Slowly it has dawned on me that the chasm between left and right, between Progressives and Movement Conservatives in the U.S., comes down to one, single, fundamental question.
No, it's not pro-choice vs. pro-life. It's not faith-based vs. reality-based. For a long time, I thought it came down to whether or not you believed in, and wanted to participate in, the fundamental concept of community.
But no, wing-nuts really don't reject the concept of community. They wallow in all the benefits that community creates, while accepting none of the responsibilities. But they certainly have not rejected community as a concept.
Like so many things in this world, the fundamental quesation boils down to how you define your terms. So to me, the difference between "Us" and "Them" comes down to one simple but fundamental question: What does is mean to be an American?
I love my country. I love it's ideals. I love that it was created pretty late in the game, as nation-states go.
That's pretty important. Centuries after nation-states from England to China came to be, in the latter half of the 18th century, a group of well-read, well-educated people living in a prosperous colonial environment invented the next generation of the nation-state.
It was to be a state governed by timeless laws, not invidividual whims or the passions of the moment. It was to be a state with built-in checks and balances designed to limit the power of government to overwhelm the individual. It was specifically designed to prevent what was termed "the tyranny of the majority," so that 51 percent of the population could never ram it's worldview down the throats of the other 49 percent. It was a state that recognized the horrible potential for evil inherent in theocracy, and its founders worked mightily to prevent that ugly fate from ever corrupting their invention.
It was, more than anything else, to be a meritocracy, a place where a person's talent, abilities and work ethic would determine his fate, not wealth, class or other accidents of birth.
It wasn't perfect at the beginning, Nor has it ever been. But I agree with Lincoln that this experiment in self-government truly is the last, best hope of man on earth.
All of this preamble is to explain what I mean when I say that I am an American, and why I take such pride in it. It also explains why it makes my blood absolutely boil when wingnuts start calling those of us who believe in such high standards "un-American" or "anti-American."
It makes my blood boil yet again, to see intelligent, educated people whore themselves to the mob for short-term political and economic gain. Bill Frist and William Bennett come immediately to mind, people who surely know better yet endorse the simplistic, boorish, selfish perversion of patriotism that is spewed out on Rush Limbaugh and LGF and the Fox News network every day.
Their portrait of an "American" is one that would surely have horrified Jefferson, Franklin, Paine and the other great thinkers of the Revolution. The "American" of Bush, Fox and Frist is a swaggering, cocksure, gun-toting redneck badass, the meanest and toughest sonofabitch in the bar, who takies what he wants because he can, who never apologizes or admits a mistake because he doesn't have to.
America never lived up to its highest ideals. Not because there was anything intrinsically wrong with us, but simply because those ideals were so high, beyond the reach of ordinary mortals. The whole idea was that we'd never get there, but we would never stop trying.
George W. Bush's America has stopped trying, has stopped even trying to look like it's trying.
Under Bill Clinton, for all his faults, the end of the Cold War was viewed as an opportunity to do positive things we couldn't manage before. Under W, the end of the Cold War is an opportunity to get away with murder. We'll bomb your cities and villages, take your oil, pollute your planet. We'll rape and pillage like Visigoths, because we can.
If any foreigners call us on it, we'll bomb the living daylights out of them. If any domestic critics call us on it, we'll defame them, call them traitors, and sic our mindless mob of followers on them.
These people sicken me. They defecate on the legacy of America's founding fathers. They wrap themselve in the flag while they spit on every good thing it ever stood for. They are not patriots. They are not what America is to me -- not what I swear I will work every day to make America stand for once again.