Cry the Beloved Country

In the past few days, I must have read over 50 articles on the present political situation.  The Republicans either made an extraordinarily astute strategic choice with Sarah Palin, or a huge tactical blunder, because if  my circle of frantic emailers and I are any indication, millions of us are galvanized for Obama like never before.

But it is exhausting. I am deeply angry at once again facing the prospect of being led by people who want to wield power but have no interest in governing well, who hold out the very idea of government as something "they" are doing to "us" instead of the purest expression of democracy.  "We the people" read the first three words of the Constitution. The government is not a collection of faceless bureaucrats imposed on us from without who care about nothing but trying to control our lives, they are men and women doing jobs that are mostly necessary to the well-being of us all.  I don't know about you, but I like my roads paved, I want my teachers paid, I believe in Social Security and Medicare and courts and police and yes, even a strong defense. But 761 bases across the world-YES, 761--is not defense, it's empire.  It is draining our treasury and corrupting our warriors and feeding the giant parasite of the military-industrial complex so that we can keep declaiming the absurd propaganda that "we are the greatest country in the world."

What the hell does that mean? How is one land better than another, one people nicer, smarter, more kind?  Do these "patriots" feel so insecure that they can only feel better about themselves by internalizing a descriptive that makes us superior to others? If these people consider themselves Americans rather than citizens of the world, then can I ask what planet they are living on?

Sarah Palin just got a passport last year; and John McCain still can't pronounce Vietnam correctly.   It is clear as day to me that in that dank prison cell long ago he vowed to himself that his suffering would not be in vain, and when we lost that war--justly so--he embarked on a lifelong hunt for some sort of war to win that would somehow redeem his torture. Maybe he just should have apologized to the Vietnamese people for blindly serving an unjust cause he never questioned merely because in his world, it was and always would be, "my country right or wrong." 

We didn't invent such an inane sentiment, it has been passed down from empire to empire, from nation to nation, leading to a first World War in which millions died just to prove their country was the "greatest" ever, to a second where the loser wrought untold havoc because it couldn't bear having lost that first time.  Now that they finally seemed to have learned their lessons, the Europeans prosper in a relative peace, and somehow still get held up to ridicule by Giuliani because they're, well, European. They don't all carry guns there, don't all believe that Jesus Christ is their personal Lord and Savior and no one goes bankrupt because they can't pay their medical bills. Heathens.

I just don't get people who want the right to execute a rapist but would force the mother he raped to bear the child produced by that crime.  I don't get people who think it's all right for Americans to bomb Iran but have no curiosity as to why we are so disliked in the world that we are the target of terrorism in the first place.  (Who can understand what people are like who don't speak English, after all?)  I don't get people who think men who love each are somehow unholy but men who kill and even torture are thought to be doing "God's work.". 

I can only take comfort in looking at the grand sweep of history and hope that if the Berliners and Parisians who engaged in mutual carnage 70 years ago are now closer to each other than the current residents of San Francisco and Fort Worth, that maybe in several years these States might truly be United again.  I pray for a country that feels no need to puff itself up, to "kick ass," to have more, to consume endlessly, and to refuse to take responsibility for its part in any of the world's problems.

As someone who does speak some foreign languages and has lived abroad, I will tell you this about Americans.  In general, we are more friendly than not, less pretentious as a people than most, and our class distinctions are fairly fluid.   But we can be rather more boorish, xenophobic, and downright anti-intellectual than most, too. Neither set of traits make us much better or worse than other people; like the odd English we speak, it's just the closest we come to a national identity. 

Isn't it high time we dropped the sense of exceptionalism that we use to set us apart and above from the rest of humanity?

MCO 2008