``Mainly you lose me here, Chuck...'' (jks)
That's probably because you are too even tempered and rational. I am not. So I'll try a slightly more rational approach.
I live in a world of at least dual aspect (logos, eros), one of rather blah sights and sounds, and the trivial interactions of everydayness: people at work, cops writing tickets, paperwork, rules and regulations, figuring out mechanical and electrical failures and fixing them. The other world, that of eros is completely limitless and has very few material referents. It is supercharged with dramatic and emotive meanings, signs, symbols, sensations, images. This interior world of imagination and its passions have been endlessly commodified by mass media where most of my information about the world that I can not see and experience directly is presented to me. It thus charges every image, every piece of information with some emotive aspect, some shading or nuance intended to illicit an emotive response.
I refer to this supercharged world of imagination (eros) as a mythic envelop, since it has a kind of totalizing perception that works as an active filtering system that re-configures the blah world of everydayness and gives to it, its meanings. These are of course merely representations to the rational mind, logos, and nothing to become too upset about. A picture is just a picture, a cigar is just a cigar.
Most people are completely aware of this division however they characterize it, and usually go on about their lives without playing much attention. They (I, we) consider the mythical world of representations they experience as merely an adjunct, a piece of entertainment that is given heightened expression by movies, concerts, tv, sometimes books. On the other hand, we are also ceaselessly reminded that our economic system uses this mythic aspect of mind through advertising and propaganda to sell us the latest big deal in computers or whatever---but mostly to propagandize itself as the very heart, mind and soul of everything human (the ideology of capital and Empire). And we are aware that the news and political pronouncements are selling us their version of what is happening in the world, and selling us what we should be thinking is right and wrong about these events.
To the rational mind, logos, none of this mythic world is particularly compelling, until something traumatic happens, something that disturbs the balance, then Psyche is seduced by Eros. That is, suddenly the mythical world takes over the mind almost completely. We are plunged into this imaginary storm tossed sea where everything becomes supercharged with emotive reactions and is filled with portend and meaning.
In order to maintain the dramatic unity, erotic tension, and domination of this imaginary world, it is essential that no part of it or its audience resists or betrays the illusion, violates its thematic consistency. It is living theater and what is usually referred as patriotism is used as the means of identification, to evoke sympathy with the unfolding dramatic action. If we are at war with Eurasia, I am at war with Eurasia! To be patriotic is both to sustain and to be part of the drama.
Now I could say, not in my name, and pretend to be the reticent Psyche. But I could say this, if I were only logos, as if my name could only comprehend the rational, considered, and clear headed aspect. But I am not the calm and reticent Psyche.
There was a reason I went into art and not philosophy or science. Perhaps it was too much sugar and comix, and then perhaps I devoured these because the balance was already disturbed.
You asked, what about Louis' USA?
The practical answer is that world, the one that I have fabricated as my mythical America---where all the progressive histories live, where the complex themes of the French Revolution were interwoven with America, where the abolitionists, and Thoreau, Melville, Crane, the WPA painters, the Lincoln Brigade, Abstract Expressionism live---all of that is so far off the registers of most people I know, that I can not even refer to it as America, because they've never heard of it and it makes no sense to them. About the only universally recognized aspect of that world that might exist in the public imagination is jazz as you suggest. But for me, it is only very particular styles of jazz---actually the least popular ones---the hard, scratchy, badly recorded early Bebop and then the later just over the edge Davis and Coltrain. In other words, the very stuff, most people dismiss as incomprehensible noise.
The truth is that I discovered that America and re-traced it, re-constructed it, because it followed a universal theme: an attack on the orderliness, propriety, and stayed complacency (the whiteness) of the bourgeoisie. It was composed of all the creative and romantic American reactions I could find. I could hardly expect it to be embraced as patriotism, now, in the mist of this rightwing puritanical mortification of mind and spirit, sold as the all american way of life, and the only true patriotism. Better to express it as the ultimate anti-patriotism.
Chuck Grimes