fredoneverything | As I listen to American fury against uncoöperative Afghans, to Congress furiously denouncing Pakistan for anemic aid in conducting the current wars, I sometimes wonder whether the US is playing with a full deck. The anger arises I suspect becaause the US and the rest of the world work from very different premises. They believe in, as we say, distinct narratives.
The American narrative holds that the United States is a light to the world, the freest, richest, most productive country the world has ever seen, the greatest military power, the most prolific producer of technlogy and of Nobel laureates. America is a force for freedom and democacry, a champion of human rights, a land of universal opportunity with liberty and justice for all. The Unites States is what all countries could be if they accepted our values. History supports this view. In a raw ccontinent, American energy and free enterprise carved a paradise from a wilderness.
This narrative, the belief that America is special among nations, favored by God, pervades the culture. Those old enough will remember that Superman fought for “truth, justice, and the American way.”
Underlying all of this is a profoundly moral view of America's place in the world. The United States does not fight, like the French, for glory or like the English, for empire, or like the Russians, to steal watches from the wounded. America fights against Evil, whether in the form of communism, terror, Islam, socialism, or the growing threat of enslavement by Chinese communism. These evils are real, Americans believe, immediate, and threaten us with tyranny.
The narrative of the US military springs from the national narrative. American soldiers are brave, wholesome young men selflessly sacrificing to overthrow brutal dictarors, to defeat terror, and to give the oppressed peoples the benefits of democracy. This actually happened in Japan, Germany, and Iraq, asserts the narrative. Sure, a bad apple among GIs may occasionally commit an atrocity, but these are isolated incidents and blown out of proportion by a leftist press.
Quite different is what might be called the World Narrative, held around the globe with differeing intensities and emphases. It holds the US to be an endlessly aggressive military power that is out of control, hypocritically speaking of democracy and freedom while supporting dictators and overthrowing elected governments. America is arrogant, crassly mateiralistic, crime-ridden, vulgar, racially unjust, the world's only avowed practicioner of torture, economically explotative, imperialistic and intolerant of other cultures.
The military form of the World Narrative holds that America savagely attacks weaker nations in pursuit of oil and empire, that it uses overwhelming technological superiority to butcher peasants armed with rifles, that atrocites are routine, that it employs Stalinist nocturnal raids to terrorize populations, that killing of children is common.
The American narrative holds that the United States is a light to the world, the freest, richest, most productive country the world has ever seen, the greatest military power, the most prolific producer of technlogy and of Nobel laureates. America is a force for freedom and democacry, a champion of human rights, a land of universal opportunity with liberty and justice for all. The Unites States is what all countries could be if they accepted our values. History supports this view. In a raw ccontinent, American energy and free enterprise carved a paradise from a wilderness.
This narrative, the belief that America is special among nations, favored by God, pervades the culture. Those old enough will remember that Superman fought for “truth, justice, and the American way.”
Underlying all of this is a profoundly moral view of America's place in the world. The United States does not fight, like the French, for glory or like the English, for empire, or like the Russians, to steal watches from the wounded. America fights against Evil, whether in the form of communism, terror, Islam, socialism, or the growing threat of enslavement by Chinese communism. These evils are real, Americans believe, immediate, and threaten us with tyranny.
The narrative of the US military springs from the national narrative. American soldiers are brave, wholesome young men selflessly sacrificing to overthrow brutal dictarors, to defeat terror, and to give the oppressed peoples the benefits of democracy. This actually happened in Japan, Germany, and Iraq, asserts the narrative. Sure, a bad apple among GIs may occasionally commit an atrocity, but these are isolated incidents and blown out of proportion by a leftist press.
Quite different is what might be called the World Narrative, held around the globe with differeing intensities and emphases. It holds the US to be an endlessly aggressive military power that is out of control, hypocritically speaking of democracy and freedom while supporting dictators and overthrowing elected governments. America is arrogant, crassly mateiralistic, crime-ridden, vulgar, racially unjust, the world's only avowed practicioner of torture, economically explotative, imperialistic and intolerant of other cultures.
The military form of the World Narrative holds that America savagely attacks weaker nations in pursuit of oil and empire, that it uses overwhelming technological superiority to butcher peasants armed with rifles, that atrocites are routine, that it employs Stalinist nocturnal raids to terrorize populations, that killing of children is common.
1 comments:
The great American delusion is fraying at the edges.
The Lone Ranger and Captain James T. Kirk came from the same mold. Mr. Spock was an Uncle Tom Tom alien. The weird thing is that these White guys let the Japanese and Chinese take over electronics. How the hell did they do that? Why doesn't the US have a virtual monopoly on global electronics?
Too much short term fast buck thinking.
So global resources running out after decades of waste on stupid bullsh!t is just going to aggravate the problems. So when is everybody going to figure out that they have been listening to White economists who could not do algebra for the last 50 years?
Hey the palefaces had to convince themselves as good Christians that they had the right to dominate the world. But then they can't figure out why airliners can't destroy skyscrapers in less than two hours. How do dumb people who are firmly convinced that they have superior intelligence accept their stupidity in order to synchronise their thinking with reality in order to avoid destruction?
DUH! FAIL!
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