The “American Psyche” After Iraq

March 3, 2007

It will take at least another three to five years before the U.S. will retreat from Iraq. The four big bases are mostly finished and staffed and the U.S. elite will not be willing to give up that strategic gain.

But on a longer term, I do not believe that the U.S. will sustain that project because the public will be further alienated by it and because the financial consequences will start to show up in everyday life.

After a retreat from Iraq the financial problems will mostly be solved by the U.S. strongarming the G7 or G8 into a new Plaza Accord, i.e. a massive devaluation of the U.S. Dollar.

But what is going to happen to the "American psyche", its "victory culture", after a retreat from Iraq.

Ira Chernus, a Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder, has published his thoughts on this in Asia Times Online and at Tom Dispatch and comes to a quite frightening perspective: After Iraq, the U.S. will turn more nationalistic, militaristic and imperialistic.

Being only a U.S. observer, I have too little real recent experience with the "American mind" – most readers here have more. So let us know your opinion on the chance of this to happen.

Some excerpts from Cernus’ piece:

Remember the "Vietnam syndrome", which made its appearance soon after the actual war ended in defeat. It did restrain the US appetite for military interventions overseas – but only briefly. By the late 1970s, it had already begun to boomerang. Conservatives denounced the syndrome as evidence of a paralyzing, Vietnam-induced surrender to national weakness. Their cries of alarm stimulated broad public support for an endless military buildup and, of course, yet more imperial interventions.
…
Ronald Reagan played all these notes skillfully enough to become president of the US. The desire to "cure" the Vietnam syndrome became a springboard to unabashed, militant nationalism and a broad rightward turn in the life of the United States.
…
Iraq – both the war and the "syndrome" to come – could easily evoke a similar set of urges: to evade a painful reality and ignore the lessons it should teach the US.
…
The ambivalence lurking in the polls suggests that many Americans want it both ways. The war should end quickly, but somehow with victory culture if not still burning brightly, at least flickering, as the birthright Americans demand.
…
the US public will be told that Iraq, too, was just an aberration, a well-intentioned war handled with a staggering level of incompetence that simply got out of control. Those who don’t want to repeat the experience, who prefer to try other paths to global security, will be told they are infected with the Iraq syndrome. And the prescription for a cure will inevitably be military buildup, imperial war and, of course, the possibility of both "kicking" the Iraq syndrome and welcoming US troops home in the sort of triumph they so richly deserve.

Posted by b on March 3, 2007 at 20:38 UTC | Permalink

Comments

Thanks b. these pieces have it just right. America right now, is in another bout with delusion. Too many of us have given up on right or wrong in favor of self-deception.

Posted by: Ben | Mar 3 2007 21:27 utc | 1

The United States are the United States of America, a very large continent but the American mind has by a rhetorical trope meant the part by the whole. USA is profoundly nationalistic, everything within itself is as good as it is possible. The topmost good is in the Anglosaxon group a group that merely is, while the rest are hyphenated Americans. The whites are unadjectivized but the rest is somewhat contaminated. Obama is said to be black though his mother was white, but the whiteness is lost as soon as it is mixed with anything else. The whole sociology of the country is addressed towards showing that those that are not pure white have some lack. When television addresses the problem of education it is always the black child or the aboriginal American that it is shown to be in need of further improvement or complete assimilation, that is act as a good Anglosaxon. Nationalism is patently displayed in the taste for sports, baseball and football are American and they command exquisite attention. Hockey that is inherited from Canada commands much less attention. When two American teams play with each other it is the World Series. When Americans want to buy some food they obtain it as decimal fractions of a pound. To switch to kilograms would be to yield to the foreigner. To adopt a universal health care system would again be to yield to the foreigner so we have a system of incredible complexity but that averts having to acknowledge state intervention, though at bottom all health care is paid for by the Federal Government, and keep basking on the thought of personal reponsibility and initiative. The word foreign is so loaded with negative intimations that now the word is never used and instead “international” is used. The world has to be shaped on the American model. Nowhere it is seen better than in the enormous effort of Protestants to convert Catholics in Iberian America into their various groupings but all of them American. Even the Episcopal church is rent by the desire of Americans to impose their views on Anglicans. No disease is native to the Unites States, there is the Asian flu, the Mediterranean fly, HIV is from Africa, the Spanish flu and so on. To think that Americans are going to change their opinion of themselves is silly. The country is the supreme country, its religion is really Americanism, it is the City on the Hill and so on.

