Infantalism 4: Stupid Patriotism
I'm running out of myths. I'll probably do one or two more.
Today, I think the myth I will highlight is that the United States is morally superior to other countries. When I was the assistant instructor for Intro. to American Politics, my main job was to grade identification questions on tests. Students were required to define a term and state its significance. The amount of blind, unreflective "patriotism" I encountered was pretty startling. God forbid we be like Great Britain!! They are so oppressed over there! Our rights would surely be trampled if we had a (gasp) parliamentary system of government!
Let's just get a quick rundown of the evil shit this country had done.
1. Stole land from an entire race of people and systematically slaughtered them! We committed GENOCIDE!!!! GENOCIDE!!! Remember that little thing?
2. Enslaved people! Slavery! Bad!
3. Allowed robber baron capitalism to exploit the poor for, oh, 100 years or so.
4. Refused equal rights for women and racial minorities for a long, long time.
5. Propped up tin-pot dictators in countries around the world throughout the 70s and 80s.
6. We're the only country to use nuclear weapons in combat. Not to mention firebombing Japan with conventional weapons (see The Fog of War, documentary with Robert McNamara).
7. Vietnam
8. Iraq
9. The defense of marriage act.
10. We're the largest polluter and consumer per/capita in the world.
11. We give a pittance of our money to foreign aid, and even that little bit is dominated by military aid to Israel.
12. We continue to screw over the urban and rural poor by allowing unchecked greed to dominate our society.
These are just our MORAL failings. We have a host of cultural and economic failings (our health care. our public education system. strip malls) that deserve ridicule too.
Look, we've done some good stuff too. We have a more flexible caste system than most countries, and we've improved on legal equality. We also fought Hitler and Mussolini and stopped the Commies from taking over the entire world. Let's just stop sucking our own dicks about it, shall we?
posted by Joe @ 12:28 PM
4 Comments:
Are you sure you're not confusing perfection for superiority?
The items in your list that are unequivocally “evil” are hardly unique to the United States and reasonable arguments can be made that the items that are truly unique to the United States not evil.
And actually, per capita Australians are the worst polluters.
Well, I take your point, but either interpretation is useful for deflating the blind patriotism that I'm complaining about here. You COULD make an argument that the U.S. is morally superior even if it's not morally perfect, but it certainly would not be easy. Incidentally, my personal opinion is that we're somewhere in the middle compared to our contemporaries. Better than Saudi Arabia and Germany and Russia. Worse than Canada and Sweden.
And what's your source on that Australia stat? My quick look around the internet has the U.S. at number 1 and Australia at number 2.
Also, I agree that there are many who would defend the morality of some of the things in my list. I just think they are wrong.
Here is just one of many similar articles on the findings of a recent emissions study:
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/09/11/2683439.htm
and little European/commonwealth states always look good when only the sins of commission count…
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