A prerequisite for assimilation in American culture is deception. Delusions of grandeur, delusions of superiority, delusions of invincibility – we are all supplied with those in the land of the free home health insurance deductible. One of the primary tasks of the scholar or journalist in American culture is to find some justification for removing a clarifying vocabulary and replacing it with esoteric or academic terms that make the ugly sound beautiful. Instead of “deception” or “lie,” we could use the phrase “American exceptionalism,” which refers to the intellectual but illiterate theory that the United States is inherently different from other nations. Ronald Reagan was the most effective propagator of the myth. With his “fleshy smile and a missile up his sleeve”, to quote composer Warren Haynes, he spun children’s threads like “America is a brilliant city on a hill” and “Defending America means defending God.”
God has a sense of humor.
Today, the United States is the exception among rich, educated and developed countries for its striking inability to react with competence, discipline and honesty to the COVID-19 pandemic. Our case count is increasing with no signs of slowing down, while hospitals in Arizona, Texas, Mississippi and Florida may be forced to reject patients from their overwhelmed emergency rooms and ICUs. The financial effects of the coronavirus devastate millions of lives, while Japan, Iceland, New Zealand, Italy, Germany and other comparatively civilized countries have more or less returned to pre-pandemic life.
After decades of refusing to build a welfare state while neglecting public health institutions and infrastructure, and after choosing an ignorant and incoherent reality television scoundrel to oversee the executive branch of the federal government, with a surprising failure of imagination about what could go wrong – The bill has reached the doors of the United States. The “indispensable nation,” as everyone from Madeline Albright to Barack Obama liked to call it, will have to pay in treasures and blood.
Vladimir Putin, the latest incarnation of the Red Threat, warned Americans that they were scheduling an appointment with the disaster in 2013. While the Obama administration was considering an attack on Syria and risking the country’s third war in 11 years, Putin sported as a freelance. writer for the New York Times. He concluded his op-ed against military intervention in Syria with a broad observation about American culture: “It is extremely dangerous to encourage people to see themselves as exceptional, whatever the motivation.”
When the newest dangers of maintaining a silly sense of superiority manifested themselves in 2016, many leading Democratic Party figures and popular media commentators responded not with a critical self-examination of a free-falling society, but with a regrettable and familiar tactic. to any juvenile delinquent: “Putin did it!”
It is undeniable that the President of Russia is an enemy of human rights, within his own country and abroad, whose strategic interests are aligned with the support of reactionary regimes and nationalist movements around the world. The degradation of democracy and international alliances between free nations is tailored to its purpose and furthers its ambitions. It is also true that Russia is a weak nation, desperately clinging to its oil economy and overstretching itself with dubious misadventures in Ukraine and the Middle East.
According to the general analysis, Putin is also responsible for apparently all the political problems in the United States. From the election of Donald Trump to the increasing polarization among the American public, Putin has brilliantly orchestrated and is executing a “Conspiracy to Destroy Democracy,” to cite the title of the book by former intelligence officer and MSNBC contributor Malcolm Nance.
Thanks to Putin’s paranoia and a bizarre attempt to resurrect the Cold War, the Democratic Party and mainstream media have led a largely bored audience, and often justifiably so, through a series of supposedly “shocking” stories. Russia-related: Putin’s “interference” in the 2016 election, which was little more than a Facebook ad campaign; the long yawn of the Mueller investigation and the report of Trump’s threat to withhold Ukraine’s military aid, without anyone asking why the United States is so deeply involved in a border dispute over Crimea in the first place; and the absurd Russian “generosity” scandal.
The deviation from American failures in Putin’s paranoia peaked when Hillary Clinton accused Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, a veteran Democratic combatant from Hawaii and the United States Army, of acting on Putin’s behalf during his campaign. for the presidency. The evidence against Gabbard was nothing more than her critical views on the foreign policy and militarism of the United States. These completely undeserved accusations, put up by supposedly smart reporters and analysts, brought to mind the opening lines of Warren Zevon’s classic, “Lawyers, Guns and Money”: “I went home to a waitress, as I always do / How it was Do you know that she was also with the Russians?
Gabbard was trying to provoke Americans to reconsider their bellicose stance toward the rest of the world and, in the process, calculate the losses from our nation’s ongoing wars, drone strikes, special forces raids, and other violent interventions in all corners of the planet.
Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, both studying the collapse of ancient Rome, concluded that it was impossible to simultaneously maintain a functional republic at home and an expanding empire abroad. Vladimir Putin is not responsible for the American establishment of 800 military bases, the $ 6.4 trillion that the United States has wasted in the post-9/11 wars, or the insistent insistence that the United States enjoys a magical exception to observable truths. of history, the disappearance of past empires included.
The murky accusation that Putin was paying Taliban fighters $ 100,000 for every American soldier or Marine they killed sparked considerable hysteria, all of which avoided the crucial question: Why is the United States still in Afghanistan, especially after of the landing of the “Afghanistan Papers” by the Washington Post? Did it prove that political and military planners have recognized for many years that war has been useless?
Rep. Mark Pocan, D-Wis., And Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., Proposed a miserable 10 percent reduction in the bloated Pentagon budget, and most Democrats, their cash-filled campaign coffers from the defense industry, they rejected it. Putin is not responsible for the destructive influence of the “military-industrial complex”, an undemocratic and parasitic leech on the government, culture, and infrastructure that President Dwight Eisenhower first noticed in 1961.
Images of unmarked and unidentifiable federal centurions beating and arresting protesters in Portland, Oregon, without any apparent provocation, have shocked even the typically timid American press. But there is little recognition that Trump’s fascist movement is only possible because of a provision in the bipartisan National Security Act of 2002 that authorizes then-President George W. Bush to replace agents of any federal agency use force to protect federal property. Vladimir Putin did not write, sponsor, or vote on that bill, nor influenced the Obama administration to ratify its most dangerous elements each year in a series of National Defense Authorization Acts.
One of the most persuasive and applicable arguments that Eisenhower made against the increasing power and influence of the military-industrial complex is that resources are limited, and the development of a garrison state will inevitably diminish the welfare state. “Every weapon that is manufactured means theft from those who are hungry and not fed, those who are cold and not dressed,” he warned.
He could have easily added, “Those who are sick and do not receive treatment.” The shortcomings of American society, the ineptitude of American institutions, and the insidiousness of American priorities become terrifyingly clear as the federal government continues to spend hundreds of billions on weapons, but watch as doctors, nurses, and other workers patients are treated with COVID-19. without sufficient supplies of personal protective equipment.
Donald Trump’s lucid nightmare of the presidency may have been assisted by a Russian-led social media-led “fake news” campaign, but the effects of Putin’s schemes cannot be compared to the subversive influence of the repression of voters. Assaults on voting rights in Wisconsin prevented 200,000 voters, mostly poor and disproportionately black, from running the franchise in 2016. Republican officials in North Carolina, another decisive state, were brash enough to boast that their The crackdown campaign reduced voter turnout among black residents by 8.5 percent.
Meanwhile, the Supreme Court recently ruled in favor of what amounts to a voting tax that Florida officials will use to prevent former criminals from voting in 2020. Democrats could aggressively present the case for voting rights and try to expose how Republicans, often their own admission, win by preventing Democratic constituencies from casting votes. Instead, they have consistently followed Ian Fleming’s story of Russian sabotage.
When it comes to Kremlin-funded Facebook ads: Why are so many Americans gullible enough to believe outrageous or ridiculous lies? Putin did not degrade the public education system, removing civics, history, and social studies courses from the curricula, and did not create an anti-intellectual culture that leaves people susceptible to funny claims and rude lies.
Putin’s malevolent opposition to gay rights, his oppression of journalists and dissidents, and his encouragement to non-liberal parties around the world certainly make him an international villain. But the stance that everything went perfectly with American democracy before he and Julian Assange ruined it is intentional blindness and stupidity. As long as liberals become obsessed with Russia, they will remain unable or unwilling to face the growing crises in their own country.
Unless, of course, they are correct about all of this, and Putin is really responsible for America’s failure to competently respond to the coronavirus pandemic, its refusal to protect the voting rights of millions of its citizens, and their inability to provide basic social services and resources for the poor and the working class, while waging multiple wars without a clear purpose. But if Putin can do all of that with social media memes, wouldn’t that make the United States even weaker than it already seems?
