Tag Archives: exceptionalism

Critique of American Exceptionalism published today by MinnPost

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MINNPOST published “In the 2012 race for the White House, Is religion fair game?” this morning. Click THIS LINK to read the piece on MinnPost.com.

The first commenter on MinnPost didn’t like it. Here’s the comment:

September 5, 2012 – 8:21am.

but you’ve overlooked the obvious.

This nation was founded on the principle of religious liberty.  The Declaration of Independence mentions God four times and describes the uniqueness of America in that, unlike Europe, where power flows from God to the Throne to the People, in America “we are endowed by our Creator” … power flows from God to the people and then to government.

The issue of religion in this campaign hasn’t been about whether the Mormon practice of tithing is one this society should consider adopting (“If 10% is good enough for God it should be good enough for government.”  -  Romney gave $4 million to the church last year) or whether Obama’s connection to black liberation theology and its demand for “social justice” is compatible with a free society.  No, it’s been more basic than that.

When Paul Ryan reminded us in his acceptance speech that “our rights come from God,” leftwing websites and TV talking heads took issue with that.  Some even expressed outrage as if they’ve never read the Declaration.  They insisted that our rights come not from God but from Government!

And as if to formalize their party’s transition to secular humanism this week, we’ve learned that the democrats have removed any mention of God from their party platform.

So the discussion of religion IS fair game in this election, but not in the minutiae that you suggest, but whether the majority of the citizenry even understands that our founding was based on religious liberty and inalienable rights and is codified in the Constitution that exists to protect them, because frankly, Reverand, I’m beginning to doubt it.

Leave your own comment on the MINNPOST site or here on Views from the Edge. See previously published commentaries on the intersection of religioin and politics, and American exceptionalism on Views from the Edge for more on the subject

Why is pop culture fascinated with the end of the world?

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Minnesota Public Radio’s Public Insight Journalism asked the question after release of the film Seeking a Friend for the End of the Earth. Here’s how I responded.

Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death makes the case that our culture is death-denying.

One could argue that our fascination with end of the world films and stories is an entertaining and objectified way of dealing with one’s own personal destiny. Every death is “The end of the world.” The end of the world writ large on the planetary screen moves the issue into the world of fiction, fantasy and myth from which, like all cultures before ours, we create meaning in the midst of time.

There are other reasons for our fascination, of course. Supreme among them, in my view, is the dualism and the violence that saturate Western culture: God/Satan, Good/Evil, Moral/Immoral, Saved/Damned, Blessed/Cursed.

It is this misreading of ancient Jewish and Christian texts that makes the will to power the central theme of our time. The late Japanese Christian theologian Kosuke Koyama said that all “sin” has the same root. It is the claim of “exceptionalism.” Under the banner of nationalist exceptionalism’s shameless stealing of the metaphor of “the city set on a hill” away from its proper setting in Jesus’ nonviolent Sermon on the Mount, we assume Western Culture and the U.S.A. to be the Golden City and the agent of divine will. The exercise of that fallacious conviction results in wars of foreign intervention, occupation, and “pre-emptive strikes” in the name of national security.

We have become a national security state. The “end of the world” fascination in our time is heightened by the knowledge that global destruction – nuclear night – is entirely possible. We fear it. We know it. Yet we are also a culture addicted to entertainment where our worst nightmares get projected onto a movie or television screen where we know that what we’re watching is fiction. The fiction is almost always a high-tech version of the old racist and xenophobic dualism my generation grew up on: cowboys and Indians.

Beneath the question of why our culture is fascinated with end of the world is human nature itself. We human beings, like all other animals, are mortal. We may be exceptional in that we are (more) conscious and self-conscious, but first and last, we are animals. We are born. We live. We die.

As conscious animals, we are capable of great feats. We are also, so far as we know, the only animal capable of self-deception, denial, illusion, and species suicide. The denial of death is the great denial, and immortality is the human species’ great illusion.

The fact of death looms over life for each of us existentially and for the species itself from the beginning and in the middle, not just at the end.  Death is our shared destiny. Death is extinction. Our fascination with the end of the world is a strange Molotov cocktail comprised of all of the ingredients of the human condition, most especially the spiritual terror of annihilation, and the illusion of winning. It is the ongoing legacy of the biblical myth of Cain, humanity’s “first-born” who kills his brother Abel, the myth that describes our time and place in history.