Posted by: jlcg | Mar 3 2007 21:43 utc | 2

the city on the hill has burnt to the ground. some time ago. & the pornographic politics of the empire can only be enacted through force, harm & negligence
the house on the hill burnt down to the ground when wild bill donovan imagined himself real & created societies that were written in the illussion of america
& donovan’s america was not that of melville or of hawthorne, of dos passos or of dreiser, of f scott fitzgerald or of james agee
perhaps the politics of north america has always been closer to poe than to that of poetry
if an american idealism existed – it was pronounced dead when hart crane jumped into the waters & never came back
america was whatever was happening inside the heads of ezra pound & robert lowell
the so called ideologues of north america – on left or right – so comforted by their certitudes & their belief they were the new rome that they could not see they were nothing other than the ejaculation of european intellectuals, german intellectuals – for the most part nazi intellectuals – heidegger, schmitt & all the other hollow men who wrapped themselves around the phillip johnson fascism of the so called youthful america & after that fools whether they were named daniel bell, bloom, skinner or huntington imagined themselves – the new philosopher kings
but they were a joke, a bad joke that the really powerful – whether their name was hearst or murdoch laughed at all the way to the bank
& what the new america – the america of joe mcarthy, jessie helms or tom delay – was able to manipulate perfectly, more perfectly than any society before it – even more than nazi germany & stalin’s russia – was & remains fear. fear. fear pure & vulgar.
the nazis took death to a whole other level but the ingeneous america has gone much further – it buys & sells fear on every level. it has so impregnated its culture it has spread elsewhere like the plague
america for a long time has not been a society of ideas but a society in fear of ideas
j k galbraith understood it perfectly. it is what informs the writing of a blumenthal & it is that which dominates the hysteric but realist voice of paul craig roberts
the real america existed for ten minutes in a nightclub in new york in the 1920’s when the haunted jelly roll morton played on stage & a couple in the audience spoke genteely of henry james, america was somewhere in those epochal hangovers of f scott but the most clear & perfect understanding came in the form of two films – the marx brother’s ‘duck soup’ & the social realism of charlie laughton’s ‘the night of the hunter’

Posted by: r’giap | Mar 3 2007 22:09 utc | 3

@jlcg:

In other words, America is basically just like China, or England, or India, or Islam, or Rome, or France, at the peak of their respective empires, allowing for differences of available technology and fill-in-the-blank-with-ethnicity. Chill out.

What will happen when we leave Iraq? On the one hand, the “Vietnam Syndrome” didn’t last long. On the other hand, though, the ghost of Iraq will be hovering there, no matter how little is said, the next time someone proposes an invasion. A lot will depend on whether the Bush administration merely leaves office, or is thoroughly discredited, which means in actual fact that a lot will depend on how much the failures of the Bush administration filter down to the average American during the next two years.

Posted by: The Truth Gets Vicious When You Corner It | Mar 3 2007 22:14 utc | 4

@Truth – 4
the “Vietnam Syndrome” didn’t last long
If I get Cernus’ argument right, war on Iraq is part of the Vietnam syndrom.

Posted by: b | Mar 3 2007 22:42 utc | 5

@b:

Usually, when people use the term “Vietnam Syndrome”, they mean the reluctance to invade which started as a result of losing the war in Vietnam. As I recall, Reagan wanted to go to the mideast as Bush has in fact done, but was told by his various advisors that he couldn’t because of the Vietnam Syndrome. (And instead we went to Grenada and funded a bunch of evil proxies around the world, including the whole Iran-Contra mess.) Cernus may be using the term differently, but by the more common meaning, it’s really a backlash against the V.S., not the V.S. itself.

