Can't be American without a Flag

What holiday season would be complete without people like Dennis Prager to complain about how bad liberals are?

Dennis says he likes rituals. Without them, how would people know who they were? He goes so far as to claim, rather grandiosely, that,

No national or cultural identity can survive without ritual

This might sound kind of strange coming from a Reform Jew who presumably buys into the whole autonomous, optional mitzvot thing that's long been a hallmark of Reform practice, but Dennis never lets pesky thing like facts or personal hypocrisy stand in his way. Besides, in a big-picture kind of way, I suppose he's right. Rituals are important to self-identity and cohesion, though, as Reform and Conservative Judaism (and many other examples) illustrate, exactly which rituals and elements of identity one chooses to maintain can often be rather open to interpretation.

Americans knew this until the era of anti-wisdom was ushered in by the baby boomer generation in the 1960s and '70s. We always had national holidays that celebrated something meaningful.

Or at least we SAID they did, which was what really mattered.

When I was in elementary school, every year we would put on a play about Abraham Lincoln to commemorate Lincoln's Birthday and a play about George Washington to commemorate Washington's Birthday. Unfortunately, Congress made a particularly foolish decision to abolish the two greatest presidents' birthdays as national holidays and substituted the meaningless Presidents Day. Beyond having a three-day weekend and department store sales, the day means nothing.

And that's whose fault, exactly? There's nothing to stop people from making Presidents' Day meaningful. If anything, it's an opportunity to expand people's attention beyond merely the two most well-known (and whitewashed) guys. How about using the larger focus of the day to have mini-plays about the Lesser Known Presidents? And since when do good conservatives need the government to mandate a holiday so people will appreciate American leaders? Next you'll blame the Democratic Congress for not having a MacArthur Day.

Columbus Day is rarely celebrated since the European founding of European civilization on American soil is not politically correct.

Really? Because no one seems to have told any of these guys. Chicago, San Francisco, Baltimore, Colorado, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and of course that great liberal bastion, New York City. Try picking up a newspaper sometime. Incidentally, Heaven forbid we put some extra effort into trying to balance an appreciation for the founding of America with dealing with the dirty facts of history like Spanish Imperialism, Indian slavery and genocide, and Columbus being a general jackass with a poor sense of direction.
Again, Dennis seems content to take the easy way out and blame someone else. How utterly French of him.

Christmas has become less nationally meaningful as exemplified by the substitution of "Happy Holidays" for "Merry Christmas."

Inane red herring, thoroughly debunked here and elsewhere during the great "War on Christmas" fiascoes of the fast few years. If anything, trying to establish common ground between ALL the winter holidays is designed to make Christmas more accessible as a semi-secular and "national" (not religious) holiday to people that may not celebrate it in a Christian context. The continual insistence on keeping Christmas as exclusively Christian and on giving it some sort of superiority over other holidays is part of what turns so many people off of it. What a surprise, some people react poorly to Christmas becoming yet another implement of culture war bludgeoning.

Memorial Day should be a solemn day on which Americans take time to honor those Americans who fought and died for America and for liberty. But, again, fewer and fewer Americans visit military cemeteries just as fewer communities have Memorial Day festivities.

A- How on earth are you backing this up?
B- Exactly what do you do on Memorial Day?

We come, finally, to tomorrow, the mother of American holidays, July Fourth, the day America was born. This day has a long history of vibrant and meaningful celebrations. But it, too, is rapidly losing its meaning. For example, look around tomorrow – especially if you live in a large urban area – and see how few homes display the American flag. For most Americans it appears that the Fourth has become merely a day to take off from work and enjoy hot dogs with friends

It's interesting Dennis mentions flags. A flag, ironically enough, like most of what Dennis has mentioned as examples, is a rather superficial, and simplistic, display of what are, for many people, very complex emotions and ideas. For the record, I put up a flag after 9/11. But friends and relatives asked me to take it down shortly thereafter, because people like Dennis made them feel intimidated by and alienated from symbols of American patriotism. They couldn't figure out how to show pride and appreciation for their country without feeling like they were associating themselves with people on the right, who, rightly or wrongly, they saw as trying to obtain a monopoly on patriotism, particularly the "my country right or wrong" variety.

People like Dennis scare people away from being overtly patriotic. They don't want to be associated with people like him, and they resent the implication that there's some sort of patriotic or cultural litmus test going on, as if they need to pass a certain threshold of "correct" holiday observances in order to pass the "good American" test. What the hell business is it of Dennis' how people celebrate any holiday? And again, how is he measuring proper holiday festivities? An Independence Day pageant? Historical reenactments? Please do tell, O Mighty and All-Wise Prager, how we should be celebrating our Independence Day- aside from blowing our fingers off, of course.

National memory dies without national ritual. And without a national memory, a nation dies. That is the secret at the heart of the Jewish people's survival that the American people must learn if they are to survive.

When Jews gather at the Passover Seder – and this is the most widely observed Jewish holiday – they recount the exodus from Egypt, an event that occurred 3,200 years ago. We Americans have difficulty keeping alive the memory of events that happened 231 years ago.

How have the Jews accomplished this? By the ritual of the Passover Seder. Jews spend the evening recounting the Exodus from Egypt – and as if it happened to them. In the words of the Passover Haggadah – the Passover Seder book – "every person is obligated to regard himself as if he himself left Egypt." The story is retold in detail, and it is told as if it happened to those present at the Seder, not only to those who lived it 3,200 years ago.

That has to be the motto of the July Fourth Seder. We all have to retell the story in as much detail as possible and to regard ourselves as if we – no matter when we or our ancestors came to America – were present at the nation's founding in 1776.

Dennis, of course, is conveniently forgetting that most people's seders, while certainly a point of cultural connection, are not as rosy or sepia-toned as he might like to pretend. Passover is Jewish Thanksgiving. Some people love it, some people hate it, some people do it traditionally, some people do alternative seders, whatever (and the pluralism of that ritual is itself its own point of controversy). However you observe the holiday, however, I'm rather skeptical that most, or even a sizeable number of practitioners actually come away feeling, "hey, that totally happened to me!" It's a ritual, yes, but even the most widely observed rituals, if we're honest, have a certain amount of self-awareness.

The truth is that we CAN'T experience the Exodus as it happened to our ancestors, and that gap, that distance, is part of the seder experience itself, the acknowledgment and struggle to deal with the existence of that impossibility. By the same token, it is impossible for Americans to ever experience the founding of the country as our forefathers did- nor should, IMO, they try. Instead, they should contemplate the distance itself, and how that shapes their understanding of the past and their own selves as Americans. To do otherwise is to merely engage in whimsical, and largely useless, fantasy.
National memory and consciousness are indeed important. But the way to promote those values is through honest examination of historical fact and the acknowledgment that the America of today, and the Americans of the present-age, are NOT the same as the predecessors. Dennis' proposal, like his diagnosis of the problem, is all show and no substance. Guilting people into coming to an American seder that holds no meaning for them has no purpose. You may get bodies in the seats, yes, but what good is that without their hearts and minds?