Sarah Palin comes right out and says she believes in American Exceptional ism. An exceptionalism obviously rooted in her religious beliefs. Is this who America is?
On the other hand McCains other henchperson Phil Gramm, says no, we are not exceptional, in fact we are a nation of whiners.
I thought we were supposed to be rugged individualists, conquering the British, then homesteading the West, while inventing the lightbulb in our garages, or something.
Who are we?
It seems to me that for the last eight years we have been some combination of sheep and a mushroom. Kept in the dark and fed bullshit while blindly following the lead of the Worst President Ever and worshiping the new American God….greed.
We are to my eye, a nation confused by some serious bullshit artists. They have pulled and yanked on and manipulated every myth and meme of America for their own nefarious ends. Subtituting torture and war and hate for true “American Values.”
Who are we?
We are no longer an nation of small farmers out on the prairie. We are no longer a nation of engineers and scientists. We are no longer a nation of innovative small entrepreneurs. The American small business is under attack by Big Box stores. Nearly all of our industrial and manufacturing jobs are gone. Hell we have lost over a million jobs just this year. Are we now just a nation of brokers and barristas?
Right now we are watching the previously undefeatable (in myth) Super Power of America lose two wars while our economy, our newly replaced, artificial paper economy crash and burn before our eyes.
Who are we?
Through the expertly manipulated fear and terror of post 9/11 America, through the Gordon Gecko like adoration of greed, we have been turned into that which serves the plutocrats. A nation of placid consumers doing and buying what we are told. Consumers of bread and circuses and convinced that we no longer have a say in the system. We have given up our government and all that we previously stood for to charlatans and snake oil salesmen …who have NO concern over our concerns. We The People have become irrelevant, as far as they are concerned. We are now only a constituency every four years when they need us to vote them back into power to serve their real masters. The MIC and their spawn, the corporate monoliths. We see THEIR agenda in the tanking economy, loot pillage and then get bailed out.
Who are we and how do we act, now?
We have no myths left to draw on, no story left to relate to, no enduring national identity.
It is time to reinvent America, it is time to make America back. It is time to rediscover the fighting spirit that USED to mark us. Not fighting foreign wars, not conquering nature. Fighting here at home, fighting to take our country back, fighting to make a new America and re-establish the best of America. Fighting to re-found our country and redefine our values. What we stand for. What we stand against.
Who we are.
It is time to, as our new populist leader takes office, take a stand against the plutocrats, the warmongers, the despoilers of the earth, the authoritarians. It is time, finally, to realize the promise of America. It is time finally to make this country into what it was supposed to be all along.
Liberty Equality and Justice for ALL.
67 comments
Skip to comment form
Author
When you ain’t got nothing, you got nothing to lose.
If I only had a dollar, for ev’ry song I’ve sung.
Ev’ry time I’ve had to play while people sat there drunk.
You know I’d catch the next train back to where I live.
Is Bob talking about America now?:
And is that–actually–a song of liberation??
Civil War America. We weren’t a superpower then, we had just come out of the civil war, the left had splintered over the wording of the 14th amendment, reconstruction was failing…people of good will were even defending segregated schools as a way of keeping African Americans safe from the mobs.
There’s been some important changes in this country, but we’re in a post-Cold War, nether-period right now.
Wishing doesn’t make it so.
As you know, I’m trying to attack the notion that we are, in fact, a “we”. I know that gets in the way of polemic, and of collective action. But “we” aren’t really anything. There are plenty of engineers and scientists still among us. There are thousands of small businesses which are not threatened by big box stores – indeed, the rise of Starbucks has led to a documented increase in the success of independent coffee shops.
This is true:
It is one of the best sentences you have written, IMHO. But it was always so, and our recognizing it is a good thing. Fuck myths and stories. What is the value of an enduring national identity? What is so wrong about just being ourselves? Why ought we seek new myths and stories to tie ourselves to? Why must we fear our liberation from the bullshit of the past?
We will never have common purpose, buhdy. We will never be able to agree on even the meaning of “equality”, much less what it means to provide it “for all”. And if you and I cannot achieve that, what is the realistic potential for either of us to achieve that with 300 million other people? And more to the point, why bother?
you have to hate each other.
Who aren’t we?
…I’ve been researching that today…tracing my mathematical genealogy back as far as I can go. So far I am back to William of Ockham in the 1300s, though we’ve left mathemtics far behind about 3 centuries before that and ended up traversing mystical theology.
http://www.globalresearch.ca/i…
The problem with the American experiment is that it is a nation built on the idea of “a people” rather than the reality of a people. What I mean by that is, you go to Italy, for example, and for the most part, it’s populated by Italians. Go to Germany and it’s populated, mostly, by Germans. Spain, mostly by Spaniards. I’m simplifying, of course, and thinking in terms of long-term (many generations) inhabitants rather than relatively recent immigrants. So their “tribe,” so to speak, is “Italian,” “German,” “Spanish”, etc. (Interestingly, this concept is not the case in France. I’ve driven through France several times, and thanks to expansion and acquisition, there are people within the borders of France who are from other “tribes.” Anywhere east of Aix-en-Provence, the people are Italians (they still call Nice “Nizza”), anywhere west of Arles they are Spanish (from the defunct Hispanic kingdom of Catalan). In Alsace, they’re German, and speak French with a delightful German accent. In Brittany, they’re genetically identical to the Welsh. But I digress.) But my point is this: these nations have an actual national identity that gives them their tribal definition. In America, we are all immigrants, so our “tribal” definition is based on the “idea of America.”
And when that “idea of America” starts to implode, as it has in recent years, and we no longer think of ourselves as “one nation” (under God or not), then we are pulled by centrifugal forces into odd new “tribal” configurations that are not based on genetics or race or a millenium of shared culture, the way it would be in Europe or Asia. Without an unwavering belief in the “idea of America,” we Americans quite simply don’t know what we are.
i am not educated, i am not a scientist, i a blue-collar worker who, like many others, reads and revers Joseph Campbell. i love story. i love clean lines.
five years ago, i was on this idea of a new narrative like a … (fill in favorite Sarah Palin platitute here). from my particular perch in the world, rural red america, it was clear (to me) that pursuit of alternative energies was the narrative thread that had a chance to pull red and blue and purple together.
i ran out of metaphors to describe what seemed to clear to me at the time…
r&d, new university programs, agriculture and industry, manufacturing plants, all circling around a local (ie, ‘tribe’) source of energy. jobs, education, health insurance by default, local environments, a renewed concern for land and the effects of pollution. national security is a given.
something that could unite the “America Firsters!” and the Tree Huggers.
but, i couldn’t make the case. i know many here aren’t big fans of John Kerry, but i was at the time. i thought the John Kerry of 2003-4 was the John Kerry of 1972. a warrior who came home to fight for peace, which i thought was another piece to the story.
alas. it wasn’t a clean line. i couldn’t sell the narrative. and in all truth, it’s probably always going to be messy, a little here, a little there, half a pint, etc. and ‘we’ will, or we won’t, stumble forward.
That’s the only myth I can think of. The “exceptionalism” myth is a method of manipulation and control used by an international elite whose Empire has replaced the United States as the dominant power. We are a conquered nation–that would be the right myth I think.