Touchstone Magazine - Mere Comments
...the nation may be going the same way that medieval Christendom went. I agree, and I'm not talking about the power of multinational corporations-- and neither was he. I mean that the virtue of patriotism, which is linked to a sense of belonging to this land, here, and loving it, a virtue that did not begin with the nation-state but could at least survive in it, is fading away. A man calls himself a doctor or a lawyer, a golfer, a husband and father, a collector of postcards, even a Methodist, before he calls himself an American. I have an old Army-Navy hymnal at home, and to look through it is to be astonished by the number and variety and quaint eloquence of its patriotic anthems, most of them now long forgotten. Even our most common patriotic hymns have been reduced, in the lived experience and memories of citizens, to a single verse, usually only dimly understood. Lines such as these from the hymn that used to be called simply America are almost incomprehensible now, not semantically but affectively, and would certainly never be written:
I love thy rocks and rills,
Thy woods and templed hills;
My heart with rapture fills
Like that above. (more)
