In common parlance, I’m not much of a patriot, especially if that definition focuses on people who have devoted their lives to serving their country, those who vigorously defend it against all detractors, and those willing to do almost anything for their country, and that includes lying, cheating, stealing, and far, far worse. I’m thinking CIA and other intelligence services here as well as those who have made black holes like Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo and torture infamous. This essay examines how that situation developed.
I first started questioning the “my country right or wrong” attitude as a pre-teen when I first became aware of the moral bankruptcy of U.S. policies and actions regarding the weaker “nations” or peoples then widely known as “Indian” tribes and our treatment of slaves and blacks before and after Emancipation. That realization came from reading what white British settlers, Colonial governments, and later the U.S. and state governments did to the Native American peoples who populated the continent. I remember as a youngster feeling helpless frustration and outrage over our purposeful drive to dispossess Native Americans of their lands and their lives in our ruthless elevation of greed and land acquisition as our national motive force and the God-given superiority of whites over “redskins.” As I grew older and more widely read, that anger over the systematic and purposeful destruction and later marginalization of Native Americans as whites stole the fat of the land and left the tribes the dross became a simmering anger that informed my understanding of American imperialism.
In retrospect, it’s difficult for me to separate the outrage I felt over Americans’ treatment of Native Americans from that accorded to blacks. Of course, I was only a kid but I distinctly remember reading articles in our local newspaper about whites disguising themselves as black and being treated badly by other white people. I also distinctly recall a visit of Aunt Mary Tobias from Los Angeles; she was my grandmother’s sister so really was my great aunt. It was in the early 1950s, almost certainly 1951 or 1952, so I would have been eight or nine years old. She hated flying so had taken a Greyhound bus to St. Louis.
Mom had driven to the bus station Downtown to pick her up accompanied by us three boys. The bus was a little late so I wandered around the busy station, taking in the unusual sights and sounds. I approached a water faucet and leaned over to take a drink when Mom grabbed my arm and asked what I was doing. I pointed to the sign over the fixture and said that I wanted to see what color the water was. The sign read: Colored Only. That’s when she told me only black people could drink from that spigot and not white people. When I asked her why she told me it was none of my business, but I knew it meant whites could drink cooled water from the new fountain while blacks had to drink room-temperature tap water from an upturned spigot.
After that, I couldn’t get enough information about blacks in America. For those readers too young to remember, the 1950s and 1960s were rife with lynchings, murders, and other violence to blacks throughout the south, including race riots in cities like Chicago, Los Angeles, Birmingham, Detroit, Milwaukee, etc. That was the start of the famous Civil Rights Movement with which I deeply identified and regarded people like Paul Robeson, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, Stokely Carmichael, and many others as heroes.
During my undergrad years I became increasingly aware of the glaring differences between the way white Americans thought of themselves and the way we treat people unlike us in certain definable ways. White Americans’ grandiose self-conception with respect to immigrants is perhaps best expressed in the famous poem:
Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!
But I quickly discovered that actions are far more telling of reality than are the self-aggrandizing myths we hold so dear. Witness the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, by which the U.S. government prohibited all immigration of Chinese laborers. The Act was intended to last for 10 years but was renewed in 1892 and was made permanent in 1902—repealed in 1943 only because we desperately needed China as our ally in fighting the Japanese; oh, hypocrisy thou dost reign supreme in American history. Another example is how the federal government treated Japanese citizens during World War II. About 110,000 people of Japanese ancestry (some 65,000 of whom were U.S. citizens) were sent in concentration camps (euphemistically titled War Relocation Camps) without due process and scarcely a shred of evidence that they were Japanese agents. As a direct result, they lost their homes, businesses, and property all without recourse to the judicial system. It is telling that in 1988, President Ronald Reagan signed into law the Civil Liberties Act, which admitted that those U.S. government actions were based on “race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership” and apologized for the internment on behalf of the U.S. government and authorized a payment of $20,000 to each individual camp survivor, amounting to $1.6 billion in reparations. A mere pittance regarding what they lost.
Prior to grad school, I had been an unenthusiastic and largely non-analytical supporter of the small but growing war effort in Vietnam. Interestingly enough, my anti-war beliefs developed about five or six months after my tender white ass was saved from the draft by none other than the Clerk of the Selective Service Board in St. Louis, a position equivalent to the Executive Director. Thus, it wasn’t a self-serving fear of being drafted that drove my growing antipathy to the war and distrust of our national government and national political figures, who, I came to understand, as a matter of course lie to the populace at every opportunity.
