Back in the early 80’s, my father ran an ad agency in my home town of Rochester, NY. During one of my college summers he asked me to entertain one of his interns, an exchange student from Germany. So, I showed the guy around town, took him to movies and nightclubs, drove him down to Ithaca for a tour of Cornell, the whole upstate experience.
I thought I’d give him a good dose of Americana by taking him to a Rochester Red Wings game, which is our minor league AAA baseball team. Once we had found our seats and I was trying to explain how baseball works in less than 10 minutes, the announcement for the National Anthem came over the PA system.
I’ll never forget the confused look on his face when everybody stopped talking and stood up for the Anthem. Once it was over and everybody sat back down, he said “What was all that about?” I told him that before most major sporting events, we played the Anthem out of respect for the country and a sense of unity.
He started shaking his head and looked down. “No, that would never happen in Germany. Way too nationalistic. We learned the hard way how dangerous that is.” It really surprised me; I had never considered that point of view before. He wasn’t being mocking or nasty at all; he had loved every minute of what he had experienced in his trip, so much so it genuinely shocked him to see what he considered to be a complete departure from our national character.
He went on to say “Besides, both these teams are from the US. We only do that for international competitions like the World Cup and the Olympics.” I couldn’t argue with that logic either. Hockey was the only sport Cornell was consistently good at, mostly because our team was stocked almost entirely with Canadians. So, before each game we sang both the Canadian and American Anthems. Makes perfect sense; it was a gesture of gratitude to them for enabling us to kick Harvard’s ass once in a while.
That summery baseball exchange has stuck with me for the past 30 years, so I was immediately reminded of it over this past weekend. That kid had it right the first time. A country this great should indeed be proud of itself, but there’s a difference between pride and narcissism. Everything else he had seen that summer was living proof of a great country: an openness that welcomed a young foreigner and encouraged him move about freely, a job at a company that was doing interesting work, and people who wanted to go out of their way to show him a good time and to share what our home was all about. That should be enough to prove our greatness, and for him, it was.
I work on brand strategy for a living, and all too often clients want to fast-forward to the appearance of a positive brand image, and skip past enabling the performance that would actually create that perception on its own. I'm the guy whose job it is to tell a client that they're not living up to their self-image. It rarely goes over well until I show them the data that confirms it. I treat the response to this news as a sort of corporate character test: the strong ones wince but act on it; the weak ones go into denial and expend even more effort to explain it away.
The American flag, beautiful as it is, is really only the logo for our brand as a culture. It’s meaningless without the substance it’s supposed to represent. You can’t demand a public acknowledgement of greatness without a day-in, day-out commitment to justice to back it up.
Pride is built on an a foundation of earned confidence through accomplishment; narcissism can look like pride, but it's really just a constant, gnawing fear of being exposed as inadequate or weak. That difference completely explains the behavior of our noxious President and his idiotic, un-American complaints about football players kneeling for the Anthem. The data is on the side of the people kneeling.
It’s a lot more work to earn enthusiasm than to require the expression of it. Only lousy products try to advertise their way to success. I really believe we're better than that.