I think it was sometime in September 1972 when Hunter S. Thompson realized that George McGovern wasn’t just going to lose to Richard Nixon, but get absolutely crushed. Even after Kent State, after Jackson State, after the bombing of Cambodia, after the first revelations of Watergate, the American people were going to reelect the bastard, and reelect him emphatically. It was in this gloomy mood that Thompson wrote the following.
“America… just a nation of two hundred million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns and no qualms about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable.”
I often felt the same way during the Bush years. I get that feeling when I read that fifty-four percent of regular churchgoers support torturing people under certain circumstances despite the fact that Ronald Reagan made no exceptions when he sent the Convention Against Torture to the Senate for ratification.
We’re a violent culture that is armed to the teeth and has few qualms about crushing anyone that makes us uncomfortable or the least bit nervous. That’s what makes it so critical that we have good leadership.
“We’re a violent culture that is armed to the teeth and has few qualms about crushing anyone that makes us uncomfortable or the least bit nervous.”
Ha, pick a country in history that’s not like that. But let’s try to grow out of a little each year, okay?
How about almost all of contemporary Europe, Canada, Japan, South Korea, etc. Not everyone is armed to the teeth and itching to bomb somebody at the first hint of risk.
Funny, but I was thinking about this very topic last night, a week and a half into my internet drought.
American culture is quite violent. We glorify violence, admire its perpetrators, and have such enthusiasm for it that simulated violence is actually more popular than simulated sex in the mass media.
It’s particularly prominent in the South, where I live, but I’ve lived in enough parts of the United States to know that it transcends our old sectional divisions.
In many ways, one of our biggest challenges as a culture is to find ways to make violence uncool. Until we do, we’ll keep killing each other in small quantities and keep killing random third world foreigners in large quantities.
There’s something wrong about using that poll, sample size or something, I can’t remember what I read about it or where. But, there’s no doubt most of the American people can be fooled almost all the damn time.
When Nixon was declared the winner in ’72, I literally ran screaming out of my house and into the street where I stood and raged until I choked on my outrage. A few neighbors came out, kept their distance while determining what was wrong with me then, shaking their heads sadly, retreated into their homes.
I wasn’t, therefore, terribly surprised when Bush was actually elected for his second term. Americans like to “talk tough,” that appeals to them. But, I like to think that if you pulled each of them aside and put them into a situation where they’d have to actually “be tough” most of them would fold. It’s all very well to agree with the idea of somebody else torturing or killing someone but your average Joe or Jill couldn’t really do it.
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Stanford prison experiment
The much feared and allegedly omnipresent Gestapo in fact relied on widespread public support to function effectively. Denunciations of fellow citizens and relatives by members of the public initiated many Gestapo investigations, even though the whistleblowers understood that those denounced could suffer torture, be consigned to an uncertain fate in a concentration camp, or be executed without due legal process. In this way the National Socialist state succeeded remarkably in policing even the most intimate aspects of personal behaviour. It stifled social or sexual relations between Jews and Christians or Germans and foreign forced labourers, rooted out male homosexuality, and punished unguarded criticism of the regime, even when uttered in the apparent privacy of the home. The motives behind these public denunciations varied widely, sometimes reflecting positive support for Nazism, but more frequently revealing an apolitical sense of public duty or a range of more personal motives such as material gain, sexual jealousy, or revenge.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."I first overheard someone remark that “God wants us to have closets” earlier this year. It seems that to some the Ten Commandments is really the ten cover stories. If we actually had a merciful God he, she or it would hold an occasional press conference to dispel the common sectarian assumption that It favors the violent tactics of a particular nation, gender or economic strata.