Another enormous influence on my growing mistrust of governmental authority came from talking regularly to a middle-aged sociologist named Eva Held (who at the time was a second- or third-year doctoral sociology student at SLU) and studying, under her guidance, the social psychology of race relations and the exercise of power in the U.S. That influence was grounded in and informed by my personality, one that instinctively bridled at authority, especially the heavy-handed, it’s-my-way-or-the-highway kind (“America, love it or leave it”), and by a sensitivity to racial injustice and intolerance that had been part of me since pre-teen years.
Through Eva I was introduced to such gems as Caste and Class in a Southern Town, The Nature of Prejudice, and The Wretched of the Earth and took off from there to discover Herbert Marcuse, Herbert Aptheker, C. Wright Mills, Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, etc., etc. It’s hard for people born after the 1960s to understand how opposition to racial prejudice, support of civil disobedience, and resistance to the Vietnam War intertwined into a coherent anti-government, pro-peace, liberal movement. It’s almost certainly next to impossible for modern youth to understand the thrill of solidarity many of us politically left-of-center students felt with Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement, Abby Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Chicago Seven, Black Panthers, Weather Underground, Students for a Democratic Society, American Indian Movement, Daniel Ellsberg, and the National Farm Workers Association.
In some not so mysterious manner, all those influences intermingled and generated an intense personal mistrust on my part of anything that smacked of nationalism and imperialism and the self-serving hypocrisy that inevitably accompanies those concepts. That was when I started voicing my dislike for the Pledge of Allegiance, which I came to regard as a fetishistic piece of nonsense. Pledge allegiance to a FLAG, a piece of cloth? How ridiculous.
Anyone reading this essay must realize that in the paragraphs above I’m describing a period of four undergrad years, five years as a grad student, plus seven and more years after that as a full-time university professor. So, I’m not talking about a fleeting, fly by the seat of your pants type of “conviction.”
It was during the initial years of grad study that I became increasingly aware of the imperialistic nature of the U.S. government, especially in its relations with Caribbean and Central and South American countries and then with Vietnam. Prior to that point I had fairly uncritically accepted U.S. pronouncements about the necessity of supporting right-wing governments in those regions to “repress” Communism or about the necessity of projecting American power and influence over our neighbors (Monroe Doctrine). As I became increasingly aware of our imperialistic history with regard to seizing Western territories from Mexico and later from Spain and then Hawaii and overthrowing democratically elected governments (e.g. Mohammad Mosaddegh in Iran and Salvador Allende in Chile) I started shedding the snakeskin of patriotism and grew ever more cynical about the role of colonizing/conquering nations and whose interests were being served. It was only by understanding the U.S. as it has expressed itself in history—a self-interested expansionist state eager to dominate brown-skin others—that my eyes have been opened to reality.
To cut to the chase, if I had to pick a time that was most influential in my ceasing to be an unthinking patriot, it unquestionably would be the mid-1960s through the mid-1980s, in what were substantially the LBJ-Nixon-Reagan years. Neither my children nor grandchildren can imagine the turmoil and angst of living through that period. Everything we believed in seemed to be turned upside down or inside out. That was when we learned our government could and would lie to the public without compunction or regret or even hesitation. Perhaps it is naïve to even think that our elected leaders and national government wouldn’t lie and obfuscate to advance their positions but the scale and scope of the lies and manipulation and lack of morals/ethics were something the general public never suspected would become the new norm. But certainly it did.
Take a glance at the events the U.S. experienced from the 1960s through the 1980s during what I call the Age of Chaos and imagine living through that time and not having your feelings about the country you lived in unchanged. The Age of Chaos began, at least for me, with the November 22, 1963, assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
- Published in 1963, Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique quickly became a best-seller and laid the foundation for the second-wave feminist movement that swept the U.S.
- In 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act and changed the political face of America for the next one fifty or more years, a fact confirmed later that year when Barry Goldwater ran as a Republican for President and won only six states, his home state of Arizona and five states in the previously solidly Democratic South.
- The horrors of the Civil Rights violence and murders: Emmett Till, 14; Medgar Evers, 37; William L. Moore, 36; Addie Mae Collins, 14, Cynthia Wesley, 14, Carole Robertson, 14, and Denise McNair, 11, victims of the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama; Viola Liuzzo, 39; James Chaney, 21; Andrew Goodman, 20; and Michael Schwerner, 24; Jimmie Lee Jackson, 26; Reverend James Reeb, 38; Samuel Younge Jr., 21; Vernon Dahmer, 57; Samuel Hammond, 18; Henry Smith, 18; Delano Middleton, 17; who are only the best-known of hundreds of murders.
- On February 21, 1965, shortly after repudiating the Nation of Islam, Malcolm X was assassinated in Manhattan by three of its members. The Autobiography of Malcolm X, published shortly after his death, was one of the most influential nonfiction books of the 20th Century and affected me more than I can say.
