America Should Never Have Been a Superpower

I've told this joke before.  There are only two reasons the United States became the leader of the free world after the Second World War.  The first is that the United States was one of only two major countries that were not partially or completely destroyed by the war.  The second is that Canada didn't want the job.

Quite frankly, ascendancy by default is the only way that the U.S. could have become a superpower.  The United States in 1945 was no different the the United States before 1945 - that is, it was still a country where literature was defined by dime-store novels, where not one college or university had have produced a great mind equal to that of Darwin of Freud,  where prayer was still practiced in schools, where banning alcohol to strengthen morality had been tried only to lead to a violent crime wave,  and where the teaching of science outside the urban Northeast and Great Lakes region was still virtually nonexistent.

America simply doesn't have the wisdom and the maturity to be a world leader, let alone the world leader.  As Paul Fussell once noted, America, having not had an age of antiquity, a medieval period, or a Renaissance, was missing many if not most of the historical and cultural experience to sustain a civilized society.  I would add that one could argue the same about Canada and Australia, but those countries at least retained a connection with the British Crown.  Not even our connections to the Old World via immigration have given us a sense of history, philosophy or culture.  The average American of Italian origin knows no more about Dante than the average American of Chinese origin knows about Confucius, while the average American of German origin is . . . Donald Trump.   The biggest European or East Asian influences in American civilization tend to be culinary, as the preponderance of pizzerias and Chinese take-out joints suggest.  (Sometimes I think that the only ethnic groups in America that have a genuine appreciation for their deep cultural heritages are us Irish and the Jews, but only because our food is so terrible. 😉)  Also, the romanticization of immigration flies in the face of one inconvenient truth.  The immigrants who came to this country, all the way back to the Englishmen who settled it in the seventeenth century, were not the best and brightest from their lands but the dumbest and the dimmest; they were folks who couldn't make it back in the Old Country, so they came here were all things were equal and no one was better than anyone else.

It is all good and fine to say that, for all of the differences between Americans based on race, ethnicity, gender or religion, our experiment in representative government is what unites us, but the real entity that brings is together is money.  We all believe in the American Dream, the belief that we can get as far as out talents will take us, which usually means making lots of money.  We always applaud the plucky immigrant who comes here with nothing and makes something of himself by making lots of money - even Elon Musk, who came here with lots of money already and ended up making lots more money.  We celebrate pop stars and movie stars who come from nowhere with nothing and make lots of money - so what if their music or movies suck?  So what if we've had few authors, composers, artists, or filmmakers who compare to those of more intellectually endowed nations?  Especially when those few have never made a lot of money?  As the Israeli-born American philosopher Chaim Witz  - his childhood pals from Queens knew him as Eugene Klein - once said, no aesthetics exist aside from what people buy.  You know him as heavy-metal star Gene Simmons.    

A country that celebrates people known for making money - like Donald Trump - is not worthy of being a world leader.  A country with creationist theories based on the idea that humans and dinosaurs co-existed like on "The Flintstones" is not worthy of being a world leader.  A country that ranks 36th in literacy is not worthy of being a world leader.  A country where speaking aggressively into a microphone to a computerized beat is considered music is not worthy of being a world leader.  A country that celebrates James Patterson while real authors starve is not worthy of being a world leader.  A country known for producing movies based on comic-book characters is not worthy of being a world leader.  A country that lets its cities rot and fall apart and builds soulless, ugly, autocentric suburban sprawl in their place is not worthy of being a world leader.  A country that values style over substance is not worthy of being a world leader. And a country that declares its values and worth by electing and then, after a four-year hiatus, re-electing Donald J. Trump as its President is definitely not worthy of being a world leader.  

Like so many aspects of American history, World War II is badly taught in our schools, with many Americans coming away with the idea that this country saved Europe from itself and then assumed its rightful place as the world's most powerful nation because Europeans had fought each other into oblivion.  World War II - at least the European theater, the Pacific theater being another issue entirely - was the result of a thousand years of bitter rivalries between the various nationalities and alliances based on religious affiliations and familial disagreements over scarce land and scarcer resources.  Incidentally, all of this is what produced artists like Michelangelo, architecture like the Notre Dame Cathedral, philosophers like Descartes, and also the fairy-tale-reminiscent castles American tourists fall in love with and tightly knit villages and towns with streets as narrow as an office-building corridor that Americans find so charming.  Americans didn't just parachute into Europe and take over everything; D-Day was a collaboration with the British, and the liberation of France - which was accomplished in part by the French themselves, through the Resistance and the Free French forces - was augmented by the Soviet Red Army advancing to and entering Berlin from the east. And even as the United States was able to fight a war without any attack on the homeland, the British had to deal with air raids and V-2 rockets against their home ground, while the Soviet Union suffered a greater loss of civilian lives and property than any other nation in the war.

