Jonah Goldberg on Katie Couric's "We"

Cosmo Girl Couric's America
"We" little problems.

By Jonah Goldberg


In a recent speech at the National Press Club, Katie Couric expressed somber disapproval of the jingoistic excesses after 9/11. Among the things that vexed her: “The whole culture of wearing flags on our lapel and saying ‘we’ when referring to the United States.” From what I can tell, nobody among the journalistic swells bothered to ask, “Who isn’t ‘we,’ Kemo Sabe?”

I don’t want to revisit those supposedly Orwellian flag pins, which sat so heavily on so many journalistic lapels. But it’s worth recalling that during World War II, civilian correspondent Walter Cronkite — whose anchor job Couric now holds — gladly wore a uniform, not just a pin, and subjected himself to military censors. He also used, I’m sure, the word “we” when referring to Americans.

To be clear, I have no interest in questioning Couric’s patriotism. Rather, I’m interested in questioning her definition of it.

I’ve come around to the view that the culture war can best be understood as a conflict between two different kinds of patriotism. On the one hand, there are people who believe being an American is all about dissent and change, that the American idea is inseparable from “progress.” America is certainly an idea, but it is not merely an idea. It is also a nation with a culture as real as France’s or Mexico’s. That’s where the other patriots come in; they think patriotism is about preserving Americanness.

Yet the strangest and most ironic aspect of our national culture is that we have an aversion to talking about a national culture. Samuel Huntington, one of the country’s premier social scientists, has become something of a pariah for constantly reminding people (in books such as The Clash of Civilizations and Who Are We?) that America is a nation, not just a government and a bunch of interest groups.

Many liberals hear talk of national culture and shout “Nativist!” first and ask questions later, if at all. They believe it is a sign of their patriotism that they hold fast to the idea that we are a “nation of immigrants” — forgetting that we are also a nation of immigrants who became Americans.

As the host of The Today Show in 2003, Couric said of the lost crew members of the space shuttle Columbia: “They were an airborne United Nations — men, women, an African-American, an Indian woman, an Israeli. ...” As my colleague Mark Steyn noted, they weren’t an airborne U.N., they were an airborne America. The “Indian woman” came to America in the 1980s, and, in about a decade’s time, she was an astronaut. “There’s no other country on Earth where you can do that,” Steyn rightly noted.

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