- On “Bloody Sunday” March 7, 1965, several hundred civil rights marchers crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, were savagely attacked by an angry mob of terrorists and white supremacists, among whom were also dozens of state and local police.
- In 1966, Lester Maddox, an openly and unrepentantly racist and segregationist restaurant owner, was elected Governor of Georgia largely because in 1964 he publically chased blacks from his restaurant with an axe handle. He sold the restaurant in 1965 rather than submit to a court order to serve black customers. It should be noted that Maddox was a charter member of the Council of Conservative Citizens, which was considered by the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League to be a white supremacist organization.
- Race riots occurred in the mid-1960s in Rochester, NY; Harlem in New York City, NY; Philadelphia, PA; the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles; Jersey City, Patterson, and Elizabeth, NJ; Hough neighborhood, Cleveland, OH; Orangeburg, SC; and others.
- In 1967, John Bell Williams, a white supremacist running for Governor of Mississippi, won election based in large part on his openly racist platform, typified by his infamous quote: “NAACP stands for Niggers, Apes, Alligators, Coons, and Possums.”
- In 1967, the Kerner Commission (formally titled the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders), was established by President Lyndon B. Johnson to investigate the causes of the 1967 race riots and to provide recommendations for the future. One of its main conclusions was that the nation was “moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.”
- Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated in 1968 on April 4 and June 6, respectively.
- Increasingly violent anti-war protests were held throughout 1968 across the U.S., including the Chicago Democratic National Convention, notable for the police riot against peaceful demonstrators.
- U.S. sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos and Australian silver medalist Peter Norman protested racial inequality on the medal stand at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City, Mexico, and subsequently were kicked out of the Olympics by their Olympic Organizing Committees and their running careers destroyed.
- On March 16, 1968, between 345 and 505 unarmed South Vietnamese men, women, children, and infants were massacred in and around the village of My Lai by U.S. Army soldiers. Although twenty-six soldiers were charged with criminal offenses, only one, Lieutenant William Calley Jr., was convicted. He served only three and a half years house arrest as ordered by President Richard Nixon. Later, his prison sentence and parole obligations were commuted by the military to time served, freeing Calley.
- In April 1970, a national Gallup poll found that 76 percent of those polled maintained that the First Amendment should be suspended if that meant no more disruptive protests in the streets. America, land of right-wing assholes.
- On Monday, May 4, 1970, at Kent State University in Kent, Ohio, 28 members of a 76-men Ohio National Guard unit fired nearly 170 rounds of live ammo into a large assembly (over 2,000) of unarmed, protesting college students, most of whom were more than a football field away and a few of whom were throwing stones. The Guard killed four students, one who was an ROTC student walking from class, and wounded nine others, one of whom suffered permanent paralysis. As a result of those murders, four million students across the U.S. protested and over 900 American colleges and universities closed during the student strikes. A Gallup Poll taken immediately after the killings founded that 58 percent of respondents blamed the students, 11 percent blamed the National Guard, and 31 percent expressed no opinion. America, land of right-wing assholes.
- Ten days after the Kent State murders, two black students were killed and 12 others wounded when city and State police at Jackson State University opened fire on a crowd of about 100 protesting students; more than 400 rounds were fired. That event did not arouse the same nationwide attention as the Kent State shootings since those killed and injured were black and racism was then and is still alive and well in the U.S.
- Organized opposition to nuclear war and weapons as well as to nuclear power plants became widespread in the early 1970s and resulted in few new nuclear plants being built.
- Daniel Ellsberg (former Marine Corps officer, Harvard PhD in economics and protégé of Henry Kissinger, RAND strategic analyst, Special Assistant to the U.S. Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs) leaked the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times in 1971 and caused a national furor when they were published. He later characterized the Pentagon Papers, which he helped write when he worked for RAND, as “evidence of a quarter century of aggression, broken treaties, deceptions, stolen elections, lies and murder.” The FBI illegally wiretapped Ellsberg’s phone and broke into the office of his psychiatrist, Dr. Lewis Fielding, searching for materials with which to blackmail Ellsberg. Ellsberg was charged by the Department of Justice with theft, conspiracy, and violations of the Espionage Act. The case was dismissed by a federal judge when evidence surfaced about illegal federal government-ordered wiretappings and break-ins and other misconduct by the FBI and other government agencies.