It would have been for the benefit of the United States and the entire world if American GIs in Europe had returned home with some knowledge and understanding of the Old World they fought to help (help) save and had wiped the American slate clean and started over with European cultural assumptions, just as Western Europe started over with American democratic assumptions, but American cultural assumptions persisted in the decades following the war in the form of Joe McCarthy, the John Birch Society, Levittowns, a racial caste system, a suppression of socialistic ideas, and the hypocritical addition of the words "under God" to the Pledge of Allegiance.  The rise of evangelical politics and supply-side economics led to Ronald Reagan, Wall Street, neoliberalism, and materialism.  The late 1960s and early 1970s were an exception - America under Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon endured violence, anarchy, and anger toward the scandal that was the war in Vietnam.  But that period also produced Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Jimi Hendrix, Neil Simon, and Martin Scorsese.  Bill Clinton presided over a period of peace and prosperity in the 1990s, and what did that produce? Hootie and the Blowfish.

Allusions to The Third Man aside, it's worth noting that America is no more immune to the tragedies of humanity than other countries, but our shallowness, our venality, and our complete disdain for intellectualism and wisdom allow us collectively deny how tragic life is, and that is how a nation as intellectually impoverished and as morally bankrupt as ours is stumbling to the end of its first quarter millennium with no guarantee that we can make it through another 250 years.  A nation with a major political party that denies climate change, after all, is not worthy of being a world leader.  So, alas, it seems appropriate that Donald Trump should return to lead this nation once again, and likely lead it to its downfall.  And yet we will still believe that America is great, if only because we're a topographically diverse, 3.8-million-square-mile land mass, a continent-sized nation of nation-sized states.  A continental nation, but not a Continental nation.

As I said before, I can't leave America, but I don't have to.  America left me.

Drilling For Ignorance

Maybe it's time for Republicans to lighten up on the energy debate.

With gasoline prices rising again, Republican presidential candidates are accusing President Obama of not doing enough to get prices in the opposite direction, suich as drilling for more oil. Obama shot back today in Miami, pointing out that his administration has drilled, baby, drilled - all over the place, with drilling increasing fourfold since he took office in January 2009. But with demand for oil in countries like China and India rising, Obama points out, gasoline prices are bound to go up based on global market demand. And generous subsidies still keep gasoline half as expensive as it is in European countries. If gasoline were sold in the United States at prices genuinely based on the free market that Republicans worship, we'd be paying as much as the French and the Germans.

Republicans, of course, are going to ignore these stubborn facts. They will also ignore the huge profits oil companies are raking in, as well as the fact that the U.S. now exports more oil than it imports - qualifying us for OPEC membership. They'll continue to insist on two-dollar-per-gallon gas. Of course, if we hadn't gotten addicted to big cars, if we had more mass transit, if Republican governors didn't keep canceling high-speed rail projects (as has happened twice in Florida in the past fifteen years), if more people could walk to work, and if more people could bike to work, as the mayor of Montclair, New Jersey does, how likely would Republicans even be starting conversations based on such asinine talking points? As I type, the House is pushing for dedicated spending for highways only, and mass transit projects like the Second Avenue Subway in New York City are aberrations rather than norm in this country.

Texas populist Jim Hightower once said that if ignorance were as valuable as oil, he'd want drilling rights on George Bush's head. He was referring to the elder George Bush. But if ignorance were as valuable as oil, the combined heads of both George Bushes wouldn't even pay half as many dividends as those of the four remaining candidates for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination.

By the way, I have a message for those who bitch about high gas prices but won't ride a bus: Get a subcompact. You'll find a subcompact more nimble and fun than your SUV. Get a Chevrolet Sonic, and help an American autoworker keep his job.

Be Very Afraid

Michele Bachmann is running for President.

That's the second scariest six-word sentence in the English language: Michele Bachmann is running for President.

The scariest six-word sentence in the English language would be this: Michele Bachmann has been elected President.

This dame makes Sarah Palin look like Margaret Chase Smith. Can you imagine America's fist female President to be a Tea Party Republican who equates President Obama's private-public hybrid health care law with socialism? How about a woman who thinks carbon dioxide is harmless? Or a woman who thought Lexington and Concord took place in New Hampshire? Okay, history isn't her best subject, you may say, and besides, she actually got her history right, she just screwed up her geography. Well, remember when she said the Founding Fathers worked tirelessly to eradicate slavery, like John Quincy Adams - who did work tirelessly to eradicate slavery but was not a Founding Father and died before slavery was eradicated?

