“Here, brother, for you a flag,” sing the proud sons and daughters of Armenia, formerly the proud sons and daughters of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. “Look at it, three colors / It’s our gifted symbol / Let it shine against the enemy / Let Armenia always be glorious!”

Down in Harare, where the dictator is murdering his opponents, the people’s voices rise: “O lift high the banner, the flag of Zimbabwe / The symbol of freedom proclaiming victory / We praise our heroes’ sacrifice / And vow to keep our land from foes / And may the Almighty protect and bless our land.”

And here in the land of the free and the home of the brave, the Star Spangled Banner waves over another chosen people: “Blest with victory and peace / May the heav’n-rescued land / Praise the Power that hath made and preserved us a nation.”

In every national anthem, the flag is glorious, the hills beautiful, the citizens courageous, free and blessed.

There’s a reason all national anthems are the same: Patriotism is a one-size-fits-all emotion manufactured of sentiments that everybody subscribes to — freedom, loyalty, honor, brotherhood — at least while they’re waiting for the ballgame to start. Problem is, once the first pitch is thrown, patriotism requires you to cheer for one team only.

These truths became self-evident during Independence Day week, when the American presidential campaign turned

into an America-love competition — or a tribunal on Barack and Michelle Obama’s allegiance to the fatherland and (yet another) 10-gun salute to the heroism of John McCain.

Obama stood up for wife and country in Independence, Mo.; an abbreviated version of his speech was published in Parade, alongside McCain’s own homily on patriotism. The pundits dutifully parsed the differences, and a few emerged. In Parade, Obama speaks of equality; McCain doesn’t mention it. Obama traces his love of and loyalty to his country to memories of childhood and family; McCain downplays “sentiments about place and kinship.” McCain’s manifesto has a military band playing in the background; Obama’s recalls choruses of “Up With People.”

But there are far more similarities than differences between these two patriots. Both men exalt freedom and sacrifice; both see the latter as necessary in defense of the former. Both laud their land’s wealth and power. Both equate loyalty to country with, as McCain put it, loyalty to “countrymen.”

Listening to Obama’s oration brought a lump to my throat. But my response was testament less to what he said or how he said it — the guy, after all, could make audiences weep reciting the ingredients on a Gatorade bottle — than to the power of sentimentality. Nationalism is the ideology of the banal, said Danilo Kis, who would retch in his grave to read the descriptor at the head of his Wikipedia page: “a Yugoslavian/Serbian writer of Hungarian/ Jewish-Serbian origin.”

Say “pride,” “Thanksgiving,” “hearts,” “Martin Luther King,” “gratitude,” and “renewal” all within 28 minutes, or put a child kissing a puppy on the TV screen. Either will reliably jerk tears of happiness. Patriotism is as buttery and sugary as apple pie.

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As antidote to all these empty calories, I spent last week reading the great anti-patriots. Virginia Woolf, asked in 1938 how to fight fascism, wrote “Three Guineas,” in which she exhorted “[f]reedom from unreal loyalties . . . You must rid yourself of pride of nationality in the first place; also of religious pride, college pride, family pride, sex pride and those unreal loyalties that spring from them.”

Leo Tolstoy 40 years earlier called patriotism “stupidity.” “To destroy war,” he declared, “destroy patriotism.”

And in between, on the eve of the revolution that toppled Russia’s czar in the name of international working-class solidarity, the feminist and anarchist Emma Goldman penned “Patriotism,” in which she drew a bright line connecting patriotism and militarism. “Patriotism assumes that our globe is divided into little spots, each one surrounded by an iron gate,” she wrote. “Those who have had the fortune of being born on some particular spot consider themselves better, nobler, grander, [and] more intelligent than the living beings inhabiting any other spot. It is, therefore, the duty of everyone living on that chosen spot to fight, kill, and die in the attempt to impose his superiority upon all others.”

Forgive Emma for simplifying; she was a polemicist, not a political scientist. But she got it basically right. Patriotism is by definition chauvinistic: My country and your country can’t both be the best. And chauvinism breeds antagonism, real or invented. The terrorists attacked us, George Bush keeps saying, because “they hate our freedom.”

Patriotism demands obeisance to all warriors. “For those who have fought on the battlefield under the Stars and Stripes . . . no further proof of such sacrifice is necessary,” declared Obama in Missouri. He named his opponent among those deserving automatic respect and implicitly chastised his supporter Wesley Clark, a warrior himself, for suggesting that getting shot out of a plane does not qualify a man for office.

