As Obama races around the country mixing politics with fundraising, he should be very glad that candidates are still requesting his presence, and that fact speaks to his eloquence and intelligence, though his rigid adherence to stict talking points restricts his message. Simply repeating that the GOP is the party of "no" is not likely to attract voters looking for substance. Income inequality and the desire to not offend any wealthy donors has emascualted Obama's appeal to regular working people, so many have turned to the Tea Party in fear. They fear that the crock sold to them as American Exceptionalism is a bag of stinking diapers left on the side of the road by the homeless family living in their car. Let's hear what Chalmers Johnson has to say about American Exceptionalism below the fold.
Chalmers Johnson has been around for awhile and that gives him the gift of perspective, having watched the arc of global events over a lifetime. He is also an adult who has changed his mind on important political matters. I find this to be a rarity, as most folks seem to become more wedded to an ideology over time, no matter how much epic fail surrounds that ideology. In an interview with Tom Engelhardt we learn this about Johnson:
Johnson, who served as a lieutenant (jg) in the Navy in the early 1950s and from 1967-1973 was a consultant for the CIA, ran the Center for Chinese Studies at the University of California, Berkeley for years. He defended the Vietnam War ("In that I was distinctly a man of my times..."), but is probably the only person of his generation to have written, in the years since, anything like this passage from the introduction to his book Blowback: "The problem was that I knew too much about the international Communist movement and not enough about the United States government and its Department of Defense. ... In retrospect, I wish I had stood with the antiwar protest movement. For all its naiveté and unruliness, it was right and American policy wrong."
IMHO the United States of America has done nothing particularly alturistic or noble, since ridding the world of facisim in WWII. The so-called Greatest Generation wrapped themselves in that narrative, ever since, believing they were God's chosen people. It it weren't so drenched in the blood of innocents, it would be laughable. We're led to believe the wanton destruction of the natural world to prop up the American standard of living goes along with imperial superpower status.
Chalmers pushed the term Blowback into the mainstream, publishing a book by that title in 2000 which was largely ignored until 9/11. Johnson had the nerve to assert that all the pain and misery dished out to the developing world by America since WWII has consequences. Well, Johnson has a new book out called, Dismantling the Empire: America’s Last Best Hope. It an article published today called The Guns of August: Lowering the Flag on the American Centuryhe previews his new book.
Let me begin by asking: What harm would befall the United States if we actually decided, against all odds, to close those hundreds and hundreds of bases, large and small, that we garrison around the world? What if we actually dismantled our empire, and came home? Would Genghis Khan-like hordes descend on us? Not likely. Neither a land nor a sea invasion of the U.S. is even conceivable.
Would 9/11-type attacks accelerate? It seems far likelier to me that, as our overseas profile shrank, the possibility of such attacks would shrink with it.
Would various countries we've invaded, sometimes occupied, and tried to set on the path of righteousness and democracy decline into "failed states?" Probably some would, and preventing or controlling this should be the function of the United Nations or of neighboring states. (It is well to remember that the murderous Cambodian regime of Pol Pot was finally brought to an end not by us, but by neighboring Vietnam.)
Johnson then posits the key "what if?" What if we had heeded Eisenhower's warning in 1961?
What, then, would the world be like if the U.S. lost control globally -- Washington's greatest fear and deepest reflection of its own overblown sense of self-worth -- as is in fact happening now despite our best efforts? What would that world be like if the U.S. just gave it all up? What would happen to us if we were no longer the "sole superpower" or the world's self-appointed policeman?
In fact, we would still be a large and powerful nation-state with a host of internal and external problems. An immigration and drug crisis on our southern border, soaring health-care costs, a weakening education system, an aging population, an aging infrastructure, an unending recession -- none of these are likely to go away soon, nor are any of them likely to be tackled in a serious or successful way as long as we continue to spend our wealth on armies, weapons, wars, global garrisons, and bribes for petty dictators.
Even without our interference, the Middle East would continue to export oil, and if China has been buying up an ever larger share of what remains underground in those lands, perhaps that should spur us into conserving more and moving more rapidly into the field of alternative energies.
Abandoning superpower status will only come from the people of this country. The same people who have been filled with idiocy and ignorance by the MSM and those that direct their message - the wealthy. America is certainly an exceptional place, if you are wealthy, that is. that inequality is well illustrated in Inoljt's diary today and in a similar graph found in a comment by Gooserock today on a diary by a delusional, disaffected conservative. His response to this typical triumphalism is worthy of repeating.