And she advocates home schooling?

Or how about when she announced her presidential campaign in her hometown of Waterloo, Iowa yesterday and said she felt a kindred spirit with noted Waterloo favorite son John Wayne? Except that John Wayne was born in Winterset, Iowa on the other end of the state. But a similarly named fellow was a resident of Waterloo, Iowa - John Wayne Gacy, the serial killer who dressed as a clown and murdered 33 boys.

There was a dangerous clown in Waterloo, Iowa yesterday. Her name was Michele Bachmann.

Chris Matthews admires Bachmann's authenticity and loyal following and says the Democrats could be in trouble without any women in visible, politically powerful positions going into 2012. What? Because Chris Matthews is a women's rights advocate like Newt Gingrich is a family man, you really have to do a double take to consider what Matthews is suggesting - that Bachmann could appeal to soccer moms just because she's a woman. It's even more frightening that people support Bachmann because she's an idiot; her mistakes actually endear her supporters to her because she's like a member of their family to them. Namely, the crazy aunt in the attic.

Bachmann's chances? Small. No sitting House of Representatives member, like Bachmann is, has been elected President since James Garfield in 1880.

We should be glad she won re-election to the House in 2010. She'd have more time as a private citizen to devote to her campaign in she hadn't.

The United States of Stupid

Recently Bill Maher said on CNN, and again on his own HBO show, that America is a stupid country. And even though that got a lot of right-wingers angry, Maher was armed with plenty of evidence. Among the facts supporting his opinion:

Polls show that a majority of Americans cannot name a single branch of government, or explain the Bill of Rights.

Seventy percent of Americans thought in 2003 that Saddam Hussein was behind the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks on September 11, 2001. While it's now down to one out of three Americans (about 34 percent), that's still too high, and it corresponds with the number of people who still approved of George Walker Bush's job at the end of his Presidency.

Nearly a quarter of Americans could not name the country we fought in the American Revolution. (Well, we know it was an English-speaking country, that should give 'em a hint!)

Nearly half of Americans don’t know that each state has two senators, and more than half can’t name their own congressman.

A Gallup poll says 18% of Americans think the sun revolves around the earth, a theory disproved by Copernicus, a Polish astronomer - that's right, a dumb Polack! - in the sixteenth century.

And these are just statistics on what passes for common knowledge. Consider examples of America's dumbness in the big picture. Look at our living pattern. We spent the past sixty years and may spend another sixty years building human settlements that are accessible and easy to get around in by car, leaving no opportunity for public transportation and walking, as if everyone in America can own and drive a car. And what kind of vehicles do many of us drive? Big cars and SUVs, the kind of cars that Heinz Nordhoff, Volkswagen's CEO in the fifties and sixties, said had more power than could be used and "thus violate every principle of engineering and technical science."

Among other American feats of engineering are bridges that collapse and domed stadiums with roofs that cave in.

How about all the money invested in the athletic programs of colleges and universities, which made many of our institutions of higher education more expensive to attend because of all that overhead and turned them into health spas where literature and math are only occasionally studied? That's what makes Title IX in the 1972 Education Act an example of American stupidity. Instead of giving women more opportunities in scholastic athletics, why not give them more opportunities in education?

And don't get me started on our obsession with violence, from handguns to nuclear missile warheads. Or our belief that weapons keep the world safe. What other country could have developed a cannon in the 1840s (a faulty demonstration of which almost killed President John Tyler and did kill his Secretary of State) and a long-range missile in the 1980s and called both the "Peacemaker?"

It doesn't surprise me that Americans are so dumb. Back in 1987, high school seniors were polled on questions of common knowledge. Asked who wrote "The Grapes of Wrath," many said Ernest Hemingway. (It was John Steinbeck.) Asked who wrote "A Christmas Carol," many named the story's character, Ebenezer Scrooge, as the author. (It was British author Charles Dickens, who famously satirized Americans in one of his novels.) And many thought the Civil War began in 1492. Well, I got news for you; these high school seniors of the late eighties are adults on the edge of turning forty, and they're just as dumb. Their high school diplomas and, where applicable, their college degrees aren't worth the paper they're printed on.

And some of them may even vote.

Many of them have parents who oppose health care reform because they don't want the government taking over their Medicare plans.

We may be of different races, creeds and colors, but we Americans are uniformly dumb all over.