In the aftermath of the attacks of September 11, a Yale University student asked one of her instructors, "Would it be OK now for us to be patriotic?" The professor, John Lewis Gaddis, widely regarded as the dean of American Cold War historians, replied: "Yes, I think it would."
Then there's how John McWhorter opened a commentary not too long ago (The New York Sun, August 3, 2006):
In a way, I don’t live in America. My world is the minority one of NPR and kalamata olives. This week, however, I’m writing from a cruise ship, and America this is. This is the America of USA Today, sausage links and “Rumor Has It.”
These are also the people who Blue Americans are given to thinking of as “scary” hordes, ever on the brink of returning America to the heartless Social Darwinism of the Gilded Age.
The idea is that because of this, we enlightened folk are to craft our public statements so as to hold off this eternal threat. When I put an American flag sticker on my windshield after September 11, a friend of mine of this type actually ripped it off, an action she meant as something between a joke and a protest. In her eyes, there were so many people “out there” who might take the sticker as a call for ignorant jingoism that it was irresponsible for a college professor to have the sticker on his car. About every fourth letter in my mailbag is from someone who says that they agree with my often right-of-center comments on race, but “worry” that people “out there” might misinterpret me as suggesting a return to Jim Crow, or leaving ghettos to fester unattended.
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