The Delivery and Contrast of Patriotism

The two main types of patriotism:

• patriotized history
• patriotized morality

The Sameness of Different Texts

Every patriotic text has six key characteristics; we call these its six diagram elements. We find that within three of these six diagram element categories, there is a great deal of commonness between different texts; the same patriotic core components, the same techniques, and the same patriotic changes tend to be found in text after text.

Delivery and Contrast Diagrams

The vertical dimension of the diagram is the delivery dimension.

• The patriotic core is what we call the set of supreme fixed ideas that all patriotic messages support. It does not change over the decades. The core consists of five myths and one preference. Each of the five myths is a false description of what the US does and doesn't do in the world. The preference is simply a preference for the US. The core always stays the same regardless of what time or place is being talked about. Every patriotic text ultimately conveys one or more of the components of the core.
• The patriotic message is the specific meaning that viewers or listeners get when they see or hear a text. Sometimes it paints a picture of a particular event, or removes the event entirely. Sometimes it expresses support for the US regarding the event. Often a text conveys more than one patriotic message.
• The technique is the technique used by a text to convey its patriotic message. This is often a linguistic mechanism or rhetorical device that makes the recipient's mind more willing to accept the message than it would ordinarily be. There is a small set of techniques that tend to get used over and over in many different texts.
• The text is written or spoken words, pictures, or other objects that people can see or hear.

These four diagram elements are linked in a chain of patriotic meaning delivery. The text uses the technique to convey the patriotic message that supports the patriotic core.

The horizontal dimension of the diagram is the contrast dimension.

• The patriotic message on the left is patriotic because it supports the patriotic core. The patriotic message is paired with a sharply contrasting unpatriotized element on the right.
• The unpatriotized element on the right has not been changed to fit the patriotic core. It is what would have been said about the event in an ordinary, unpatriotized environment.
• The modification that is required to convert the unpatriotized element into the patriotic message is called the patriotic change. There is a small set of patriotic changes that are made over and over in many different texts.

Two different types of patriotism

• We discuss two main types of patriotism: patriotized history and patriotized morality.
• Patriotized history creates a false version of historical events; it paints a picture of what happened in the world, and that picture is different from what really happened. It always conveys one of the patriotic core's five core myths.
• Patriotized morality does not describe historical events. Instead, it expresses a moral preference for (or identity with) the US, thus conveying the patriotic core's one core position: pro-US.
• Click on either of the two links on the left under the diagram to go down into the analysis sections for either type. In these sections we provide lists of the items from within each diagram element category that are found over and over in a wide variety of different texts. For each item we provide excerpts of texts (mostly news articles) that exemplify it, with each textual example analyzed using a diagram.