So you're proud to be an American

Born Again Evangelical Intelligent Design Creationists: Republican pro-lifers in favor of the death penalty. Joined by the Democrats for the latter. Two things about the death penalty; it costs the tax payer more than mandatory life without parole and we are the only industrialized country that keeps it legal.

Lets take a quick look at some of our foreign accomplishments.

Number of Sovereign Nation States Militarily Invaded: Lets see, Iraq twice, Afghanistan, Haiti, the-then-Yugoslavia, Panama, Granada, and Cambodia, not to mention North Vietnam and North Korea; that’s in my memory. You want to rationalize all of them, go ahead, be my guest. I’ll give you a couple at most.

Number of Sovereign Nation State Governments Subversively Overthrown: Twenty-eight sticks in my mind but I can not remember the book or the name of the author. Somebody out there help me. The point for foreign governments to remember is: don’t piss us off economically like trying to nationalize or regulate some of our international corporate business interests in your country. Don’t ask them to clean up any toxic environmental waste dumps in your country.

Nothing much has changed since Major General Smedley Butler, the most decorated Marine in U.S. history, wrote in 1935 following his retirement:

“I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street, and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer , a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912. I brought light to the Dominical Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents."

The Bush Administration Foreign Policy Overall: Impeachable, enough said.

All of this has pretty much accelerated during the last 7 plus years but all of it during the last 3-4 decades. All of this under the leadership of both Republicans and Democrats. Just how much of the above makes you proud?

There was much to make you proud to be an American during the earlier 3 decades from the 1940s through the 1960s. That was a period when the Democratic party fairly represented the majority of the American peoples needs and dreams.

In 1973 middle class income peaked, while poverty was declining. Since then the Democratic party sold out to corporate and other special interests, economically joined the interests of the Republican party, and forgot about social justice and economic equality.

Look at the agenda and platforms of third party presidential candidates Ralph Nader and Cynthia McKinney. Both would begin the process of rebuilding our faith and pride in America. Neither, of course, will win the election. Nevertheless, a vote for either will tell the current duopoly where you stand and what you believe in.

A vote for either of the current duopoly is a vote for what? At best, its no more than choosing between the lesser of two evils and you will have forgone the opportunity to try and get the Democrat party to hear your voice, to change, to give up on favoritism for the corporate bunch and the super-rich, and to revert to its earlier position of favorably representing and responding to the needs and dreams of the majority of the American people. It is, I think, the only possibly way to recapture the essence of an earlier America that Chris Hedges discussed so eloquently in opening his keynote address on Wednesday, May 28 at 7 p.m. in Furman University’s Younts Conference Center. To quote:

“I used to live in a country called America. It was not a perfect country, God knows, especially if you were African-American or Native American or of Japanese descent in World War II or poor or gay or a woman or an immigrant, but it was a country I loved and honored. This country gave me hope that it could be better. It paid its workers wages that were envied around the world. It made sure these workers, thanks to labor unions and champions of the working class in the Democratic Party and the press, had health benefits and pensions. It offered good public education. It honored basic democratic values and held in regard the rule of law, including international law, and respect for human rights. It had social programs from Head Start to welfare to Social Security to take care of the weakest among us, the mentally ill, the elderly and the destitute. It had a system of government that, however flawed, was dedicated to protecting the interests of its citizens. It offered the possibility of democratic change. It had a media that was diverse and endowed with the integrity to give a voice to all segments of society, including those beyond our borders, to impart to us unpleasant truths, to challenge the powerful, to explain ourselves to ourselves. I am not blind to the imperfections of this America, or the failures to always meet these ideals at home and abroad. I spent 20 years of my life in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East and the Balkans as a foreign correspondent reporting in countries where crimes and injustices were committed in our name, whether during the Contra war in Nicaragua or the brutalization of the Palestinians by Israeli occupation forces. But there was much that was good and decent and honorable in our country. And there was hope. The country I live in today uses the same words to describe itself, the same patriotic symbols and iconography, the same national myths, but only the shell remains. America, the country of my birth, the country that formed and shaped me, the country of my father, my father’s father, and his father’s father, stretching back to the generations of my family that were here for the country’s founding, is so diminished as to be nearly unrecognizable. I do not know if this America will return, even as I pray and work and strive for its return. The ‘consent of the governed’ has become an empty phrase. Our textbooks on political science are obsolete. Our state, our nation, has been hijacked by oligarchs, corporations and a narrow, selfish political elite, a small and privileged group which governs on behalf of moneyed interests. We are undergoing, as John Ralston Saul wrote, ‘a coup d’etat in slow motion.’ We are being impoverished-legally, economically, spiritually and politically. And unless we soon reverse this tide, unless we wrest the state away from corporate hands, we will be sucked into the dark and turbulent world of globalization where there are only masters and serfs, where the American dream will be no more than that-a dream, where those who work hard for a living can no longer earn a decent wage to sustain themselves or their families, whether in sweat shops in China or the decaying rust belt of Ohio, where democratic dissent is condemned as treason and ruthlessly silenced.”

To summarize what I hear from Hedges’ eloquence is this: there was an America that was my America, I yearn for it’s return.

Those who have taken it from us are unlikely to return it to us.

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