- The Attica Prison riot occurred at the Attica Correctional Facility in Attica, New York, in 1971 when approximately 2,200 inmates seized control of the prison, taking 42 staff hostage. The riot was based upon prisoners’ demands for political rights and better living conditions (e.g. prisoners were only given one roll of toilet paper per month and were only allowed to shower once a week). By the order of Governor Nelson Rockefeller, state police armed with shotguns stormed the prison, firing more than 2,000 shells, killing 43 people including ten correctional officers and civilian employees and 33 inmates, many of whom were trying to surrender. In 1972, the New York State Special Commission on Attica chastised prison officials for poor planning and use of lethal methods. The Commission also criticized Rockefeller for his refusal to visit the prison site and hear the prisoners’ complaints first-hand.
- Five men were arrested for breaking and entering into the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate complex on June 17, 1972, in a major political upheaval that became known as Watergate scandal and resulted in the trial and conviction of more than a dozen officials in the Nixon Administration and Nixon’s resignation from office.
- Roe v. Wade was decided by the U.S. Supreme Court on 1/22/73.
- On October 10, 1973, Vice-President Spiro Agnew turned in his letter of resignation to President Nixon, becoming only the second Vice-President to resign his office. He later pleaded no contest to criminal charges of tax evasion as part of a negotiated plea to charges that accused him of accepting more than $200,000 in bribes while governor of Maryland and Vice-President.
- A paroxysm of right-wing book banning across the country in the early 1970s resulted in the following books being banned from schools and public libraries: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain; Animal Farm, George Orwell; The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Malcolm X and Alex Haley; Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, Dee Brown; Catch-22, Joseph Heller; The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger; The Crucible, Arthur Miller; Deliverance, John Dickey; Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury; For Whom the Bell Tolls, Ernest Hemingway; The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck; In Cold Blood, Truman Capote; Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison; Native Son, Richard Wright; Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut; To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee; and, improbably, Where the Wild Things Are, Maurice Sendak.
- The Boston Busing Crisis over federal court-ordered busing from 1974 through the late 1980s witnessed riots by violent right-wing whites, the decline of public-school enrollment, and white flight to the suburbs. It was but one of many such attacks by conservatives and white supremacists on court-ordered busing plans. One of the endearing slogans from the Boston riots was, Whites Have Rights.
- In February 1974, Patricia (Patty) Hearst, a newspaper heiress, socialite, and actress, was kidnapped by and later was said to join the Symbionese Liberation Army. Arrested after having taken part in a bank robbery with other SLA members, Hearst was sentenced to 35 years in prison but was released after two years when her sentence was commuted by President Jimmy Carter. In 2001, she was granted a Presidential pardon by President Bill Clinton, his last official act before leaving office. Her kidnapping case is regarded by many as an example of a Stockholm syndrome victim being persecuted by overzealous prosecutors.
- On August 9, 1974, facing certain impeachment in the House of Representatives and equally certain conviction by the Senate and the extraordinarily high probability of criminal prosecution after that, Richard Nixon resigned the presidency. On September 8, 1974, Nixon’s successor, Gerald Ford, granted him “a full, free, and absolute pardon,” ending all hope Tricky Dick would be tried for numerous felonies committed while he was President.
- In a New York Times series published in December 1974 and January 1975 by investigative reporter Seymour Hersh—who also exposed the My Lai massacre, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize—it was revealed that the FBI and CIA had conducted “massive, illegal” spying operations against American antiwar protesters and other dissident groups. It resulted in a brief but nasty scandal in Washington, DC, that quickly faded from view due to a lack of public interest.
- In Congressional hearings in 1975 on the functioning of American intelligence agencies, Gen. Lew Allen, director of the National Security Agency, testified that NSA had been reading cables and telegrams and listening to telephone conversations of American citizens residing in the U.S. and overseas for more than 40 years without legal authorization from any court and without specific presidential order. In other words, what NSA was doing was flat out illegal. The national news media basically ignored his testimony, as did a jaded public too exhausted by the tumultuous events of the past decade to give a shit.
- In 1975, a national poll of public trust by the Gallup Organization revealed that 68 percent of those polled believed that the country’s leaders “consistently lied to the American people”; in 1972, only 38 percent had responded in the same manner.
- In 1975-1976 the Church Committee (formally titled U.S. Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities) revealed for the first time U.S. government involvement, especially by the CIA and FBI, in attempts to assassinate foreign leaders, particularly Fidel Castro, Patrice Lumumba of the Congo, Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic, the Diem brothers of Vietnam, and General Rene Schneider of Chile as well as covert attempts to destabilize and overthrow foreign governments, even those that had reached power through open, democratic elections. Although the Committee investigated and revealed systematic and illegal intelligence gathering acts by the CIA, NSA, FBI, and the IRS, little of positive value resulted other than the establishment of the permanent U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.
