remember and thus memorialize fallen youths and, perhaps, their own fallen youth – Memorial Day, even “civil religion” itself (see chapter 12) can easily be theorized in a rather different manner than that which is offered by its participants. If the work of scholarship is something other than paraphrasing participants’ self-reports (see McCutcheon 2001b: chs 8 and 9), then one might problematize the abstract notions of freedom and democracy, taking into account such things as the fact that, although representatives of various marginalized or minority groups do indeed win U.S. elections today, power and ownership are still reserved for a relatively small, privileged group whose sphere of activity is not limited to public office and the halls of representative democracy, then the rhetoric of freedom and rule of the demos that is celebrated on Memorial Day takes on new significance. Instead of seeing past wars as the defenses of abstract, inalienable freedoms and rights – as our politicians and the representatives of our official media-speak continually persuade us – we come to see them as the concerted exercise of imperial right and might, part of the inevitable clash of nation-states in a world of scarce resources. All the bells and whistles of nationalism – the fireworks, the flags, the uniforms, the somber speeches, the sentimental anthems played on lone bugles, and the effort to package it and
present it back to ourselves benignly as mere patriotism – heighten emotions (i.e., Durkheim’s “collective effervescence”) and make possible the egalitarian illusion so essential to our modern sense of self and nation. After all, if a population is to be mobilized to risk great public expenditure, as well as risking the deaths of huge segments of its younger membership (traditionally drawn from the lower classes) in the service of private enterprise (after all, are not wars often fought over private ownership of productive land, private ownership of and access to trade routes, private ownership of and access to natural resources and trading markets?), then the material gains and losses to the privately owned system must be mystified, universalized, and thus dehistoricized, thereby represented as moral gains and losses credited to some abstract “public good.” This is democratization in an ideological sense (perhaps in its only sense!): the gains added to, and the losses inflicted upon, the various parts must be portrayed as gains/losses to the Whole. Or, as Noam Chomsky recently phrased it in a lecture, with regard to public support, via tax dollars, of the high tech sector of the economy, the costs are socialized while the gains are privatized.1
