Exploits destructive myths about the American Secession

Rating: Null/10 (29 June 2000)

One might hope that two centuries after the United States seceded from the United Kingdom, its society would be sufficiently intellectually mature and secure enough with its position in the world not to wallow in the puerile and ridiculous mythology of its founding. Particularly because so much of this mythology serves to justify the violent anti-social tendencies that hamper the effectiveness of government and produce so much misery throughout the country today, it would be constructive for Americans to learn the historical reality of the 1770's. Instead, Sony Pictures chooses to trade on our ignorance and delusion with "The Patriot", attempting to make a quick buck by releasing a sloppy mess of lies and warmed-over two-hundred-year-old propaganda to stir up the most brutish feelings of blind jingoism. That the film contributes to the unthinking demonization of the English which Hollywood in general and Mel Gibson in particular are so inexplicably keen to beat into the American consciousness becomes a mere footnote to an epic of lazy stupidity.
Anyone whose understanding of the American Secession has progressed beyond "Schoolhouse Rock" ditties into the high school classroom knows that the "taxation without representation" and "inalienable rights" rhetoric used by the traitors was a smokescreen which the frustrated colonial elites fulminated to mask their otherwise naked grab for the political positions which would allow them to wring their own spoils from political sinecures. With the possible exception of Tom Paine, none of the Founding Fathers of the United States was a revolutionary with any sincere interests in the rights of man. No dead horse of American history has been flogged harder than that of the rank hypocrisy exhibited by those men who instigated riots, terrorism, and cop-killings on the simon-pure justification that people ought to be free to govern themselves - men who turned around to ordain and establish a form of government of, by, and for property holders; a government which was immediately, specifically, and continually construed as powerless to protect the rights of its citizens from whatever infringements state governments might see fit to impose; a government whose defining document famously spends three paragraphs on the administrative niceties of slavery. The fatuous malarky Gibson's character spews in the trailers about being rankled by unfair taxes and harms to his liberty ought to have been made suspect, if not finally put to bed, by the work of Charles and Mary Beard eighty years ago.
More disturbing and dangerous is the film's treatment of the colonial militias. Again, the commercial hype makes it clear that this movie will toe the conventional, fairy-tale line that local militias of yeoman farmers defending their property from sadistic Redcoats won the Revolution with privately owned muskets, amateur soldiery, and righteous pluck. Already, the forgettable cipher who reviewed the movie with Roger Ebert on national television gushed boneheadedly on how the film taught her about the new style of guerilla warfare pioneered by the American rebels. But in truth the militias were untrained, unequipped, undisciplined agglomerations of conscripts and mercenaries who not only tended to bolt after receiving their signing bonuses, but actually got in the way of the Continental Army. Garry Wills recently summarized numerous historical sources to conclude that the most that can be said for the militias is that they effectively oppressed blacks, Indians, and Loyalists away from the front lines. It's too bad that his useful and enlightening scholarship will be overwhelmed by irresponsible Hollywood make-believe. It's even more unfortunate that this bit of hack fiction glorifies and sentimentalizes a group that served as thought police and goon squad. It's worrisome that it perpetuates popular misunderstanding of the merits of an organized army relative to bunches of local hotheads with guns. And most of all, it's downright irresponsible and hazardous to succour the addled paranoiacs of the modern militia movements with utterly false representations of history. Their political fantasias regarding private ownership of weapons, hostility to the police, and rejection of civil society are quite twisted and lunatic enough in themselves without potboiler smut that conflates patriotism with treason getting dished out as an inspiring story of heroism. Sony should be ashamed of itself for investing millions of dollars in a maudlin, meretricious, two-hour-plus incitement to riot.