Does democracy require an element of the fetish? This question is not about voodoo or the occult? It is about objects of reverence and the rituals that go with them.
If you find the question off the wall, you probably haven’t paid attention or given much thought to the latest political rumbling in the United States. That is, the ferment over some athletes’ kneeling rather than standing when the American national anthem is sung to begin games.
By the measure of salience and the attendant visceral reaction, one would think that it is the weightiest matter facing the United States at this time. Yet, the American territory of Puerto Rico just got levelled by Hurricane Irma, with 16 people dead and millions of people without electricity and basic amenities. Across the border, a magnitude 7.1 earthquake similarly devastated central Mexico, killing about 325 people.
Elsewhere in the world, tension between the United States and its adversaries continues to escalate. American warplanes reportedly flew the deepest into the demilitarized zone between South and North Korea, prompting the latter to threaten to shoot them down. Meanwhile, Russian airplanes reportedly attacked U.S.-armed rebels in Syria. In Afghanistan, Taliban and ISIS took credit for firing at the Kabul International Airport about when U.S. Secretary of Defence James Mattis arrived there.
Anyone of these developments has the potential to trigger massive conflicts and loss of lives. Yet, it is the protest gestures of some players of American football that is garnering intense national attention.
The protest was begun last year by one player, who subsequently opted out of the last year of his contract with his team. (He wasn’t let go, as I incorrected stated elsewhere.) He was expecting to sign a more lucrative contract with another team, as players of his calibre usually do. But when no team wanted him, it became evident that his protest might end his career.
In solidarity, several other players began to kneel down this season while the national anthem is sung. And that raised the profile of the issue. But it didn’t develop into a full-blown controversy until President Donald Trump waded in. He vulgarly referred to a protester as a son of a bitch and urged team owners to fire all players who knelt during the anthem. In reaction, entire teams joined the kneeling protest and several team owners — including Trump’s staunch supporters — closed ranks with their players. Some issued statements condemning Trump’s intrusion and some even kneeled with their players.
But there is no such solidarity among the general public. Some fans at stadiums booed those who knelt. Outside the stadium, the reactions were equalled visceral. Referring to the Mike Tomlin, the black head coach of the Pittsburgh Steelers, the head of the fire department at a Pennsylvania township posted on Facebook: “Tomlin just added himself to the list of no good Niggers. Yes, I said it.”Tomlin’s offence was that he opted to keep his team in the locker room during the anthem.
The fire chief subsequently apologised, telling a local reporter that he posted the comments “in anger.”“What I said was wrong and I truly am sorry,” he said.
But why such anger over a seemingly harmless gesture? The usual rationalisation is that not standing during the national anthem is an affront to the country. More specifically, the critics say, it is disrespectful to members of the armed forces who fight to preserve freedom.
This argument is proffered routinely without regard for its fetish essence. It is an argument that would more rationally apply to cutting funds for the welfare of American soldiers and veterans. Yet, here is Marc A. Thiessen, the former chief speech writer for President George W. Bush, making it in an Op-Ed piece in the Washington Post:
“What these players don’t seem to understand is that Americans gave their lives so that they could have the freedom to play a kid’s game for a living. When players disrespect the flag, they disrespect that sacrifice.”
Oh yes, the anthem and the national flag are co-entities in this argument. And, by implication, they are to Americans what the sacred cow is to Indians and the Koran to Moslems. In India and many Muslim countries, dishonouring the sacred cow would readily result in execution —by mob action or by law. In the United States too, there are people who — if they have the chance and believe they can get away with it — would hang those who so offend them. But Trump the renaissance man would settle for loss of livelihood.
What this all means is that regardless of nationality, religion and political culture, people have a fetish attachment to objects of veneration. This is counter to the thrust of the Enlightenment, the intellectual movement away from passion to reason, from the superstitious to the empirical.
Before the Enlightenment gave rise to democracy, kings and emperors were not just leaders, they were also objects of veneration, often the pivot of nationhood. Hence, to insult them is to undercut the essence of the nation, and that warranted the death penalty. Such regimes still exist today, as in Saudi Arabia and North Korea, where merely frowning when Kim Jong Un speaks could get one executed.
When such political order began to crumble elsewhere, there was still the need for an object of veneration, something that the whole nation can rally around. In his book, “The Good Citizen,” Michael Schudson argues that U.S. democracy found such an object in the Constitution and related symbols and practices, such as the American flag, national anthem and pledge of allegiance. In Schudson’s words, the cultivation and embrace of these symbols “acquired the trappings of a religious cult.”
It is in this light that the anger against protestors who kneel rather than stand during the singing of the national anthem makes sense. It is not the rather vacuous argument that the anger is about disrespect for the military. After all, the anthem and flag mean as much to farmers, factory workers, journalists, politicians, etcetera.
Even then, there is a certain irony facing critics of the protesters. By arguing that the protesters disrespect a symbol of liberty, the critics seek to curtail the exercise of that liberty.
Punch
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