Patriotism has picked up a bad reputation lately. It’s associated with jingoism, right wing causes, and efforts to whitewash the bad parts of American history. Meanwhile wokeness has promoted the view that Americans have nothing to be proud of, since this is a country founded on the principles of racism and settler colonialism.
But, as Rich Cohen points out in this essay from the Wall Street Journal, Bill Murray’s character in the film Stripes offers us an alternative take on patriotism that is neither triumphalist nor shamefaced. Here’s how Murray puts it:
“We’re not Watusi,” Murray tells his fellow grunts in a moment of disunity and crisis. “We’re not Spartans. We’re Americans, with a capital ‘A,’ huh? You know what that means? Do ya? That means that our forefathers were kicked out of every decent country in the world. We are the wretched refuse. We’re the underdog. We’re mutts!…But there’s no animal that’s more faithful, that’s more loyal, more lovable than the mutt.”
I love this take on patriotism. Gotta see that movie again.
The Patriotic Wisdom of Bill Murray’s Silly Speech in ‘Stripes’
Rich Cohen
Remember how Winston Churchill used his matchless voice to lead his countrymen through the Battle of Britain in World War II? Well, Bill Murray, playing the most improbable sort of military hero, did the same for millions of us with his brilliant comic speech in “Stripes” during the last decade of the Cold War.
Released in 1981, “Stripes” is the story of a burnout named John Winger who, seeking direction, joins the Army. It was the first summer after the election of Ronald Reagan, whose campaign had been powered by the eerily familiar slogan, “Let’s Make America Great Again!” It was a time of high inflation, simmering tension with a communist rival and deep polarization in our politics.
In other words, a moment much like our own, which might explain why Murray’s speech still speaks so powerfully to my own teenage kids. I can’t think of a better statement of what ails us and what still makes America and Americans exceptional.
“We’re not Watusi,” Murray tells his fellow grunts in a moment of disunity and crisis. “We’re not Spartans. We’re Americans, with a capital ‘A,’ huh? You know what that means? Do ya? That means that our forefathers were kicked out of every decent country in the world. We are the wretched refuse. We’re the underdog. We’re mutts!…But there’s no animal that’s more faithful, that’s more loyal, more lovable than the mutt.”
Murray played it for laughs, and it was funny, but it was serious too. It celebrates our tolerance, stick-to-it-ness and ethnic jumble. It’s John Winthrop’s City on a Hill remade in the shadow of “Saturday Night Live.” I rank it with FDR’s First Inaugural and Lincoln at Gettysburg. It’s the speech we need today.
I was 12 that summer and went to see “Stripes,” which was rated R, late on a weeknight with my older brother and his friends. It gave the outing the thrill of the illicit. Nothing can affect a boy of 12 like a vision of the world when he’s supposed to be home in bed.
I was a Murray fan from the first. He’d grown up in Wilmette, Ill., just down Lake Michigan from my own town, Glencoe. A breakout star on the 1977 SNL season, he’d captured the vibe of the coolest counselor at every summer camp in “Meatballs” (1979) and turned himself into Carl, the addled, gopher-obsessed groundskeeper and guru, in “Caddyshack” (1980).
“Stripes” was his next career step, the role in which Murray emerged as an archetype. Our fathers had Gary Cooper—the gun fighter, the cowboy, the beleaguered marshal facing down the outlaws by himself on the dirt streets of a frontier town. We had Bill Murray—the wiseass, the suburban class clown injured by adulthood, using sarcasm as his crutch. He provided a survival strategy for the age of Brezhnev. You could wear his pose to keep Armageddon out of mind.
I remember sitting in that cool theater on a summer night, sandwiched between my brother and his friends, laughing so hard I thought I might die. In “Stripes,” Murray is just like Humphrey Bogart in “Casablanca.” Only funnier. Bogie, who’d seemingly quit the fight against the Nazis, had just been waiting for the right moment to act, even if he didn’t know it. Same in “Stripes.” Murray had been going through basic training like a Bizarro Buddha—detached, operating at an icy remove—when the moment came and the commitment was made.
“So we’re all dogfaces,” he goes on to tell his comrades. “We’re all very, very different, but there is one thing that we all have in common: We were all stupid enough to enlist in the Army…. There’s something wrong with us, something very, very wrong with us. Something seriously wrong with us: We’re soldiers. But we’re American soldiers! We’ve been kicking ass for 200 years! We’re 10 and one!”
As they stand around in a military shed, completely unprepared for the drill they’re expected to perform on the parade ground in a few hours, he says, “Now we don’t have to worry about whether or not we practiced. We don’t have to worry about whether Captain Stillman wants to have us hung. All we have to do is to be the great American fighting soldier that is inside each one of us. Now do what I do, and say what I say. And make me proud.”
Murray (left) in a stand-off with his drill sergeant (Warren Oates) in ‘Stripes.’ Photo: Columbia Pictures/Everett Collection
And they triumph, of course, in a performance of comic razzle-dazzle that I’m sure I’ve watched roughly a million times.
This silly speech in a silly movie expressed a powerful truth. The Germans of World War II were all the same because they were all the same. We are all the same because we are all different. Which means those differences don’t really matter. Our ancestors came to this country to leave all that B.S. behind. It was the American creed rephrased in the vernacular. It was beautiful.
Only later did I fully appreciate that Murray, along with screenwriters Harold Ramis and Len Blum, had given us a great gift: a way to love our country without feeling gullible, sentimental or corny.
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