Obama claimed patriotism to be an “instinct.” But you aren’t born loving your country. Indeed, the candidate noted that this loyalty has to be taught (he mentioned civics classes). And in a world where economies and communications are boundary-less, where 67 million people are displaced or in exile and millions more migrate “voluntarily” for work, this education — or reeducation — is a complicated, sometimes brutal business.

Patriotism is the love of a “homeland,” and a homeland is usually assumed to be a state.

But to be accepted as citizens of an adopted “homeland,” migrants must demonstrate fealty to a state that punishes them for the very marginality and desperation that make them useful to that state’s economy.

Then there’s the project of creating new states. “[P]eople take them, homelands, from me, and give them to me if it occurs to them, and still ask me to love them unconditionally,” writes the novelist and essayist Dubravka Ugreiç, whose Yugoslavian passport has been replaced by that of her new “homeland,” Croatia.

Ugreiç chronicles the hellish years during which political opportunists, gangsters and war profiteers wrenched apart her once-united, multicultural nation and divided it into a bunch of new, mutually despising ones. Newborn patriotisms required the death and rebirth of histories: Books had to be burned, intellectuals, even travelers, renounced, and memories erased and replaced.

It was, Ugreiç writes, a “national mythomania” of “thousand-year dreams” held by heroic “races” — Serb, Croat, Slovenian, Bosnian, Albanian — each threatened by barbarian Others whose atrocities were so savage that self-defense necessitated “ethnic cleansing.” Years of terror, violence, poverty, displacement and lies drove people so mad that they were “ready to grab hold of the one and only truth they [were] offered, like a straw”: their new nationhood.

Ugreiç is having none of it. “I am no one. And everyone,” she writes. “In Croatia I shall be a Serb, in Serbia a Croat, in Bulgaria a Turk, in Turkey a Greek, in Greece a Macedonian, in Macedonia a Bulgarian.” She is, in other words, a cosmopolitan, citizen of the world.

I too am proud to call myself a “rootless cosmopolitan,” which, incidentally, was the fascist euphemism for Jew. But you don’t have to be Jewish — or rootless — to be cosmopolitan. To be a citizen of the world does not mean having no home or identity.

Rather, argues Kwame Anthony Appiah, a worldly Ghanaian-British philosopher with deep ties to both places, we can be “partial” cosmopolitans by assuming two commitments: an obligation to others beyond kith, kin and citizenship; and “[taking] seriously the value not just of human life but of particular human lives, which means taking an interest in the practices and beliefs that lend them significance.” When the two ideals of “universal concern and respect for legitimate differences . . . clash,” Appiah writes in Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers, “cosmopolitanism is the name not of the solution but of the challenge.”

******

On Independence Day, my partner Paul and I walked down the road to celebrate the 80th birthday of the farmer who owns or owned much of the land on our hill. We don’t share many political views with Wendell, but we appreciate his dry Vermont humor and the love with which he and his wife tend the trees and fields on the road. Wendell is different from us — we don’t always understand the practices and values of the other — but he is by no means a stranger.

After supper — a choice of meat or vegetarian lasagna — we gathered on benches and folding chairs at the top of the broad, sloping hayfield to watch fireworks. Most were red, white and blue. They made big noises — the rat-a-tat of automatic weapons, the whistles of missiles. But the grand finale was neither patriotic nor warlike. The explosions opened in slender silver and yellow petals, spreading almost silently down the sky. They didn’t look like bombs bursting in air. They looked like spider mums.

When the oohing and aahing was over, we all went into the house and thanked each other and said good-night. Then Paul and I walked home under the moon that shines on friend and foe this whole world over.

This article originally appeared in Seven Days.

As a kid in the 1960s, I went to a camp where competitive sports were viewed as mildly distasteful, if not explicitly frowned upon. Sure, we gathered in the evenings for rowdy bouts of “Capture the Flag.” On hot days there was “Sink ’Em,” which involved attempting to deluge or capsize the other team’s rowboat while madly bailing your own — mostly an excuse for unfettered splashing.

But this was not an institution that divided campers into two antagonistic nations on Day 1 and recorded all activities as battles in a summer-long color war. No, no, no. Ours was a Quaker camp. We were pacifists.

My Jewish communist parents transmitted a similar suspicion of sport. No one who’s faced one of us over a Scrabble board would accuse the Levines of shrinking from competition. Yet I was given to believe that sports were the exercises of a goyishe-industrial complex, overseen by CIA paramilitaries, training American youth for Cold War hostilities.

