Politics & Power Quote by Virgil Goode

Patriotism, in Virgil Goode's framing, starts as a relief story: two centuries of luck, a homeland mostly untouched. That opening gesture sounds generous and unifying, but it also quietly primes the listener for a pivot politicians love: if safety is a “fortunate” exception, then fear can be treated as the rational baseline the moment anything breaks the pattern.

The line is doing two things at once. It flatters the national self-image of geographic insulation and historical exceptionalism, while also narrowing what counts as “attack.” “Homeland” is a loaded filter; it brackets out violence that happened off the continental map (wars fought abroad), violence that didn’t look like foreign invasion (political assassination, domestic terrorism), and even violence that targeted specific communities rather than the “nation” as a single body. The effect is to present vulnerability as newly discovered and therefore politically actionable.

The deliberate vagueness of “attacks” and the shrugging cadence of “200 some odd years” make the claim sound like common sense rather than an argument. That’s useful in the post-9/11 rhetorical environment, when “rarely attacked” became a prelude to justifying extraordinary responses: tighter borders, expanded surveillance, a more militarized posture at home and abroad. Goode’s sentence isn’t a history lesson; it’s a scene-setting device. It establishes innocence, then implies a fall from grace, inviting the audience to accept sharper policies as the price of preserving a long, supposedly natural calm.