Tyler and Chris Argue, Part 2

Tyler responded to the Rogers story with this comment on the Facebook note:

The real issue here has absolutely nothing to do with patriotism, except that the restaurant owner chose that as his method of attack. The man should not have felt patriotic, but proud that he stood up for a woman's rights. Instead, he jumped on the bandwagon and decided he was a patriot for following his restaurant owner to somebody's table while the owner did something to ACTUALLY be proud of. This guy's agenda is not defending the woman, but putting down a Saudi. And that, my friend, while being patriotic in a juvenile sense, is hurting our country. He's not standing up for our beliefs, but targeting another's. There's an important difference, and this is the kind of ignorant generic hate story that lets people go on believing that there is something fundamentally wrong with these people who live in another part of the world, and not just the individual man who "play[s] grab-ass."

I answered back:

The story isn’t about sexism. It’s about privilege. Rogers' bandwagoning aside, "putting down" the Saudi and defending the woman are inseparable acts. The prince's sexual harassment is an intrinsically illegitimate assertion of power, a false inflation of his rights such that they conflict with the rights of someone else. Bringing the Saudi down deflates the superiority he temporarily assumed and puts the waitress back on equal footing. When the owner tells the Saudi that in America he's the prince of absolutely nobody, he's not attacking the prince personally - he's attacking the legitimacy of the notion of special privileges for royalty.

Of course there's nothing inherently wrong with people on the other side of the world, but there is something wrong with the culture that celebrates inborn privileges. The Saudi is a product of that culture, which is why the prince’s lackey didn’t feel the need to justify the harassment, just point out how important his boss was. Actually, to criticize his ass-grabbing acknowledges that there’s nothing wrong with him, just with his actions - critique assumes he has the ability either to justify himself or change his ways. Standing up for “our” beliefs entails rejecting “his” because they necessarily conflict – there’s simply no way to reconcile divine rights with the right of a poor peasant to not be crudely pestered by a royal playboy.

I humbly propose that this is not an “ignorant generic hate story” (quite surprised, by the way, that you earnestly seem to think I would sink to propagating hatred instead of making a real point) that weakens us. This is a tiny example of “modernity” – the process of critique of the old social world, a process that makes the modern world so comparatively better to live in. In this sense, the U.S. has historically been the most “modern” society in the world. American patriotism, therefore, is distinctively cosmopolitan – less about national loyalty (in which case it would be appropriate to “defend” our beliefs while leaving the Saudi’s alone) than about helping to fulfill a unique historical mission. Though I’ll concede we have to be vigilant against chauvinism and hatred, incidents and stories like these strengthen us.