So at camp I learned to canoe like an Abenaki and swim like a trout, and at home I was riding a two-wheeler by the age of 5. But where I come from, the physical — especially when dressed up in uniforms and organized into teams — was political. More than that, sport was bad politics.

Then, as an adult, I moved to Vermont, where the entertainment afforded by snow, mountains and lakes far outshines almost anything you can do indoors. In short order, I rejected the family religion and was born again, a jock. I still get nervous keeping score playing volleyball; those Quakers ruined me for anything resembling a race. But if a genie offered to transform me either into Nobel Prize-winning Toni Morrison or Raisa Smetanina, the female world record-holder for 10 Olympic medals in nordic skiing, I’d have a hard time deciding.

Sport, for me, has ceased to be an alien cult whose rites involve sweaty jockstraps, arcane statistics and the ingestion of mass quantities of bubbly beverages and salty foods. I still view it as political — along with a growing list of human endeavors from sex to shopping — but I’ve started to think that athletic competition might be a force for good.

A lot of people feel this way, or at least they feel that international athletic competitions are a venue at which good can be demanded. In recent memory, hardly an Olympic Games has passed without some major political demonstration. In 1968, American runners Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised the Black Power fist from the winners’ podium to tell their own country, “Stop the racism.” In 1980, after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, fully a fifth of participant nations boycotted the Moscow Olympics. From 1964 until the end of apartheid in 1996, the International Olympics Committee banned South Africa from the Games.

Through all this I cheered for the activists. Had I been alive in 1936, I’m sure I would have stood with the labor unions and anti-fascists calling to keep the U.S. home from the Berlin Olympics, which the Nazis were touting as a showcase of Aryan superiority.

If the Games were marred, even canceled, as a result of the disruption, so be it, I believed. They were, after all, only games, expendable in the cause of righting the great wrongs.

So I was surprised by my own reaction this month, when Steven Spielberg withdrew as artistic advisor to the 2008 Beijing Olympics, in protest of what he sees as China’s failure to intervene sufficiently in ending the genocide in Darfur. Lay off it, Steve, I found myself thinking. Let the Games begin. What was happening?

Perhaps I felt fatigued. After all, no Olympic political act has ever caused its target to change. The most spectacular example of this intransigence was the Israelis’ response to the Palestinian terrorist murder of 11 of its athletes in Munich in 1972: They assassinated the terrorists. Depicting these events in a feature film in 2005, Spielberg transmitted the message that violence begets violence. This time, he’s obviously acting on the belief that nonviolent protest can end violence. The Chinese replied predictably, with self-justification: China can’t solve Darfur alone, and Darfur is a minor skirmish anyhow, they say. But I agree with Spielberg about nonviolence. And political critique, justified or not, is almost always met with defensiveness — that’s no reason not to make it.

Another Chinese rebuttal — this one made more by citizens in the blogosphere than by the government — represents a more compelling argument for keeping politics out of the Olympics. Spielberg is a hypocrite, his detractors say. Why doesn’t he protest his own country’s failure to send peacekeepers to Darfur, or the U.S. occupation of Iraq?

Indeed. Why single out China or South Africa, the Soviet Union, Israel or the U.S? Imperialist invasions, dangerous ideologies, human-rights violations — were the IOC to expel the doers of all these evils, we’d be left watching Finland compete against Bhutan (and I’m sure some reader will apprise me of the wrongdoings of these apparent innocents, too).

The same thing that makes the Games a bully pulpit also militates against exploiting them as such: Everyone is there. Patriotism is scarcely absent at the Olympics — you’re reminded of this each time a medalist stands on the podium wrapped in her country’s flag, weeping to the strains of its anthem. But nationalism is the opposite of the Olympics’ purpose and value, which is to bring allies and enemies together to compete in a fashion my parents could not fathom — peacefully.

I started out saying that sport is political, then proceeded to argue that the Olympics should be free of politics. So let me begin again. The Olympics are inevitably as political, not to mention as corrupt and commercial, as every other interaction of individuals, institutions, nations, power, prestige and money — witness the doping scandals. In that sense, all we can do is try to keep the Games as clean and transparent as possible.

But sport is, in another way, more profoundly political than any statement anyone can make at any Olympic Games in any country. The political message of sport — the political energy of it — originates in the same place as all social movements do: in the heart, the body, and the imagination.

