That was the famous term Gunnar Myrdal used to describe our problems with race. I would like to use it in the context of a country so blessed with human talent and yet finding ourselves saddled with the likes of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and their courtiers.Their entire administration was conceived in deceit,received a popular boost from the staged event of 9/11 and has continued its many assaults on common people here and abroad.
The question we need to ask ourselves is: why is it that a country that can churn out Nobel Prize winners year after year is trapped by mindless nonentities with a criminal bent?
At its roots, our problems stem from two sources: the belief in American Exceptionalism and our obsession with race.These two weaknesses in our national character were exploited with great skill by the men around Bush.
The belief in American exceptionalism comes from the idea that this country is unique in World History and it is always a force for good.It is the scourge of tyrants everywhere and stands up for common people.Those beliefs absolve the United States of any criminality in its actions against other peoples,sort of a preemptive strike against culpability.A good example of this is the War on Vietnam waged by another staged event, the Gulf of Tonkin “incident”.Many millions of Vietnamese were killed by that war and I have yet to see the word Aggression used to describe our actions by the NYT and WaPo in any reference to that war.It is always couched in terms of how it was vital to stand up to Communist aggression.Events since 1975 have clearly exposed the lies at the root of that war and we show no signs of having drawn any lessons from that misbegotten adventure, or even worse,have
drawn the wrong lessons as Mr.Bush’s aggression against
Iraq clearly demonstrates.
The belief in our exceptionalism has now made it possible for Bush and his courtiers to violate our own doctrine enunciated at the Nuremberg Tribunal that aggressive wars are illegal and constitute a crime against humanity.It has also made possible the heinous crimes against prisoners and the “rendition” of prisoners to unknown Gulags without a whimper of protest except by a few people of conscience.Mr Bush knows that so long as the prisoners are seen as the dark skinned “enemies of freedom”, Americans will stay mute given their natural obsessions with race.
And this brings me to the elephant in the room, the 9/11 incident or our own Reichstag Fire.Whenever I tell my friends that this event was manufactured to confer a Churchillian aura around a third rate ignoramus and a coward, they used to tell me that no American President would be a party to the intentional killing of Americans in order to advance a political agenda.That statement is now less often invoked because of the way the people of New Orleans were left to their own fates by our Local Nero.
The intersection of myth ( American Exceptionalism) and Reality ( American Racism) has now produced an explosive combination that makes sane people everywhere recoil from what we have become.To become healthy again, we need to rid this nation of these two pernicious diseases and become part of the human community.The people of Latin America, in their protests against Bush’s visit, are sending a message just as countless millions around the world are doing.
We, as Americans, need to join them by shedding our own illusions of uniqueness.
