Omigod, sir, you have again said everything that should be said. You are exactly right, all the way. Your essays are remarkable. Thoughtful and profound. Your words really get through to me. I have a history since age 7 of saying I don’t think so when told to believe some nonsense. You are so right about the damn myths we cling so to. I love how you said we need to get some humility to realize we have a long way to go to really grow as a nation. I just love everything you said. Again. Thank you!
We are exactly the nation Black, Brown and Indigenous peoples have experienced for centuries. The exact same: cruel, inhumane, violent, and racist. Even our constitution listed fellow human being as 3/5th of a person. Let’s start with acknowledging how we got here—the bitter root of our decline.
100%. May I please respectfully add that there is a lazy and self serving devotion to belief systems around here my entire life even though we can easily learn what we want to learn about the truth about anything. I know nothing has stopped me. No one appears to know or care what a fact supported by evidence is until they are at their deposition and under oath and there are real consequences. That Journey song "don't stop believing" featured in the preposterous AI trump in the band video tells you what folks love to do because they are in a hurry to go do what they want to do when they want to do it. p.s. Thomas Graves is 100% correct...66 years of Active Measures and not many have questioned anything they are being told as long as we are having fun...now it is not fun anymore and our own military is coming for us like they are the nazis and can...my brother and I used to be terrified of the sirens in the old war movies and now those sirens are American...fucking crying ass shame...and POTUS was at the UFC last night being adored for the ultraviolence...
Sixty-six years of KGB* disinformation, “active measures,” and mole-based strategic deception counterintelligence operations waged against us and our NATO allies had something to do with it. Google “Paese Sera” and “Garrison” simultaneously to read about one example. *Today’s SVR and FSB
We are actually the nation we have always been. We are just more transparent about it. We stopped striving for the ideal of America when Reagan was elected.
I am an American who lived in several European countries over the years. I left here with the view about American exceptionalism. I returned with a far more balanced view. When you leave the American bubble, you realize not only what other countries don’t do well, but also the many things they do unbelievably well - like care for their citizens. I returned with changed views about American capitalism after experiencing democratic socialism first hand. Americans live in a proverbial cultural bubble. For any one American who explores the world and immerses themselves in other cultures and languages you at least 4 who have never left their town or state. It’s self imposed isolationism. Then, we wonder why when they encounter anything other than their bubble, they fear and react against it. If they do venture out, there are some who do so with such arrogance that they exemplify the “ugly” American. Other countries send us their exchange students (at least they did), but I would argue that part of every American education should be a spending a semester living in another culture where people do not speak the same language or have different beliefs than yours. It’s a humbling experience.
you are over complicating the basic ability to identify reality. I mean you are suggesting "constant effort" and "digging deeply" are necessary to determine simple fact from fiction and that the lines are "blurred." It's exhausting.
All these narratives assume the reader needs to be slowly walked through the process of thinking.
The transparently false gibberish that regularly oozes from the right does not have the slightest bit of legitimacy and is easily dismissed.
Yes there are long held beliefs/myths in all societies and history is biased by individual perception. Yes the rich have too much power and continue to manipulate weak ignorant uneducated fools into defending a process that is taking away their freedom because it gives them permission to hate.
These things are not difficult to understand nor do they need to be gotten to the bottom of. Trying to give reason or provide context to the cult members is just a self serving excuse to feel superior while you generate excuses for active willful ignorance in the name of ugly racism and hate. It doesn't matter WHY anymore!
you are brooding over issues that are woven into our history and culture, presenting another reason for people to oppose each other, another distraction. another excuse for inaction.
we must focus on what we can DO now! what we can change NOW! The lives being lost NOW. Simple common sense and the natural instinct most of us have to do the right thing, that is not complicated, the lines are NOT blurry between right and wrong. You are simply offering another overwhelmingly dystopian view of this country pretending it is relevant intellect when it's just self indulgent noise.
Thank you so much for this article, David. I write about Vietnam (I was there as a child just before the Fall of Saigon) and it has been painful to confront our shortcomings on so many levels in that “era.” And yet over and over, I encounter moments not of greatness or exceptionalism, but of people striving to come to terms with the reality of what happened, often personally to them. The struggle—and the way we connect through that struggle (I am speaking of personal conversations here, not of universal musings)—are subtle, genuine, and powerful.
For all of us, I think it’s worth considering that two very disparate things can be true at once: America has fallen terribly short from its inception *and* in the midst of our very shortcomings and vulnerabilities may be the place where ideals can take root.