I’m not just talking about the swell of humanism that watching a great athlete inspires. That feeling we have watching the fastest-ever, 1000-meter runner burst over the finish line, or the perfect-10 diver slice like a scalpel through the pool’s surface — this isn’t an Italian or a Kenyan but a man or a woman, an extraordinarily talented and honed human body. It’s a good thing the 1936 Olympic boycott failed to materialize. Because, of course, it was in Berlin that Jesse Owens, the African-American track-and-field star, took home four gold medals. In Berlin — in Owens — humanism beat fascist eugenics like, well, an Olympic long-jumper beating me.

But you don’t have to think we’re all the same under the skin to believe it’s worth getting together to run a few races (and let’s face it, the Kenyans are faster than the Italians). So there’s another emotion, perhaps even deeper — more personal and less abstract than humanism — that makes sport the exemplar of what politics can be.

Sport is fueled by the insane belief that we gravity-bound flesh machines can fly, that mortals can be gods. What a piece of work is man, sport says, so infinite in faculty! This is a political sentiment.

After decades of disappointments and defeats, politics has become the art — or business — of the merely possible. So wan are our hopes that when a man comes forward speaking in beautiful sentences yet promising little more than the defense of a shrinking list of liberal reforms and the temporary prevention of global annihilation, we exalt him as a visionary.

Meanwhile, in gyms and on tracks and ski slopes around the world, athletes are imagining the unimaginable — the higher jump, the more graceful turn — and then applying all their intelligence, discipline and effort, and then some, to making their visions real.

Sport is the art of the impossible. It is Utopian. This is why, now more than ever, we need sport.

Steven Spielberg — who has created intergalactic friendships and tragic clones, depicted The Color Purple and the Holocaust — is a genius at imagining utopias and dystopias. The man who named his company DreamWorks — and we along with him — should apply the lessons of Hollywood to the Olympics, in Beijing or anywhere else on this cruel and contested Earth: We need spaces to imagine the unimaginable, to dream the impossible. Dreaming is the most political act of all.

This article originally appeared in Seven Days.

The instant the ad hit the stands and screens, the blogosphere and talk media were aflame with outrage. Four thousand emails poured into the Times, calling the lame schoolyard epithet despicable, disgraceful and treasonous. Congress — including 168 Democratic senators and representatives — voted to condemn “in the strongest possible terms” MoveOn’s “personal attacks” on the general’s honor, integrity and professionalism (Leahy and Welch voted yea; Sanders nay). Clark Hoyt, the Times‘ purportedly unbiased Public Editor, allowed that, had it been up to him, he would have asked for the deletion of “Betray Us,” which he called “a particularly low blow when aimed at a soldier.”

First off, calling a general a soldier is like calling Bill Gates a programmer. David Petraeus is the boss, and the Times got it right the first time: He is a public figure, representing the U.S. Armed Forces, U.S. foreign policy and the war in Iraq. This means that, whatever he may feel personally, he is not a private citizen; legally, he cannot be libeled. In fact, just like other generals prosecuting corrupt policies (Curtis LeMay, William Westmoreland, Augusto Pinochet and Idi Amin come to mind), Petraeus is precisely the guy to dis. If he comes back from the circle of hell that is Iraq and reports that things are looking up, he is either a fool (which he isn’t) or a liar — the president’s liar.

What struck me about this “blow,” though, was its rarity. Far more typical these days is the other part of the Congressional resolution, which repeatedly recognizes, honors and respects “all members of the U.S. Armed Forces.”

“Americans rightly admire our troops for their bravery, dedication and integrity. The Marines, for instance . . . epitomize the rectitude of America’s soldiers,” read one typical blog in Capitalism Magazine, an Ayn Randist website. A Sunday Times book review by Iraq vet/lawyer/writer Phillip Carter began: “It’s hard not to like soldiers. The young men and women who make up our armed forces represent virtues we’d like to see more of in society: integrity, selfless service and loyalty to comrades and country . . . Spend enough time with them, particularly those serving in harm’s way, and you will inevitably come home admiring them, and maybe envying them as well.”