- In 1976, the House Select Committee on Intelligence, the counterpart of the Church Senate Committee, revealed more secret illegal operations of the U.S. government; the report detailed illegal activities by the CIA and the FBI but the Committee was stonewalled by the Ford Administration and the report basically went nowhere.
- In 1976, an ex-CIA case officer, Philip Agee, published an expose about covert CIA operations in Latin America titled, Inside the Company: CIA Diary. In the book Agee wrote: “. . . millions of people all over the world had been killed or had their lives destroyed by the CIA and the institutions it supports.” He also wrote, “U.S. policy at the time, executed by the CIA, was to support murderous dictatorships around the world, as in Vietnam, as in Greece, as in Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil. And that’s only to name a few.”
- In 1976, the U.S. Supreme Court invalidated the Federal Election Campaign Act Amendments of 1974 by ruling that giving money to a presidential candidate was the same thing as speech (Buckley v. Valeo).
- The Jonestown Tragedy occurred when on November 18, 1978, nearly 920 people died in a mass suicide in a sect’s settlement in rural Guyana as a result of the actions of the sect’s founder, Jim Jones. The name of the settlement, Jonestown, became synonymous with the incidents at those locations. It was the largest mass death event in modern history and resulted in the largest single loss of American civilian life in a deliberate act until 9-11.
- The Iran hostage situation was a diplomatic crisis between Iran and the United States that was precipitated by a group of Iranian students who attacked and took over the U.S. Embassy in Tehran on November 4, 1979, holding 52 American diplomats and citizens hostage for 444 days (to January 20, 1981). The crisis grew out of the CIA’s orchestrating, with Britain’s MI6, the overthrow of the democratically elected Prime Minister of Iran, Mohammad Mosaddegh, in August 1953 and replacing him with a dictator, Shah Mohammad-Rezā Pahlavi, who was overthrown in February 1979 in the Iranian Revolution organized by the Grand Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.
- The Three Mile Island accident was a partial meltdown that occurred on March 28, 1979, in a nuclear reactor in Dauphin County, Pennsylvania. It was the worst accident in U.S. commercial nuclear power plant history and was rated a five on the seven-point International Nuclear Event Scale.
Although the Vietnam War wasn’t only social-political movement that drove feelings of alienation, of being cut adrift, it was the force that pushed many of left-leaning people into more critical examination what we thought our country was and what it stood for (Yes, we were pitifully naïve). When the counter-culture movement of the 1960s/1970s and the great Civil Rights struggle were added to the War protests, the result was a perfect storm of rage against the “establishment” that birthed the Students for a Democratic Society, Free Speech Movement, Youth International Party (Yippies), Black Panthers, Bobby Seale, Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Tom Hayden, Angela Davis, Bernardine Dohrn, the Chicago Seven, Woodstock Nation, the Weather Underground, etc.
It would be too easy to get side-tracked by diving into the details of the counter-culture movement and the Civil Rights struggle, but in reality it was the Vietnam War that drove me and many thousands of others over the edge. And it started with President Lyndon B. Johnson lying outrageously about what the American military was doing in Vietnam. People basically ignorant about the details of those times might wonder how I can be positive that LBJ and other high government officials intentionally lied to the public about the War. But it’s easy when the government collected the truth about what was really happening in Vietnam in an official report titled, United States – Vietnam Relations, 1945-1967: A Study Prepared by the Department of Defense, that detailed the history of the United States’ political-military involvement in Vietnam from 1945 to 1967. Although the Department of Defense published the report it was classified and no one outside of a very few in Washington saw it until Daniel Ellsberg discovered it and released it to the New York Times and the Washington Post as the Pentagon Papers and LBJ’s duplicity and lies were revealed for all to see.
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It wasn’t long before national events of breathtaking dimensions served to solidify and intensify those various “subversive” leftist ideas that had taken me by storm, as it were. Enter stage right Richard Milhous “I am not a crook” Nixon, our 37th President and the only one to resign in utter disgrace under the very real threat of impeachment and prosecution for any number of heinous felonies committed at his direct order and at the direction of his political appointees. Young people today cannot begin to fathom those days of political intrigue and turmoil as it was revealed that the FBI and other federal agencies had committed any number of illegal acts against Nixon’s political opponents. As an aside, my favorite 1972 presidential election bumper sticker was the very popular:
Dick Nixon before he dicks us.
Of course, the Dickster was elected and promptly proceeded to fuck his political enemies and the American public until caught and threatened with impeachment and criminal prosecution. And then was issued a sweeping Presidential pardon by his replacement, Gerald Ford, who paid the ultimate price in the next election of being beaten by the clueless peanut farmer from Plains, Georgia. I have to say that after the Watergate events had completely unfolded and Nixon had resigned and been pardoned, the default position for the rest of my life would be to regard politicians on both sides of the aisle as untrustworthy and corrupt, meaning ready, willing, and able to provide support or favor in return for profit or other tangible rewards. Rare exceptions to that rule may be possible but they are threatened with extinction if they exist at all.