Posted by: The Truth Gets Vicious When You Corner It | Mar 4 2007 0:26 utc | 6

TTGV..@4
A cohesive nation requires a sense of superiority together with the possibility of salvation through its own mechanisms. That is religion, and in the USA there is a profound sense of religious Americanism. There is nothing wrong with that but it is silly to imagine that our lives would be different if we only wished them to be different without actually modifying our lives. War is the supreme manifestation of nationhood and it is an opinion validated by all the wars that have been fought. War is bad but it is a fact. War is a fantastic mechanism of social change. Can you imagine that women would have reached the level of development they have attained if the First General War had not killed so many young men that woman’s labor would be necessary an that necessity would carry with it all the rights of regular citizens? Didn’t the most recent General War bring about the disappearance of certain empires and the creation of others? I tried in my note to show some of the characters that make up religious Americanism. Within that religion there are dissidents and heretics but the general tenor of the nation is not that difficult to portray.

Posted by: jlcg | Mar 4 2007 0:31 utc | 7

Religious Americanism is an abstraction, albeit a very central one. But remember that America also doesn’t make very many things anymore, other than military stuff: planes and tanks and ships and “systems” have become a core of the economy, just as they were of the Soviet economy. To keep the economy humming you have to make more of those things. To justify funding that production, you have to keep expending the products. Supply and Demand theory leaves America little choice but to continue militaristic adventurers that can only be sold on the dogma of exceptionalism. The taste for sport helps here as well: “so we’ve lost a few games – we’re still leading the league”. The Victory Culture will, unfortunately, survive unchastened.

Posted by: Allen/Vancouver | Mar 4 2007 1:51 utc | 8

If I remember , it was 41 who in his speech concluding the first gulf war who exclaimed “the Vietnam syndrome is over”, and harkening in the equally implicit “new world order”.

Posted by: anna missed | Mar 4 2007 1:55 utc | 9

Unfortunatly, a central tenet of americanism or exceptionalism is that much of it is grounded, almost unconsciously, in liberalism and enlightenment theory. This makes it difficult to throttle as a matter of cultural identity, especially if you’re relying on liberals to do the job.

Posted by: anna missed | Mar 4 2007 2:10 utc | 10

I put Vietnam syndrome and Iraq syndrome into my supercomputer and it spit out Enron syndrome.

Posted by: pb | Mar 4 2007 6:29 utc | 11

You know you’ve hit upon a superb thread topic when you get R’Giap to expound…

Posted by: jj | Mar 4 2007 6:38 utc | 12

I suppose that the answer will be found in how the blame for the failure is apportioned.
If the line, “We would’ve won if…” can be sold again, there’ll be another orgy of finger pointing at native “fifth columnists,” the new Hanoi Jane’s of Iraq, and renewed calls for America to show its stuff. Presumably, this jingoistic dream of collective empowerment will find it first demonstrations when the teeth are kicked out of some no-account country like Grenada, Poland or Ethiopia. At that point, the country will be back on the road to fascism.
Since the other possibility involves too many conditionals (the US had no business reinventing the Brezhnev doctrine, for starts), I can’t even express it succinctly. Its very complexity, I suppose, makes it the least likely. Hopefully, however, it will come to pass and the people of this country will spend some time cleaning up their own mess rather than trying to pump themselves up by dominating others.

Posted by: bcgister | Mar 4 2007 7:13 utc | 13

I’ll be waiting to hear from the G.I.’s returning from Iraq about how those damned antiwar pinkos “spat on me at the airport and called me ‘babykiller’ and didn’t give me a tickertape parade and I only got four new national holidays”… while simultaneously defending the prowar administration who slashed their VA benefits. C’est plus la change… and you know the rest.
And since traumatic brain injuries are the signature wounds of the Iraq War, the “American Psyche” promises to get twisted in all the predictable ways and then some for the next generation or so.

