March 6, 2007

Dear Colleague:

    John F. Kennedy famously said: "Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask rather what you can do for your country." At the time of its utterance, it was widely thought to be inspirational. And for good reason. Kennedy no doubt had in mind that Americans were, by and large, blessed, thanks to their fruitful land and good institutions. Kennedy's fellow Americans inherited these riches. They were therefore obligated to give something back—obligated to ask themselves what they could do for a country that had given them so much. In a strict sense, however, Kennedy's fellow Americans did not really include the likes of you and me, solid yeomen of mid-America; they were rather the highly privileged bourgeoisie of the Eastern seaboard. Their sons and daughters—and especially their sons—were expected to serve. They were trained to serve in such private schools as Groton and St. Paul where, although the libraries and labs were absolutely first-class, the sleeping quarters and meals were deliberately primitive—"hard narrow beds, cold showers, and boiled cabbage"—in imitation of Britain's Eton and  Harrow, boot camps for the future rulers of empire.

    Now, you see how easily a high-sounding ideal can slip into its opposite? Hitler himself might have orated, "Ask not what your Fatherland can do for you. Ask rather what you can do for your Fatherland." The slogan, in other words, has a dark, fascist undertone. A democratic slogan, by contrast, is almost the opposite. It would retain the part that asks what I can do for my country, but it would also insist that I ask what my country can do for me. Unlike other forms of government, the test of democracy is precisely what it can do for the individual, how it can provide John Lythlohan and Mary Pienkowski with security, freedom, the opportunity to pursue happiness, and, most importantly, some higher common goal.

    The real rub is the goal of the service to be rendered. Is the goal to make my country rich, powerful, and feared? Or is the goal to make my Fatherland, a land of pure Aryans where blonde boys in lederhosen march and blonde girls with pigtails sing, where the streets are immaculate and the trains run on time? Or is the goal a universalist ideal of brotherhood—the universal distribution of hope—that might find its first expression in a particular country? When Kennedy urged Americans to ask what they can do for their country, he wasn't appealing to narrow patriotism. He was appealing to an American ideal that flourished earlier, culminating in Lincoln's image of America as a "redeemer nation," a nation that has nothing to do with Volk or patria, but everything to do with the political incarnation of the idea of justice and universal rights. Of course, the biggest blot in that idea in Lincoln's time was slavery. Hence the absolute necessity to remove it. Hence, thereafter, the many attempts to include more and more Americans as equal, with the same rights and obligations. Pursuing this dream has given Americans the fresh-scrubbed face of hope that no pursuit of mere material advantage can grant. How shocking it is, then, that in our day an American president could urge a constitutional amendment that would deny certain basic rights to a whole class of citizens. And how shocking—and sad—it is that, in lieu of a generous spirit of inclusiveness and hope, Americans now appear content to direct their energies to militaristc ventures in the Middle East and to shopping at Wal-Mart till the corns hurt.

Best wishes,

Yi-Fu