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A thorny issue for me always has been the concept of American Exceptionalism that is so beloved by conservatives, though also touted by many moderates and even some uncritical liberals. Most conservative exceptionalists see the U.S. as constituting a political-social-economic model of democracy and success that should be envied and emulated by the rest of the world. As an historical aside, it should be noted that as America and Europe have changed over time, so have the attributes that exceptionalists claim distinguish us from them. It may have started with our rejection of royalty-nobility-privilege associated with structured class systems but the contemporary right basically has three flashpoints regarding exceptionalism: the belief in the efficacy of organized religion and that people who practice their religion are better morally than those who don’t; that the U.S. has a special mission to spread democracy, individual liberty, and human rights across the world; and that we are a classless society where, through limited government, rugged individualism, and free enterprise, anyone can get ahead on their own. I should also mention that many right-wing American exceptionalists claim to believe that power flows directly from God’s hand to American politicians. Newt Gingrich is closely allied with that preposterous idea.
I wholeheartedly detest the exceptionalist concept that the American form of government should be admired, even worshipped, by all because it’s largely unhistorical and is little more than a self-serving, self-aggrandizing myth that smokescreens our reality of nationalism/imperialism and cynical lip-service to ideals while the federal government engages in actions that are illegal and morally reprehensible. We are a country built from the earliest colonial “plantations” and then as a new nation on the systemic and ruthless dispossession of Native Americans and the despicable treatment of enslaved blacks. Slavery and continental-scale land confiscation are what made this country what it is, yet those realities are nearly totally ignored or dismissed out of hand, especially by conservative exceptionalists.
Some readers may think that my emphasis on race and slavery is an over-focus on a small part of American history that is an aberration as it were and fails to adequately represent the true nature of America. Rather, I am convinced that a nation supposedly founded on liberty and equality (“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”) while thriving on land coersion so blatant it approached outright theft, inequity, and slavery is a shameless two-faced hypocrite and charlatan. To say that most Americans are disingenuous about their history is to be too kind and far too uncritical.
This country has never addressed institutional racism or structural inequality and most likely never will because the greater majority of Americans deny both exist. The fault, they say, simply lies with blacks, the poor, and Native Americans, who as separate groups have deliberately chosen not to participate fully in the quintessential American Dream. And that attitude quite nicely summarizes what I think of as the American Condition: that the average or typical American either refuses to let herself acknowledge the harsh realities of our history or closes her eyes to their adverse effects. Those Americans hold tight to their glorification of our country as having been made exceptional by God and therefore worthy of uncritical love and devotion and patriotism. It is far easier and far more comforting to ignore historical reality than it is to confront it.
Much of the way I feel about the U.S. is grounded in our history of institutional racism and white supremacy. It is safe to say that the Founders personally regarded the “peculiar” institution of slavery as troubling for moral and political reasons. But I firmly believe Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe were blatant hypocrites because they supposedly worshipped at the altar of liberty/freedom and equality but owned black people and never publically acknowledged their humanity or the immoral contradictions of slavery in a country purportedly dedicated to liberty/equality. Although they may have recognized the many conflicts generated by white ownership of blacks with respect to rights expressed in the Declaration of Independence, they purposely turned their backs on resolving those conflicts.
For four of the five Founding Presidents the public rights of all to liberty and inalienable human rights were trumped by individual property rights, wealth, self-interest-greed, and status. Because the very existence of their world and their personal fortunes depended on enslaving blacks, they elevated money over morality and over the aspirational myths in our founding documents. Eight of the first ten Presidents owned slaves (not both Adamses) as did ten of the first 15. Yet, today so many conservatives boast about our collective freedom and equality under the law without even a nod to the fact that our nation was founded on monumental hypocrisy that continues unchecked today.
Contrary to what some historians today propose in their attempts to gild the Founding Presidents’ reputations, it wasn’t enough for them to believe in private that slavery was intrinsically evil. Jefferson, Monroe, and Madison proved thought itself is ineffective by continuing to own slaves until they died and by refusing to free them in their wills. What those slave-owning Founding Presidents did was to enforce the principle that property rights and self-interest were far more important than human rights, positions still held by many conservatives.