Posted by: Monolycus | Mar 4 2007 7:32 utc | 14

There are strong influences toward fascism in our national character. One is the organized Christian religion itself, which has been a religion of empire since Constantine put it on the map originally. Another is our militarized manufacturing economy, which increasingly puts all our financial eggs in the armaments basket — we need to use up those weapons to create the jobs to make some more. War is a wonderful way to foster fascism.
Another is our national myth, ‘our story.’ We are the first and foremost, the free-est and finest people ever to walk the earth, as proven by our leading the world in every category of civilization for the past sixty years. Another is our ingrown, even incestuous, racism. Our rejection of the other, the outsider, even the barely discernible ones born in our midst.
What I find most pernicious about these tendencies, and others, is that it is so hard to turn away from them. One does not “un-become” any of these things without a complete reassessment of identity, whether individual or national.
The one glimmer of hope ahead lies in the inevitable foundering of the fantastical American economy, since it is only economic pain that will force reassessment upon this delusional population.

Posted by: Antifa | Mar 4 2007 8:10 utc | 15

@Antifa #15
I do not disagree with any particular point in your assessment… I would go so far as to say that it is more than “hard to turn away from them”. These values permeate the culture; they are ubiquitous and self-reinforcing. It is a culture of artful denial… where an otherwise rational man can write the words “..all men are created equal” while retaining the ownership of some of these “equal men”. The national schizophrenia is based upon the rationalization of so many underlying hypocrisies that it could not result in anything apart from “fascism” as you called it. It can not be questioned too deeply and still maintain its integrity, so an authoritarian psychology must result to jealously protect the fundamental illusions. The United States is not unique in this respect.
This is why I have said before that travel is indispensable for us if we want to prevent our minds from ossifying. It is also why I think that the more authoritarian a society becomes, the less internally consistent it is, the more it restricts its citizen’s right to travel. I have detested defending myself from other people’s baggage about the fact that I am “American”, but I have understood it. I’ve had to re-evaluate my appraisals regarding how “noble” and “liberal” other nations are in the process. It cuts both ways.
I don’t know how key a role Christianity plays in this… I believe that fundamentalism is probably the greater culprit here. I am Buddhist myself, though hardly fundamentalist about that. I do agree with the Buddha that we must abandon the familiar before we can grow. The view of a culture changes fairly drastically with a little distance between it and oneself.

Posted by: Monolycus | Mar 4 2007 8:47 utc | 16

One good thing about the Vietnam syndrome redux in Iraq is that the bush administration has used exceptionalism explicitly to define the the imperial mission in Iraq. Unlike the specifically political/ideological i.e. communism/capitalism paradigm used in Vietnam, the current conflict is underwritten in democracy/freedom as a directive from god as intrepretated by the president. Thus, the enterprise is itself predicated on a deep structural level of american exceptionalism — as opposed to a simple ideological grounding. Its the president himself who has chosen to define the war on terror, for lack of a real and formidable enemy, as an intrinsic cultural struggle, that brings to bear all the identity issues implied in the american character. Its no coincidence that the administration has employed the liberal argument of bringing democracy/freedom to the oppressed as the central polemic of disarming criticism — “of course the Iraqi’s desire our freedom, and to think otherwise is to be simply a racist” — so that the imperial project becomes synoymous with and a harbinger of enlightenment.
The problem with such an outlook, and the potential cultural blowback that Chernus warns about, is that because the rehtoric has reached such an intrinsic level of american identity is that failure in Iraq, unlike the failure in Vietnam, is that the very character of “americanism” is called into question if not jeopardy, and may ellicit in its wake a more virulent and unabashed offspring. That because the bush administration has actually used the “americanism” impulse to in effect to destroy it — there remains the potential of just despensing with its more idealistic manifestations in favor of a rote realist perspective of the out and out fascism of the glass parkinglot crowd. Which of course, could garner even more insane support were it to be accompanied with the economic crash thats likely to follow the identity defeat in loosing the war on terror. That could be the final turn of events transforming the national identity.
And without a doubt the beginning of another civil war.

