“When exactly was the United States of America a moral
nation? When it interred a million Asians? When it only went to war against the
Nazis because it had been bombed? Or perhaps it was in our golden days, when it
was slaughtering natives and receiving shipments of blacks to pick cotton. We
didn’t go to war for moral reasons. We went to war because we wanted Texas, or didn’t want Spain
interfering with our interference in Cuba, and the newspapers were right
there toadying. Benjamin Franklin was the first great American op-ed writer and
he was such a stooge for the establishment they almost let him write the
Constitution.
“This illusion! This illusion you have that the American
public was ever informed. There was more than a century when the only reliable
way to get a presidential candidate’s platform was if he happened to visit your
town. And the Founding Fathers knew people were ignorant and never expected
better from them, and so while they enshrined freedom of the press, they also
institutionalized the Electoral College for Congress and a Presidency – a
private crop of people who would select another private crop of people to decide
everything while most of the country tried to survive the flu. Maybe, maybe the
second private crop of people decided things for moral reasons, or maybe they
fed into a Military Industrial Complex that Lyndon Johnson warned the entire
country of live on television and still no one did anything meaningful about.
“So tell me when America knew what it was doing. Was
it when we were scalping the natives for government credit? Was it when we were
enslaving anyone even descended from an African? Was it when we dropped an
atomic bomb on private citizens? When did we qualify as the greatest country in
the world, who is the greatest country in the world now, and why on earth would
we want to be that thing again?”
This is frighteningly true. Some of it I knew, other parts were new to me. Thank you for this. I am looking forward to Part 2
ReplyDeleteI think this is one of your more powerful and controversial pieces, and yet there are very few comments. I was expecting to see a few pages of hate inspired vitriol from proud Americans defending their great country.
ReplyDeleteI am with you, but it doesn't stop with America.
In the second verse of the Australian national anthem we are told " for those who come across the sea, we've bounteous plains to share". Despite this, every week refugees risk their lives in an attempt to come to our (great) country. Many don't make it because we won't help them.
If I don't stop writing now, I may not ever stop.