But
beginning with John Winthrop’s primary formulation in Puritan New
England. Begun as a place where Church of England deviants could
practice their religion free of British royal interference, those
very freedom fighters rejected Roger Williams’ variant by kicking
him out of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. A very strange way to
support religious freedom! Not to forget that the same Puritans also
inaugurated the suppression of the native Amerinds. An ominous
foreshadowing of the equally egregious behavior of the next
century—the establishment of black slavery in the cotton growing
Southern states. Using a religious metaphor, you might even conclude
that these were two American “original sins”. Alas, two of our
beloved Founding Fathers, Washington and Jefferson, were
slaveholders. Indeed, the “more thoughtful” of the two even had a
black mistress! No wonder that Americans are, you might say,
constitutionally confused about their moral behavior.
That
moral confusion is even deeper in contemporary America: 2 million
prisoners, mainly poor and too often black. Far more than any other
country in the world. “Justice for all?” consider the tacky CV of
George W. Bush: DUI as a teenager, unpunished; AWOL during the
Vietnam War, even though ordinary citizens paid a million dollars to
train him to be a pilot in the so-called Champaign Squadron
(so-called, because it was designed to give the sons of the rich and
powerful a pass on the real war);a serial bankrupt in the oil
business in Texas, until he betrayed his investors the fourth time by
insider trading, with a mere semantic SEC slap on his now rich wrist!
How
could God’s America elect such a moral moron to be President? He
even used his loot to become a baseball millionaire, with the City of
Arlington picking up the tab for the new stadium! And our jails are
now full of young blacks who sold drugs to the very suburban whites
like Bush 42 who drugged with impunity! To cut brush on his spread in
Crawford. How can we been complacent about such injustice. A main
reason is the nefarious influence of American Exceptionalist
rhetoric.
And
our official injustice didn’t stop at our shores. The myth that
America is not imperial is as vicious as our sad history of
mistreating Indians and black slaves. As soon as trade in the Pacific
grew attractive, our naval vessels brought American soldiers and
entrepeneurs to eventually take over Hawaii. Mark Twain and William Dean Howells complained bitterly about the hypocrisy involved—to no
avail! In the next generation after the Filipinos defeated Spain, we
muscled in and beat the indigines.
Ditto,
the next century with Woodrow Wilson (the Virginia racist who headed
Princeton) sent the Marines into the Caribbean to rule as many of
their roosts as possible! (That’s the Wilson who tried to make
Europe safe for democracy, while he put our first great labor union
organizer, Eugene Victor Debs, in federal prison for ten years! Why?
Because he was a pacifist, like Wilson until 1917!) We blather every
Fourth of July about the likes of Wilson, when he betrayed our better
ideals with his belated Virginia First ideology. These tacky
contradictions makes US liable to the Exceptionalist scorn of
non-Americans.
If
we really want to live up to our best ideals (I do!), we must purge
the Exceptionalist rhetoric which has thrived because it pretended to
excuse (or ignore) our Original Sins of Indian suppression and black
slavery. Actually, America has had great opportunities. We have been
exceptionally sinful. If we ever shape up, we could retrieve the
pseudo-ideals and turn them to real idealistic behavior.
That change
won’t be easy. But without positive change, we run the probable
risk of disintegrating. Just look today at the travesty of our
Congress. Its manifest failures mainly derive by lying to ourselves
about our confused past. That is the true tragedy of a country that
allows Rush Limbaugh and his ilk to be our unofficial historian. An
Exceptional blunder!
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