Posted by: anna missed | Mar 4 2007 9:43 utc | 17

I read an essay by Chris Hedges that sent a chill down my spine.
Christianists on the March
I don’t want to seem alarmist, but… I have been imagining the coming economic crisis in America, and perhaps the world, as having a “silver lining”. A perennial human failing perhaps. I thought, everyone hates change and it will take the disintegration of the present status quo to disrupt people’s lives so much that we finally will take charge of our government again and put it back on track.
But Chris Hedges take the opposite view. He imagines that things will get much worse when the financial meltdown occurs. And it occurs to me now that he may well be right.

Posted by: John Francis Lee | Mar 4 2007 14:16 utc | 18

thanks for the link JFL, nice to see you back
awesome thread btw..

Posted by: annie | Mar 4 2007 15:31 utc | 19

Welcome back, JFL! I’ve been concerned about you… after the Bangkok bombs, I hadn’t heard anything from your direction.
Anyway, I am glad to see that you are still around and hope you’ve been well. Thanks for the Hedges essay… although I wouldn’t call that good news.

Posted by: Monolycus | Mar 4 2007 16:13 utc | 20

anna missed said something in comment # 10 about American exceptionalism being based implicitly on the theories of enlightenment, democratic liberalism and so on. I’d like to give my testimony on that.
Enlightenment theory says you should sweep away superstition and myth and so on, and use your natural reason. And what you get so often in the US debate is this: “I don’t know anything about … but it seems to me evident that…” That’s why, to take the particular case of Mideast policy, the big-name opinionators not only don’t know any Arabic language or history and don’t canvass areas where you could find out about some of the Arab-related discussions. For a long time I thought that was laziness, but in fact its a manifestation of what anna missed said: They’re enlightened Americans. They feel no need of anything other than their “natural reason”. It isn’t just ignorance, it’s punk ignorance that says: It’s good I don’t know anything about conditions in the region, because it would only cloud the exercise of my natural American reason.

Posted by: Badger | Mar 4 2007 20:08 utc | 21

The US has not failed in Iraq. The oil is more or less locked up, if not today, then tommorow. Iraq is smashed, the 4 or more bases will stay there for ever, controlling the country. Puppet Gvmts. will revolve. Breezy doors, air and dollars flutter, flights to London will continue.
The poor Iraqis who could not flee will be -are already- doomed to live in failed state, the new kind, with propaganda TV and cell phones and water that kills babies, closed schools, bad food, gunmen and criminals in the streets, hospitals that are bloody battlefields, rats in their homes, kidnapping a national pastime. The new Palestinians. (Not quite. There are differences.) No viable economy of their own. Australian wheat, medecines as gifts, past their sell date, from the west, imported gas and kerosene, no work, no agri. And the West frowning about all those terrorists, sectarian strife, etc.

Posted by: Noirette | Mar 4 2007 20:21 utc | 22

There is an article in Rolling Stone magazine by Matt Taibbi that describes a link between a US soldier’s loss of humanity and America’s corrosive war economy.

“A country that feeds itself through manufacture of war technology is bound to view peace, nonviolence and mercy as seditious concepts. It will create policies first and then people to fit its machines, finding wars to fight and creating killers to fight them

As evidence for this thesis, Taibbi gives the example of the letter of a Marine airman, which was sent home, describing the man’s self-confessed euphoria at killing Iraqis from his F-18 jet fighter:

“The fellas from 121 started showing up the other day. It’s starting to sink in…I’ll have to go home, the opportunities to kill these fuckers is rapidly coming to an end. Like a hobby I’ll never get to practice again. It’s not a great war, but it’s the only one we’ve got. God, I do love killing these bastards…Morale is high, the Marines can smell the barn. It’s hard to keep them focused. I still have 20 days of kill these motherfuckers, so I don’t wanna take even one day off. “

Such deranged personalities will eventually find their way back home, where history shows they are quite often unable to cope with social norms in their own backyards. America exports destruction and imports the resulting pathologies, traumatic injuries, along with cycles of rage and confusion, hyper-vigilance, despair.
Vietnam Syndrome/Iraq Syndrome? I can only hope the American public comes to wiser conclusions this time around. All the vainglory and the misguided “culture of victory” and the imaginary reality created around this war has been the doing of a criminal administration and the corporate media that fawned over Bush/Cheney and their brutal project. I hope the people don’t forget that.