If some readers do not find much to agree with in my point of view, consider the reasons the “three-fifths” clause was inserted in the Constitution (Article I, section 2) to determine a state’s representation in Congress and the number of Electors in the Electoral College. That insertion wasn’t an accident; it was an intentional act with intentional consequences. Through exercise of the “three-fifths” clause, slave states always had one-third more seats in Congress and in the Electoral College than their free population justified, even though, naturally, slaves were unable to vote. Thus, slave states had greater voice in Congress and in presidential elections than a straight popular vote would have earned them. That meant southern states collectively gained an advantage that often provided the margin of victory in close elections, for example in 1800 when Thomas Jefferson won over northern rivals John Adams and Aaron Burr.
We know the results of those seeds: the Civil War, Reconstruction, economic slavery imposed by tenant farming and share cropping, Jim Crow laws, KKK, White Citizens’ Councils, lynching and other mindless violence, voter “registration” laws in the South, separate and inherently unequal education, laws forbidding inter-racial marriage, de facto and de jure segregation in federal and local housing programs, racially restrictive zoning and property covenants that enforced neighborhood segregation, and red-lining by banks and insurance companies. The list goes on and on.
From the end of Reconstruction until the late 1960s, the U.S. allowed state-sponsored Jim Crow terrorism throughout the South, Southwest, and Border States where white citizens and white police forces used overt physical violence and the threat of violence to subjugate black Americans. Some may deny that statement since not every U.S. state engaged in Jim Crow terrorism but as the nation permitted those evil acts to continue without substantial effort by the federal government to intervene until the late 1950s. It is not an exaggeration to say that white Americans used the official power of local and state government to ensure their supremacy over blacks and that that legacy of state-sponsored terrorism has never been fully addressed and is with us today.
In 21st Century America, racism is definitely not extinguished or even totally sub-rosa, though many stary-eyed optimists believe it can be minimized if not eliminated. But not in the short life left to me or in the lifetimes of my adult children. Those seeds were planted too well and have established deep roots. That’s what I see, an old white guy who’s been leaning left for a long time.
But, what do black people see? And I don’t mean about whether prejudice still flourishes in America because they all see that even if whites refuse to. They saw Ronald Reagan launch his 1980 Presidential election campaign by invoking states’ rights, meaning white supremacy, in Philadelphia, Mississippi, that bastion of White Citizens’ Councils and unrepentant racial hatred. They’ve seen a war on drugs that, if you judge by convictions and incarcerations, looks like an out and out war on black people. They saw George Bush gleefully drag the specter of Willie Horton from stump to stump and across national TV news. They saw the George W. Bush campaign’s scurrilous and blatantly immoral attack in South Carolina on John McCain’s mythological black love-child. They’ve seen the pathetic failures of half-hearted school busing and federal fair housing and desegregation programs. They’ve seen mortgage companies/banks and insurance firms redline neighborhoods to ensure blacks could not obtain housing loans or home or car insurance. They’ve seen de facto and de jure segregated school systems that produce poorly educated students. They’ve seen Senator Trent Lott praise Strom Thurmond for his unadulterated racism, claiming the U.S. would be a better country if Thurmond had been elected President. They’ve seen the horrors brought by Hurricane Katrina as black citizens pleaded on national television for their government to help them and were turned down by a pathetic Bush Administration who obviously cared little for their safety or their lives. Black people have seen unarmed young black men shot down like dogs by police. They’ve seen America for what it really is while whites allow themselves to see only what they want to see.
Yes, our ideological and hypocritical blinders are working perfectly.
American history is one of blatant and unrepentant imperialistic colonization. We fought, conquered, stole from, lied to, and subjugated native peoples by force of arms from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from the Gulf of Mexico to Canada and celebrate that history while refusing to acknowledge the true nature of those events. We mythologize that imperialism as the triumph of Manifest Destiny, our frontier/pioneering spirit, free enterprise, and rugged individualism, never wanting to look beneath that slick veneer to see the ruthless greed that drove white Americans to rob native peoples of their lands, their livelihoods, and their essences and to enslave more than four million blacks. We had a “natural right” to the North American continent so we forced native peoples into areas we thought were worthless and seized the best, most productive, and most beautiful lands and natural resources for our exclusive use. As a direct result of that coersion, Americans were able to expand rapidly across more than 2,500 miles of rich land and natural resources and exploit them to the maximum. In effect, we colonized the central core of North America while piously sneering at England and other European nations for being imperialists. We are a nation, like so many others, founded on hypocrisy, hubris, and self-serving violent nationalism but present ourselves as an Exceptional democratic nation endowed by God to be admired by all others.
Today white people no longer have to rely on redlining, restrictive covenants, or overt racial discrimination to keep the races separate. Today we have more subtle legal mechanisms like exclusionary zoning that protect us from being blamed for segregation and housing discrimination. We aren’t the Jim Crow Southerners, the KKK, the horrid race baiters. We publically repudiate overt racism as something from the past. We had nothing to do with that ugliness. But whites do not want to admit they have helped create a situation of plausible deniability, a narrative of racial innocence that allows them to benefit from discrimination and segregation but to avoid the guilt and the shame.
