PART THE ONE: What Comes Naturally
This morning I woke up dreaming a politically irrelevant limerick, so you don't have to:
A beaver in Rome, nothing loth,
Has sworn a binary oath:
Get plenty of fiber!
Don't dam the Tiber!
And so far he's lived up to both.
Wait. Is anything politically irrelevant anymore? This Roman beaver's pledge might be seen as resembling the promise of House Republicans, now that they have a majority: they will chew and chew on their spiteful feelings (fiber) and let infrastructure and climate-change (the Tiber) slide.
PART THE TWO: Thee and her.
We hear so much about pronouns these days. What are America's?
In "America the Beautiful" (1893), thee and thy and thine: "Confirm thy soul in self-control, thy liberty in law.. . God shed His grace on thee, And crown thy good with brotherhood /From sea to shining sea! Thine alabaster cities gleam/ Undimmed by human tears!"
Crazy-ass stuff, but pretty damn singable. And before we pursue this further, could I just quote my favorite stanza:
O beautiful for pilgrim feet.
That's just that stanza’s first line. Here are the rest:
Whose stern impassioned stress
A thoroughfare for freeedom beat
Across the wilderness.
In "America," the song (1831, thee and thy: "My country, 'tis of thee . . . of thee I sing. . . . Thy name I love . . .
In "The Star-Spangled Banner" (1814), we: "What so proudly we hailed . . ." and so on.
In none of these pronouns does gender figure in.
But in "Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean" (1843), we get not only a thee but "garlands of vic'try about her" and "her flag proudly floating before her."
America female then? You could say, those are references not directly to the nation but to a goddess-like symbol of it.
So how about the great naval hero Stephen Decatur's famous after-dinner toast, from circa 1820. The most common rendering is, "Our country: In her intercourse with foreign nations may she always be in the right; but our country, right or wrong."
In 1901 G. K. Chesterton, an Englishman, was humph to that: "'My country, right or wrong, is a thing that no patriot would think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying, 'My mother, drunk or sober.' No doubt if a decent man's mother took to drink he would share her troubles to the last, but to talk as if he would be in a state of gay indifference as to whether his mother took to drink or not us certainly not the language of men who know the great mystery [of love]."
Chesterton is off there. Decatur may have been gay, as Randy Shilts has suggested, but he was not being indifferent. He was signing on to country-love in a way that Chesterton should have appreciated. I have just been reading Chesterton, on patriotism, on Liberalism (“As much as I ever did, more than I ever did, I believe in Liberalism. But there was a rosy time of innocence when I believed in Liberals”), and on fairy tales. Some of it might provide grounds for left-and-right understanding. For instance:
"A man who says that no patriot should attack the Boer War until it is over is not worth answering intelligently; he is saying that no good son should warn his mother off a cliff until she has fallen over it. But there is an anti-patriot who honestly angers honest men, and the explanation of him is . . . he is the uncandid candid friend; the man who says, 'I am sorry to say we are ruined,' and is not sorry at all."
Dr. Samuel Johnson, another Brit, said (according to his Boswell, James), "patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel." People quote that a lot today. But Johnson was not rejecting tough-love of country but, wrote Boswell, "that pretended patriotism which so many, in all ages and countries, have made a cloak for self-interest."
I was going to propose a national commission to come up with new pronouns for America. I was on the verge of invoking something I read in the Washington Post about a line of clothing, a brand that "isn't marketed as gender fluid or unisex. It just is." But the more I thought about the idea, the more it felt unworthy of Chesterton, Johnson, Boswell, and Decatur — a genuine Errol Flynn character for whom my home town was named.
At the 2020 GOP convention, Kimberly Guilfoyle hailed her father-in-law as one who "loves this country and will fight for her.” Yeah, well. It and its will have to do. Just don't stick an apostrophe into the latter, unless you mean to be contracting it [just] is.
And now I tiptoe away on my pilgrim pedal extremities.
PART THE THREE: Lagniappe
"This fellow I'm dating now, Gus,
Insists that his pronoun is Us,
And claims that it's nice of him.
So what are we, twice of him?
And what is our pronoun then? Gus?"