We live in a country, after all, where significant pluralities of the population refuse to accept the worldwide scientific consensus on climate change and fervently continue to believe in the superiority of a piecemeal, private-sector health care system despite ample evidence that Americans spend more for medical care, and have poorer outcomes, than people in any other major Western nation. The cultural and geographic isolation of the United States has a lot to do with this, as do the failures of our education system, but those explanations aren’t quite sufficient. One aspect of the paranoid worldview is a sense of immense self-importance: The CIA has chosen you for secret experiments, or you and your Internet friends are the only people who can see that the Obama birth certificate seen and touched by independent experts is an obvious fraud. In the United States, we cling to this sense of specialness on a manic, nationwide, tautological scale; the way we do things in America is clearly superior because we know we live in the greatest country in the world.So there, un-Americans!
Sunday, July 29, 2012
Pee-Pants Nation
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2 comments:
My theory about much of this is perhaps well known at this point, but it goes like this.
In the last three generations, there is no part of the world that has not had the horrific violence of modern industrial warfare visited upon it, with its attendant unimaginably immense destruction and loss of life.
No part of the globe, that is, except the nation that undeniably leads the world in the art and science of industrial scale murder - The United States.
We have no institutional memory of towns and cities laid to waste, men and boys massacred, women and children made refugees even as the died by the thousands of disease and starvation as helpless refugees. We have no childhood imprinting of soldiers marching through our towns, killing, looting and raping as they came. We are the only people on earth who have no experience with the brutal policies we regularly inflict upon others.
We are the pampered killers. The comfortable horsemen. If we are the greatest nation, it is because we have laid so many others low, and they, by an accident of geography and history, have never been able to teach us the lessons they have learned so hard...
Depends Editor:
Yes; compare the over-reaction to the 11 September bucket of water in the face to the "Meh, whatevs" reaction to the mere drip drip drip of thousands upon thousands of car & gun deaths a yr.
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