Today Americans are surpassed by dozens and scores of democracies in longevity, upward mobility, wealth equality of course, education, health care systems, and many more measures of quality of life. And of freedom in some cases.
The only people making any headway for 30 years in this country are the richest 1%, and most of them have been barely advancing.
Almost all the growth of the entire national economy has gone to a few thousand individuals.
That's exceptional too, no other advanced democracy has such spectacular bonanzas for their top few thousand citizens.
The real point of exceptionalism is to justify our being able to operate outside international norms and laws. We're definitely not an exceptionally good advanced democracy for its average people. Many other countries are better for them.
That's the truth of the matter. As it becomes more painfully obvious to all Americans, some will simply turn away from the truth. Those with the most cognitive dissonance turn to fear and the Tea Party. Others are too enthralled by the naval gazing of race, gender and sex identity politics to accept the underlying systemic flaws, or they have succumbed to the allure of incrementalism by briefly being the party in power. We need change and we need big change. I was glad to read the recent diary by Jerome a Paris, entitled Judging Obama. It lays out the current schism on DKos very well. Let me be very plain. As a Progressive I will vote for Dems in the mid-terms and I will advocate for Obama in 2012 unless a non-corporate candidate emerges, but mainstream Dems would do well not to alienate progressives. They will not win without them. So far, the American Left has observed the epic fail of the Tea Party, as it deconstucts into its base elements of racism, bigotry and fear, and decided, in a rare fit of self-preservation, to remain in lockstep with National Dem leadership, but I think you may be able to figure out that I am on the need-for-systemic-change side of that argument. As Chalmers Johnson goes on to postulate:
If, however, we were to dismantle our empire of military bases and redirect our economy toward productive, instead of destructive, industries; if we maintained our volunteer armed forces primarily to defend our own shores (and perhaps to be used at the behest of the United Nations); if we began to invest in our infrastructure, education, health care, and savings, then we might have a chance to reinvent ourselves as a productive, normal nation. Unfortunately, I don't see that happening. Peering into that foggy future, I simply can't imagine the U.S. dismantling its empire voluntarily, which doesn't mean that, like all sets of imperial garrisons, our bases won't go someday.
Johnson goes on to criticize the CIA
Not only has the CIA lost its raison d'être by allowing its intelligence gathering to become politically tainted, but its clandestine operations have created a climate of impunity in which the U.S. can assassinate, torture, and imprison people at will worldwide.
and praise the alleged wikileaks source.
I'm impressed as well with Pfc. Bradley Manning, if he is indeed the person responsible for potentially making public 92,000 secret documents about the war in Afghanistan. Daniel Ellsberg has long been calling for someone to do what he himself did when he released the Pentagon Papers during the Vietnam War. He must be surprised that his call has now been answered -- and in such an unlikely way.
Overall, that's the kind of change I can believe in, and I believe we need to go much deeper into what we value as a nation. We need to overcome nationalism and the media-generated shallow materialism, in order for homo sapien to persist as a species. The situation is that dire, at least in my reading of the tea leaves. Others are welcome to disagree, but I believe we must think big or perish as a species. Those who cling to their fortunes, their status and their egos in the turbulent times ahead will be swept away by those who put individuality aside in the interest of the common good.
Though it flies in the face of the over-hyped "personal freedom" to purchase a bunch of swag from the mall, destined for the landfill, we need to consider the future far beyond our relatively insignificant lifetimes. Incrementalists reject the apocalyptic thinking that my views represent and that is increasngly reflected in mainstream thought, but one should ponder why this worldview is gaining so much attention these days. For many Americans struggling to feed their kids tonight, the apocalypse has already arrived, and I guarantee there are plenty of fat cats deserving jail time (see 12 minutes in where Kieser interviews William Black) that are more to blame than the newly poor, themselves. Indeed, these are the people that have been "bailed out" with our tax dollars.
For me, this is not a negative, pessimistic worldview, but rather a last ditch effort at hope. I believe humanity has the potential for unrivaled good, but that is nowhere to be found in greed, glutoy and self-indulgence. Change is not just something to hope for, but our very survival depends on it. Nowhere in our sacred scripts is it written that we should treat the infirm, the poor and the destitute with contempt and disgust, rather we are directed to help them. Will we rise to that challenge?