We did it a little at a time, selling ourselves unthinkingly in small transactions and somewhere we went over the line. The scales tipped and we became a nation characterizable by our inability to stand on our own and take care of ourselves except militarily, what you expect from an exploitative nation. And our creditors could pull the plug on us instantly.
How sad this is. I never bought American exceptionalism. I look at our history and see all kinds of complexity underlying the lies my teachers told me, with varying aspects of culpability and confusion but, man, you really can't know how much you love something until you lose it. I loved the hope and openness and optimism of the old America so much.
My heart aches indescribably for it. The bogus idealism of the American ruling class sickens me. The thing that plagues us is us. It's not radical Islam or welfare mothers or a loss of values, as it's portrayed, but the abandonment of an authentic, national sense of self. The secessionists and corporate conquistadors have it wrong on rightness.
Imperfection doesn't invalidate your ideals. No one ever lives in the land of platonic forms but ideals need to have some connection with reality or it all ends in compensation, the buying off of inauthenticity with dissimulation and self-righteousness The platonic form of a sofa is not Sasquatch but a sofa, a sofa which looks like those Africans.
They found the tribe there most closely embodying the original genetic makeup of our species. In photos there are hints of everyone in these people, just as the platonic form of anything is its anythingness. A representative government may be a sorryass representation of the ideal but it should at least be recognizably a representative government.
It shouldn't look like a Yeti, but ours is a Yeti, failing to embody the minimum identifiable attributes of the thing it is supposed to be. Suddenly, there comes to mind for me the Declaration of Independence and the Preamble to the Constitution. When in the course of events a thing ceases to function as the thing it is supposed to be you do something.
Such as throw it out and replace it or modify it into compliance with the applicable standards, such as "of, by and for the people." The schismatics won't have it. The new puritans don't believe in "we the people," those few exceptionally powerful words declaring us to be an independent group of common purpose and destiny. There's no inclusive "we."
Not for them. They are about exclusion. By poverty, race, bad luck, age, illness or other imperfection. Less for us is more for them, evidently. You can be inside the happy zone one day and outside the next, and to hell with you if you are. They'll make it as hard as possible to get back in. But "we the people" is our American way of being, an essential element of our identity.
Inclusion. I wrote a paper for a class in economic thought in 1982 attacking Milton Friedman on these grounds, that the imperfection of your theories doesn't invalidate theorizing. Those Chicago economists were positivists: fatalists, skeptics and nihilists, really, as opposed to being normative. Standards were too fuzzy for them in the face of efficiency, their grail.
It's not a failure to admit failure but a sign of strength. If an inclusive "we" means owning our imperfections it's good. You can't achieve perfection by walling off anything. It's schizophrenic and unattainable anyway because you unavoidably try to wall off aspects of yourself as you mistakenly see them in other people. What you don't see is the denial and compulsion.
The insanity of purporting perfection. Our strength as Americans has always been realism and practicality and the willingness to act responsibly as a people in the long term interests of everyone. It has defined us and worked. It's crazy to throw it away so, I say, embrace the imperfection and just say no to the horror of perfectionism.
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