Love It or Leave It

June 28, 2008

Today I found this image, available for $14 on the front of a t-shirt, at americathebeautiful.com. It is one of those patriotic phrases that I find frustrating. Its practical use is to cut off criticism of America and its policies: "If you're so angry, why not go someplace else?" But does anyone imagine that this is really a choice? It's not like anyone has a say about being born in America.. so where is someone who does not "love" America supposed to go? There have to be positions between loving and leaving.. which we would understand if we considered the case of an individual growing up in contemporary Russia, where a person could be less than happy with the nation, but unwilling to leave at the same time.

I was thinking about this today as I continued to read about Crazy Horse. I got past Custer and Little Big Horn.. and am surprised at how quickly the big victory melted away into thin air. A large contingent of Sioux had no desire for a protracted fight with the Americans. In this position Crazy Horse was forced to adopt some uncustomarily aggressive policies to keep his war party together. When two envoys from the reservation appeared at his camp to urge peaceful settlement, Crazy Horse "openly threatened both envoys and their nervous hosts. 'We would never be allowed to take any one from that camp,' the envoys reported. 'If any left they would be followed and killed'" (254).

This sort of action on the part of Crazy Horse—and he follows through in some instances with punishment for fellow Sioux who leave the camp—is counted as a fall into isolation by Kingsley Bray in his biography. But how necessary it was for Crazy Horse to keep some form of unity is clear from the stalemated conclusion to the winter-fought Battle of Wolf Mountains. Bray writes:

...a party of five to six hundred warriors—little more than half the available force—mounted and turned their ponies downstream. With anger at the half-hearted response breaking his composure, Crazy Horse ordered the assembled people "to go down and meet [Miles]... or else move camp." [256]

Because of these warrior defections Crazy Horse was not able to put up the kind of large warrior force that proved victorious at Little Big Horn. In response he tries to enforce something like martial order on the customarily independent Sioux camps. It was a deeply un-Sioux kind of tactic.. but one that was necessary if the American military was to be successfully challenged.

As a nation America had some very powerful motivations at its disposal. No soldier could up and decide to withdraw from the a battle. He would be AWOL and punished. More important than the active threat of punishment was the battery of symbols that lies behind American power: flag and honor and patriotism. These are symbols that work to establish coercion in a body of men. It is striking that the Sioux had none of these mechanisms for inner control. The weakness of Native resistance would always be their lack of strategic cohesion and group solidarity.

Crazy Horse understood this dynamic and clearly tried to change it.. in the process introducing some practices that went totally against the grain of the Sioux way of life. (An example, by the way, of how the act of countering forces of change often leads accidentally to the very change one has tried to push away.) In effect Crazy Horse lacked the psychological mechanisms that come with being a nation-state.. and therefore had no chance at fighting the Americans for a long period of time. His efforts at physical coercion were the shadow of the unconscious coercion that we take for granted.