Patriotic tableau, Jewish Community Center, 1940
David Brooks yesterday found a way to proclaim his love for America that in its heartbreak and longing adds a page to an American Jewish literature of patriotism.
The news hook for his New York Times op-ed column was the healthcare reform bill and the Democrats. But he soon got emotional, and it wasn’t the bill’s extension of benefits that got him choked-up. Brooks got scared. Like any partner to a love affair, he is afraid his beloved is changing, and in changing, leaving him.
Yet I confess, watching all this, I feel again why I’m no longer spiritually attached to the Democratic Party. The essence of America is energy — the vibrancy of the market, the mobility of the people and the disruptive creativity of the entrepreneurs. This vibrancy grew up accidentally, out of a cocktail of religious fervor and material abundance, but it was nurtured by choice. It was nurtured by our founders, who created national capital markets to disrupt the ossifying grip of the agricultural landholders. It was nurtured by 19th-century Republicans who built the railroads and the land-grant colleges to weave free markets across great distances. It was nurtured by Progressives who broke the stultifying grip of the trusts.
Brooks goes on to say that the country’s energy is in danger of fading and “The task ahead is to save this country from stagnation and fiscal ruin.”
You may laugh but I find this combination of gee-whiz excitement and love and hand-wringing very moving. It is part of me and a large part of what attracted me to Jewish American literature, which brims with puppy-love eagerness for the America that offered the Jews so much.
There are no shortage of examples, but for convenience I’ll stick to my obsessions.
Seymour Krim was both thrilled and aghast at America’s energy, titillated even as he held his nose. “I was consumed by the voice and landscape and (be truthful!) romance of roaring-drunk modern America,” he wrote in his essay about poet Milton Klonsky.
The same could be said of the Saul Bellow who wrote Augie March and Henderson the Rain King, but late in his career Bellow saw that the patriotism of his generation was an artifact of another time.
In “Cousins,” the character Scholem is described as “a patriotic American (a terribly antiquated affect).” And the dilemma faced by Cousin Mendy and the story’s narrator is also Brooks’ dilemma and my dilemma and one faced by many American Jews.
“Jews who had grown up on the sidewalks of America, we were in no sense foreigners, and we had brought so much enthusiasm, verve, love to this American life that we had become it. Odd that it should begin to roll towards oblivion just as we were perfecting ourselves in this admirable democracy.”
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