If, like in the movie, you had only three weeks left before the end of the world… What would you do?

I’d do what I’m doing now only more consciously. I’d continue to write each morning. I’d do my best to live gratefully, attending to beauty in nature and in art (classical music and paintings) and to family and friends. I’d pray more thoughtfully. I’d walk my dogs more joyfully, stop yelling at them for barking, and find a place on the North Shore to look out to the horizon of Lake Superior. I’d eat lobster and Dungeness crab with lots of hot butter and salt, rib-eye steaks, garlic mashed potatoes. I would avoid Brussels sprouts! I’d end each meal with a Maine blueberry pie, flan, or Graeter’s ice cream, and a Makers Mark Manhattan.  Then I’d settle down on the couch next to the love of my life, Kay, by the fireplace, turn off the news, see if we can make a little fire of our own, get anchored again in the Sermon on the Mount, and return to sources of joy and laughter in the poems of Hafiz. I’d give up being intentional/purposive. I’d live in the moment.

Follow the Money

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money - follow the money

money – follow the money

Eight years as Executive Director of the Legal Rights Center, Inc. in Minneapolis confirmed this perspective by Fareed Zakaria.

Money spent on Prisons is rising 6 times the rate spent on higher education  By Fareed Zakaria,  March 25, 2012.

“Televangelist Pat Robertson recently made a gaffe. A gaffe, as journalist Michael Kinsley defined it, occurs when a political figure accidentally tells the truth.

“Robertson’s truth is that America’s drug war has failed and that the country should legalize legalize marijuana. This view goes against the  deepest political, moral and religious positions Robertson has held for decades, so imagine the blinding evidence that he has had to confront-and  that has been mounting for years-on this topic.

“Robertson drew attention to one of the great scandals of American life.
“Mass incarceration on a scale almost unexampled in human history is a
fundamental fact of our country today,” writes the New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik.
“Over all, there are now more people under ‘correctional supervision’ in
America-more than 6 million-than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin
at its height.”

“Is this hyperbole? Here are the facts. The U.S. has 760 prisoners per
100,000 citizens. That’s not just many more than in most other developed
countries but seven to 10 times as many. Japan has 63 per 100,000, Germany
has 90, France has 96, South Korea has 97, and Britian – with a rate among
the-highest – has 153. Even developing countries that are well known for
their crime problems have a third of U.S. numbers. Mexico has 208 prisoners
per 100,000 citizens, and Brazil has 242. As Robertson pointed out on his TV
show, The 700 Club, “We here in America make up 5% of the world’s population
but we make up 25% of the [world's] jailed prisoners.”

“There is a temptation to look at this staggering difference in numbers and
chalk it up to one more aspect of American exceptionalism. America is
different, so the view goes, and it has always had a Wild West culture and a
tough legal system. But the facts don’t support the conventional wisdom.
This wide gap between the U.S. and the rest of the world is relatively
recent. In 1980 the U.S.’s prison population was about 150 per 100,000
adults. It has more than quadrupled since then. So something has happened in
the past 30 years to push millions of Americans into prison.

“That something, of course, is the war on drugs. Drug convictions went from
15 inmates per 100,000 adults in 1980 to 148 in 1996, an almost tenfold
increase. More than half of America’s federal inmates today are in prison on
drug convictions. In 2009 alone, 1.66 million Americans were arrested on
drug charges, more than were arrested on assault or larceny charges. And 4
of 5 of those arrests were simply for possession.

“Over the past four decades, the U.S. has spent more than $1 trillion
fighting the war on drugs. The results? In 2011 a global commission on drug
policy issued a report signed by George Shultz, Secretary of State under
Ronald Reagan; the – archconservative Peruvian writer-politician Mario Vargas
Llosa; former Fed Chairman Paul Volcker; and former Presidents of Brazil and
Mexico Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Ernesto Zedillo. It begins, “The global
war on drugs has failed … Vast expenditures on criminalization and
repressive measures directed at producers, traffickers and consumers of
illegal drugs have clearly failed to effectively curtail supply or
consumption.” Its main recommendation is to “encourage experimentation by
governments with models of legal regulation of drugs to undermine the power
of organized crime and safeguard the health and security of their citizens.”

