Light On Dark Water

I've been thinking about this since I mentioned Obama's apparent lack of love for this country in a post last week. I see some evidence that the sort of patriotism I was thinking of there is less common than I assumed. Perhaps the president's detachment is not unusual any more. That wouldn't really be surprising, considering the ideological assault on the country that's been in progress since the 1960s.

But part of the problem in discussing any of this is the equation of patriotism with nationalism, and exaggerated, possibly pathological, nationalism at that. I don't consider them to be the same thing. In my mind patriotism is fundamentally natural and healthy, and in fact I'd say that if a person feels none of it at all then something is wrong with either him or his country or both. Further complicating things in this country is that nationalism for Americans is bound up with the American creed, which is not the same thing as the actual geographical and cultural country. Here's a Sunday Night Journal from 2005 on that topic: "Patriotism and the American Creed".