Going Fo(u)rth

 There's a tiny American flag jabbed in the dirt in my front yard this morning, and I know how it got there.

It was me. I'm the culprit.

I put it there to remind myself we still live in a country worth all the noise that went rattling around the neighborhood last night, even if it's also worth wondering how it survives its citizenry. We are a proud, brave, venal and stupid people, we Americans, capable of great acts of sacrifice and nobility and equally appalling acts of hatred and and violence. We are human beings, in other words.

It's tempting, in these riven days, to think we have never been so divided, never been so susceptible to fear-mongers and demagogues and the crass self-interest of those who gleefully feed on our worst impulses.  The history nerd in me recognizes this for what it is, the endless recycling of themes that go back to the founding of the republic. Everything that is in America, you see, also was.

The appalling fear-mongering over illegal immigration, for instance, has ever been thus. If the worst elements of American society refer to those coming up from Mexico and Central America as an "invasion" (with all the implied menace of that charged word),  those same elements used the same rhetoric when refugees from the Great Famine in Ireland began landing on our shores in the 1840s. Ditto the Asians, Italians, Russians and Eastern Europeans who followed in succeeding years.

All of them, or the great majority of them, came to America fleeing oppression or violence or religious persecution or poverty. All of them crossing our southern border today, or the great majority, are fleeing much the same thing. And all of them were portrayed by the aforementioned elements as murderers and rapists and terrorists and drug-dealers, coming to take our jobs and our security and our very lives.

A hundred years ago, there was even a foreshadowing of the current wave of anti-immigrant sentiment. During the crafting of the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924 -- the most restrictive and baldly racist anti-immigration legislation in American history -- one of the crafters, a man named John B. Trevor, looked to the south and feared an "undesirable mongrel immigration" from Hispanic populations.

Listen to the rhetoric coming out of Washington today. Not a hell of a lot different, if in fact there is a difference.

And yet, as a country, we've achieved great things despite all this -- with the significant contribution of those successive waves of immigrants the worst of us swore were an existential threat to America itself. Yeah, not so much, Bubba.

But so it goes in a nation that has endlessly wrestled with the concept of freedom and to whom it applies, and which is no more loud and contentious and divided by that debate than it's ever been.

If today's Right demonizes the Left and vice-versa, after all, both are only following the example set by our forefathers, who perhaps demonized one another even more egregiously. Helped along by every bit as vicious a partisan press as today's, the Jefferson Republicans branded the Hamilton Federalists as  "monarchists" who wanted to return the young America to a state of servitude to a king; the Hamilton Federalists responded by branding Jefferson a liar, a hypocrite, an atheist and a proponent of mob rule.

Both were probably on the mark, to some extent. And hugely off it in the main.

Which brings me back to that flag planted in the dirt in our yard.

Some people think by putting it there I'm declaring myself in league with the "patriots" who use the flag and the troops and the Star-Spangled Banner as cover in the pursuit of blatantly un-American aims. I say people can think what they want, this being America. And since it is, no one gets to dictate what putting an American flag on my lawn on the Fourth of July means to me.

It means America ain't perfect. But I'll still take it over anything else you've got.