Posted by: Copeland | Mar 4 2007 20:56 utc | 23

Americans love war the way they love football: They love to watch it, they want to win, and the actual work and risk of it is for others.
If their team loses they get very cranky and start talking about firing managers.
The players (soldiers) really don’t signify. We cheer them, and nowadays, stick yellow ribbons on our cars, but when a bullet or a bomb takes them out of the action, its good luck, buddy! The Walter Reed Hospital scandal is nothing new. We have already had the scandal of no-body-armor, and in previous wars we had the scandals of Agent Orange and Depleted Uranium. (We still have that last one.) The peaceniks always get accused of spitting on the troops, but this is bogus: We are constant–we just want them to quit. It is the boosters that are gungho until the troops are no longer useful, and then it is drop them in the dumpster and forget! And start thinking about the next war.
The obvious cure is one that I obviously cannot recommend. Americans will lose their taste for war when they experience it the way Europeans did in the 20th century–by losing livelyhoods, homes, and family members. I do not mean losing someone you know (everyone lost someone they knew in Vietnam–it wasn’t enough!) I don’t mean 9/11–that was theater: We lose more people every year in traffic accidents. I mean when war walks through the front door into the living room and suddenly what is on TV is not so important anymore, then people will start to consider that war is bad.

Posted by: Gaianne | Mar 4 2007 21:04 utc | 24

Thanks for the link Copeland. I’m always happy to see “Kucinich” in print.
Also.
Try to imagine future road rage when they do come home. Something Madmaxian…

Posted by: beq | Mar 4 2007 22:39 utc | 25

@JFL – we’ve all been concerned about you. Would you give us an update – were you just busy elsewhere, or … I wondered if Thai ISPs got censored, or you were ill, or…. Anyway, yr. presence was missed…
By the bye, Chris has new bk. out on the subject – inspired by/dedicated to one of his Theology Prof. @Harvard – an elderly chap who informed them that in 21st cen. they would be fighting Theocrats – he was way ahead of his time. I’ve been waiting to see if bk. gets publicity it deserves, or if subj. too taboo for Wall St. Propaganda system.

Posted by: jj | Mar 5 2007 0:10 utc | 26

Posted by: jj | Mar 5 2007 0:11 utc | 27

Sorry, that was system screwup. I hit post, then got anti-spam system, entered code there & hit post again. It double posted… 🙁

Posted by: jj | Mar 5 2007 0:12 utc | 28

one of the saddest elements of the american illussion is that they believe their own fox fed propaganda
so today with tthe bombing of afghani citizens – that on all evidence was an allmighty fuck-up – they & their dogs recount a story that clearly isn’t true, in fact has no truth in it (it is a sub television narrative of people getting caught in crossfire – a clumsy retelling of the israelis killing lebanese citizens because hezbollah were firing from inside orphanages, old people’s homes, etc) but by the end of the daily news cycle they believe it
& that grotesque little golem wolf blitzer says it like it is scripture
they recount this bullshit to themselves & they beleive it but what they do not understand, what they clearly do not understand that with each crime the incremental increase in the fight against us military force becomes greater & more profound, becomes more multiple
it is clear that in iraq & in afghanistan but also in africa & in pakistan – the infrastructure of radical islam cannot cope with the enormous number of people coming to them to either seek martyrdom or simply a change of circumstance
& that is the real story – the immensity of the movement against imperialism & its increasing mastery of the conditions – it is learning to fight under