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Sort of in summary, here’s what I think is wrong with our political system. Perhaps the best place to start is with an 8-11-11 quote from Yoni Appelbaum in The Atlantic on why Progressives are losing the national debate:
Most Americans are convinced that their government is fundamentally broken. And if progressives want to sell the public on the idea that government can solve our problems, they first need to identify, and explain how they will fix the problems with our government.
For me the problem is agonizingly simple and doesn’t need 25 paragraphs slicing and dicing WHAT’S WRONG IN WASHINGTON. Our government is broken because we have allowed politicians at every level to be bought by the rich and powerful. As an example of exactly how far that process has become embedded in the American political system, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled fairly recently that corporations have the same right to freedom of speech as individuals and that their donations to political election campaigns are a form of speech and can largely be kept secret from public scrutiny. I am unable to summon sufficient words to even give an impression of how much I detest those rulings or how much contempt I have for the Supreme Court, which has been an object of my scorn since their totally partisan, corrupt, and unforgiveable Bush v. Gore decision—and here you better have O’Connor, Rehnquist, Scalia, Kennedy, and Thomas in mind.
What we have is a system of legalized corruption wherein politicians are in the pockets of their rich and powerful contributors and do their bidding. Naturally our system is broken. How could it be otherwise? If you don’t believe that critique just look at the role Joe Lieberman played for decades as the national shill for the insurance industry. Or the way the Florida sugar corporations contribute to the majority of national congressional election campaigns to ensure they are always granted tremendous financial favors in terms of agricultural price supports. That list is endless.
Readers who do not believe my point is accurate should do a bit of research on their own as to how many registered lobbyists were in Washington 40 years ago and how many there are today. Ka-ching, Ka-ching has become our national anthem and the functional motto of both parties. And we American so arrogantly look down at the way developing nations function and raise our lips in a gratuitous sneer at their disgusting culture of corruption and avarice. How sad we are today, not able to run our own soiled system and not knowing how to FIX the problem. The game is rigged and everyone in politics is involved and yet we refuse to acknowledge the evidence in front of our eyes. And all the right wing assholes want to do is blather on and on about what an exceptional fucking nation we live in. Right.
In a directly related point, the refusal of the Bush and Obama Administrations to prosecute the big banks and Wall Street for their numerous roles in causing the Great Recession has put a huge exclamation point on my feelings about this country. The real reason for the failure of the federal government to prosecute is that the financiers are too entrenched in the pockets of both the Democratic and Republican Parties for that to happen despite their criminal deeds. Money not only talks but also rules the U.S. Ka-ching, Ka-ching.
I want to conclude by listing several other things I absofuckinglutely hate about the U.S.
- We regularly prosecute children as young as thirteen as adults and sentence them to long prison terms.
- We regularly incarcerate and execute the mentally challenged and mentally ill.
- We regularly torture people in our prisons, not only in places like Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo and in countries where we have sent those poor bastards who have been subject to extraordinary rendition, but also in countless prisons in the U.S. where prisoners have been forced into decades-long solitary confinement and subjected to brutal treatment by prison administrators and guards.
- According to the U.S. Constitution, only Congress can declare war, but that has been routinely ignored in modern history, leading to an imbalance between the legislative and executive branches that has enabled presidents to unilaterally expand their powers and become quasi-dictators free from Congressional oversight.
- Today, the phones and data centers used by nearly every American citizen in the country have been tapped without court authorization and no one has been investigated or tried for it, creating a country where the government no longer bothers to justify shredding, through secret surveillance, the personal liberties and rights of ordinary citizens who have never engaged in criminal activities.
To paraphrase Daniel Ellsberg, who will always be one of my heroes, politicians and governments lie all the time, not just occasionally, but all the time. Not every word they utter is a lie, but anything they say could be a lie depending on their motivation du jour, especially on who is putting money into their pockets or into their election campaigns. And that is exactly why neither politicians nor governments should be trusted by any citizen at any level at any time.
I freely confess that I am not and never will be a patriot if that means to encourage a government to trample the rights of its citizens, intentionally benefit the powerful while demeaning the powerless, lie through its teeth and then hypocritically deny on-the-ground reality, or commit imperialistic acts against native peoples and other nations. But, if being a patriot means acting on the best interests of one’s country by protecting the rights of ordinary citizens, and here I’m thinking about Daniel Ellsberg and Edward Snowden, or by helping disadvantaged individuals and groups that have limited ability to help themselves, then that’s a different matter entirely.