You don’t have to be a free-market warrior or War on Terror cheerleader (as Carter seems to be) to harbor undying devotion to Our Men and Women in Uniform. Soldier-love is held up as an antiwar sentiment, too. This leads to an ever-escalating contest over which side is more faithful to the beloved. A couple of weeks ago, Rush Limbaugh impugned military personnel who oppose the war as “phony soldiers.” Democratic Party Chair Howard Dean demanded he “immediately apologize to our brave men and women in uniform for undermining the sacrifices they make every day serving our country.” Dean called Limbaugh’s comments “un-American.” To gild this red-white-and-blue lily, the Dems posted a 2005 video clip on their website — headlined “New Audio of Rush Limbaugh Viciously Smearing a Veteran” — in which Rush expressed his support for the troops by calling Marine Paul Hackett a “staff puke” who “tried to hide his liberalism behind a military uniform” when he ran for Congress as a Democrat.

Troop admiration is also a good disinfectant for memories of Hanoi Jane and rumors of Vietnam War protesters spitting on returning vets. Old peacenik Bernie Sanders has carved out a politically useful niche standing up for veterans’ rights to compensation, health care, education and pensions. (By the way, sociologist and Vietnam veteran Jerry Lembcke put the spitting-on-soldiers myth to rest in 1998, when he combed every newspaper story, oral account and poll and found no evidence of spitting — except a few pro-war goobers aimed at protesters.)

Jim Currie, a professor at the National Defense University in Washington, D.C., summed up the love fest on National Public Radio: “The reality is, you’re not going to find anybody today who’ll say they don’t support the troops.” Currie noted that it means a lot to the men and women in country “to know the American people are behind them,” to hear “we’re with you, we support you, we honor you, we admire you.”

*********

OK, I’ll say it. I don’t “support the troops.” ?That is, I don’t support them qua troops. I support them as people, just as I support — or rather, worry, grieve and rage on behalf of — the Iraqis: as people caught in a senseless, fruitless, apparently endless bloodletting.

But to speak of the virtues of soldiering is implicitly to ratify the values of militarism: that might leads to right. This helps perpetuate the war in Iraq, and all wars.

Being “with” the troops is not the same as honoring them. If I spent time with those Marines while they rousted cowering children from their beds at 4 a.m., I feel certain I would not admire or — of all things — envy them.

Part of me pities them. Does that sound patronizing? Read Walt Whitman’s accounts of the Civil War — far more visceral frontline reportage than anything Wolf Blitzer could accomplish with a full camera crew. It is a combination of admiration, gratitude and, yes, pity: ?”. . . all the men with this coating of murk and sweat and rain, now recoiling back, pouring over the Long Bridge — a horrible march of twenty miles, returning to Washington baffled, humiliated, panic-struck. Where are the vaunts, and the proud boasts with which you were sent forth? Where are your banners, and your bands of music, and your ropes to bring back your prisoners? Well, there isn’t a band playing and there isn’t a flag but clings ashamed and lank to its staff.”

Pity was a fine form of sympathy for the hordes of working-class boys whose blood was siphoned into the collapsing veins of Europe’s dying empires during World War I. And now, another dying empire chews the flesh of its own. Last month a Manhattan gallery exhibited Nina Berman’s photos of wounded Iraq vets, taken in 2003. One of her subjects has no legs, one no face or ears; several have no expressions on the faces they have left. The pictures recall Otto Dix’s drawings of hideously stitched-together World War I soldiers. Back then the chronic nightmare these survivors suffered was called “shell shock.” Now it’s “post-traumatic stress disorder.” But in both sets of images, even the men decorated with medals look less like heroes than victims.

There’s a difference, though, between World War I (and Vietnam) and the Iraq war. Then, the cannon fodder was drafted. Today’s fighters volunteer. In fact, it is this distinction that inspires the most admiration in those who admire the troops. To me, it’s the troubling part: They did not make the policy, they might not even understand the policy — who does, really? — but they have chosen to give their lives to it. There are other ways to serve your country, other ways to learn to fly a plane or earn a college scholarship. These men and women are not responsible for the war, but they are responsible for their part in it — even if they are only following orders. They have volunteered to follow orders.

There are some troops I admire: those who may have been duped into volunteering, joined the National Guard expecting to help in natural disasters, or even excitedly anticipated the adventure of battle, but who wake up in Baghdad or Falluja one morning and realize the whole thing is a crock and a crime — then desert or refuse another tour, or pour themselves into protesting the war. These are Rush Limbaugh’s “phony soldiers.” They are heroes to me.

I look at those Berman pictures and fervently wish our women and men in uniform to return home with limbs and sanity intact. But this wish does not translate into endorsing the values written in their sacrifice. Far from it: Their sacrifice is an obscene waste.

This article originally appeared in Seven Days.