“Bipartisan forces have created the trend that we see. Conservatives and
liberals love to sound tough on crime, and both sides agreed in the 1990s to
a wide range of new federal infractions, many of them carrying mandatory
sentences for time in state or federal prison. And as always in American
politics, there is the money trail. Many state prisons are now run by
private companies that have powerful lobbyists in state capitals. These
firms can create jobs in places where steady work is rare; in many states,
they have also helped create a conveyor belt of cash for prisons from
treasuries to outlying counties.

“Partly as a result, the money that states spend on prisons has risen at six
times the rate of spending on higher education in the past 20 years. In
2011, California spent $9.6 billion on prisons vs. $5.7 billion on the UC
system and state colleges. Since 1980, California has built one college
campus and 21 prisons. A college student costs the state $8,667 per year; a
prisoner costs it $45,006 a year.

“The results are gruesome at every level. We are creating a vast prisoner
under-class in this country at huge expense, increasingly unable to function
in normal society, all in the name of a war we have already lost. If Pat
Robertson can admit he was wrong, surely it is not too much to ask the same
of America’s political leaders.”

- appeared on-line, IllinoisDemNews@yahoogroups.com

Just one country?

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Kosuke Koyama – RIP

The late Japanese Christian theologian Kosuke Koyama (click HERE for NYT obituary) said, “There is only one sin, and it is exceptionalism.”  Koyama was baptized during the bombing raids of Tokyo in WW II. As the bombs exploded and the building burned around the church, Kosuke’s pastor looked him in the eye. “Kosuke,” he said, “You are a disciple of Jesus Christ. You must love your enemy… even the Americans.”Koyama first saw the myth of exceptionalism in the Japan of his youth where the Emperor and the Divine were hand-in-glove. Japan was an exceptional people that could not fail. In his later years, following his retirement from Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York, “Ko,” as his friends called him with great affection moved to Minneapolis.

During the 15 years I knew him, he shared his greatest sadness that the ideology of exceptionalism he had experienced as a  boy in Japan he now saw in the United States.

Today in 2012 political candidates cunningly appeal to the myth, believing that doing so  will rally true believers to cast their votes for them as the truest believers in America. Steve Shoemaker sent this piece today.

Verse - Steve Shoemaker, Urbana, IL May 2, 2012

The U.S.A. actually  is just one

country out of quite many “under God.”

It would be wrong to think the summer sun

shines only on our farms.  In other lands

the children grow as strong and bright as here,

and elders have respect around the world

(in fact, in many places they don’t fear

such loneliness and high cost of health care.)

 

 

Other countries are also free and brave, and have fine soldiers ready to defend

their shores.  It’s sweet and seemly that we give

our lives to save our families,  friends and land,

but we must not think we’re exceptional

and forget, too, the international.

The Germans at the Service Club Meeting

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Pledge of Allegiance

Five visitors from Germany were guests of an international service club recently where my friend Steve Shoemaker is a member.After the meeting, they asked Steve some questions.

Why ask Steve?

For starters, he’s 6’8″ and he’s up for Club President soon…unless he’s impeached before taking office for his Letter to the Editor.

Dear Editor,

Five folks from Germany recently visited central Illinois as part of a local service club program to improve international understanding.

At one point they asked me about something they did not understand:  why do Americans begin so many gatherings with a ‘”patriotic” song, the Pledge of Allegiance, and a prayer?

As foreign visitors, of course, they felt excluded from at least the first two–often at events designed supposedly to welcome them…  And if from a non-Christian religious tradition, they felt excluded from all three.

Perhaps especially because they were from Germany, remembering the horrors of two world wars begun partly from excessive beliefs in the superiority of their nation and religion, they were sensitive to expressions of exceptionalism at U.S.A. sports events and service club meetings.

Can we welcome others better by showing the American virtue of hospitality, finding rituals that affirm the equality of all, and treating others the way we wish to be treated?

Steve’s an affable chap and hard not to like. At the next meeting Steve and some of the members had a nice chat. There’d been some conversation, they had a different opinion, they said, and the good thing was they were all free to disagree.

Hmmm.

Click HERE for a quick history lesson on the evolving text of the Pledge of Allegiance.

What do YOU think? Chime in with a comment to expand the discussion. I’ll send them to Steve for the next meeting.