Posted by: remembereringgiap | Mar 5 2007 1:13 utc | 29

once upon a time

Posted by: remembereringgiap | Mar 5 2007 1:21 utc | 30

Sadly, I’m totally with Gaianne on that one.
When a country has gone so deep down the toilet-militarism and nationalism, there’s only one cure, and it’s a bitter, nasty bloody one. Complete military humiliation. As long as the US hasn’t suffered something the scope of the French collapse in 1940, *including military occupation by a foreign power*, or casualties well beyond the 10 mio mark in some awful war, the USA will simply not give away its tendencies for exceptionalism and lording over the rest of the world.
By looking at European history, we can see it required 2 world wars and bloody revolutions with the total casualties being close to 100 mio before most of it was cured of warfare – and only for some decades. Heck, it wasn’t even enough for some European countries, most notably those who were the less invovled in WWII – UK being the clearest example, but Aznar’s Spain being up there. (in case you though you misunderstood me, yes, I definitely imply that, if it was fine and good in the short term for UK to be just merely fire-bombed, having a good chunk of the country butchered/burned to the ground/occupied for years *might* have produced a better outcome for the very long-term of the country, because it would have destroyed for real any dream of empire)

Posted by: CluelessJoe | Mar 5 2007 8:08 utc | 31

Annie, Monolycus, jj,
It’s nice to hear that you think of me. I’m fine. Thailand is a dictatorship. So is the US. Not much new politically, except that as Noirette points out, what we had feared has already come to pass.
I write to “my” senators, Hutchison and Corynyn. Hah. My Congressman, Solomon Ortiz, doesn’t even have an email address. I’m a bit alienated, politically.
I’m pursuing life here in Thailand. We’re changing house. I’ll be commuting out to a village primary school again next term. I’d taken the last term off.
At this stage I’ve chosen to pursue a life among ordinary people in parallel to the hell on earth that is politics of any sort. No intersections other than the daily letter to the editor here in Thailand. That’ll stop too next term. The sound of one hand clapping.
The alternative would be to return to the US, which is the only country in which I am enfranchised, and become a sandwhich man in the capital, or occupy a Congessional office. So bankrupt is the organized political machinery that direct political action by the individual seems the only course left unpursued. It may come to that. I don’t imagine I would last long if I did return. And I’m not planning to do so.
The human race is a big disappointment. Individual humans are the source of life’s pleasures. It’s a bitter pill to swallow. Or was. I’ve swallowed it.
Keep well yourselves. I enjoy reading you all if not writing too much myself these days.

Posted by: John Francis Lee | Mar 5 2007 15:17 utc | 32

“The human race is a big disappointment. Individual humans are the source of life’s pleasures.”
I’m also glad to see your voice again.
I hope it’s not all as desperate as this yet. We can always reach out to as many individuals as we can. Imagine if b didn’t have this place open for us and how many individuals are touched here who wouldn’t be otherwise. Not much incouragement, I know, but never give up JFL.

Posted by: beq | Mar 5 2007 17:41 utc | 33

Please keep posting JFL. You were missed.

Posted by: Bea | Mar 5 2007 20:23 utc | 34

There was once militant British exceptionalism. I don’t know the catch phrase for it. There was once militant French exceptionalism, it was the “civilizing mission”. Both of them survived WW2 enough for Suez, Algeria, Malaysia, Kenya, Vietnam, and I don’t know what else to happen, so I don’t think that experiencing WW2 firsthand is the whole story. I think the truth also includes a sobering up of the elites of these countries that they simply didn’t have the economic/cultural might to play that role anymore. 16th century Spain broke itself on a Catholicizing mission. German elites went a different path but with a similar sense of mission. In every case nothing but (relative) economic/physical weakness/ruin ended the exceptionalism. From this view US exceptionalism will similarly morph into something less militant if and when it ceases being perceived as a sign of robust national health to the ptb.
When the implications of being dropped into a common labor market with the third world billions (amid increasing competition for scarce energy) can no longer be papered over with debt, the resulting anger will be a wild card not present in post colonial Europe. Grandiose distractions like exceptional national missions will be functional domestically in a way that they were not in 1950s Britain and France.

Posted by: boxcar mike | Mar 6 2007 2:55 utc | 35

Everything posted above was very interesting, most of it quite accurate. It can all be summed up in two words: Manifest Destiny. These two words can be used to justify anything that has ever been done by America, good, bad or otherwise. American children have this ideal force fed to them all the way through the school system. Until this concept is completely discredited and abandoned, we will continue doing as we’ve always done.

Posted by: mikefromtexas | Mar 9 2007 4:36 utc | 36

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