“Where we stumble, there lies our treasure.” ~Joseph Campbell
This is an excellent essay, David -- thank you. I have had a problem with the notion of "American Exceptionalism" since I moved to Canada 42 years ago and began to understand that the rest of the world did not see the US in the same way it saw itself through these mythologies of Greatness. These days, I feel angry every time some pundit refers to Trump as "the most powerful man in the world," by virtue simply of his position as POTUS and nothing more. He is NOT, unless you define "most powerful" as the guy with his unstable, unpredictable, ketchup-covered finger on the nuclear button. Perhaps we should start calling him "the most dangerous person in the world." The US is a great country in some regards, but in many, it is not and never has been. We were not taught our true history in school, and as progressive movements took hold and grew throughout the late 20th century -- civil rights, second-wave feminism, gay and trans rights, indigenous, and disability rights movements -- the white men and women who were fed the lie that as others gained their rights they would lose theirs became angrier and angrier, their anger aimed at the wrong people -- not the billionaires who were stealing everything for themselves, but the "minorities" who were merely asserting their rights to a seat at the table. Then came the invention that has hailed and hastened our demise: social media. Once the techbros figured out that rage was infinitely more powerful than empathy and care, it was game over for us, IMHO. I feel like we're now living in the opening scenes of one of those dystopian futuristic movies where a few people survive a world-wide apocalypse and have to figure out how to rebuild society from nothing. We are living in the moments just before the destruction of all we hold dear. Will we rise up and stop the coming demise of our social order? Or is it now too late? One thing is for sure -- if we choose to do nothing, we're done.
Beautiful articulation, thank you.
Yes we are! We need to start acting like free people, not MAGA supported goons!
"American Exceptionalism" is a self-serving myth that should have been retired decades ago...tRump has made it official, it's dead and buried.
Omigod, sir, you have again said everything that should be said. You are exactly right, all the way. Your essays are remarkable. Thoughtful and profound. Your words really get through to me. I have a history since age 7 of saying I don’t think so when told to believe some nonsense. You are so right about the damn myths we cling so to. I love how you said we need to get some humility to realize we have a long way to go to really grow as a nation. I just love everything you said. Again. Thank you!
We must always remember that it is the bad Roberts court that it’s done this to American freedoms and our American social structure!
they are against the United States Constitution yes, these are very bad people!
We are exactly the nation Black, Brown and Indigenous peoples have experienced for centuries. The exact same: cruel, inhumane, violent, and racist. Even our constitution listed fellow human being as 3/5th of a person. Let’s start with acknowledging how we got here—the bitter root of our decline.
Propped up by a paper tiger constitution.
100%. May I please respectfully add that there is a lazy and self serving devotion to belief systems around here my entire life even though we can easily learn what we want to learn about the truth about anything. I know nothing has stopped me. No one appears to know or care what a fact supported by evidence is until they are at their deposition and under oath and there are real consequences. That Journey song "don't stop believing" featured in the preposterous AI trump in the band video tells you what folks love to do because they are in a hurry to go do what they want to do when they want to do it. p.s. Thomas Graves is 100% correct...66 years of Active Measures and not many have questioned anything they are being told as long as we are having fun...now it is not fun anymore and our own military is coming for us like they are the nazis and can...my brother and I used to be terrified of the sirens in the old war movies and now those sirens are American...fucking crying ass shame...and POTUS was at the UFC last night being adored for the ultraviolence...
Thank you
Sixty-six years of KGB* disinformation, “active measures,” and mole-based strategic deception counterintelligence operations waged against us and our NATO allies had something to do with it. Google “Paese Sera” and “Garrison” simultaneously to read about one example. *Today’s SVR and FSB
We are actually the nation we have always been. We are just more transparent about it. We stopped striving for the ideal of America when Reagan was elected.
I am an American who lived in several European countries over the years. I left here with the view about American exceptionalism. I returned with a far more balanced view. When you leave the American bubble, you realize not only what other countries don’t do well, but also the many things they do unbelievably well - like care for their citizens. I returned with changed views about American capitalism after experiencing democratic socialism first hand. Americans live in a proverbial cultural bubble. For any one American who explores the world and immerses themselves in other cultures and languages you at least 4 who have never left their town or state. It’s self imposed isolationism. Then, we wonder why when they encounter anything other than their bubble, they fear and react against it. If they do venture out, there are some who do so with such arrogance that they exemplify the “ugly” American. Other countries send us their exchange students (at least they did), but I would argue that part of every American education should be a spending a semester living in another culture where people do not speak the same language or have different beliefs than yours. It’s a humbling experience.
We are, in this country, a melting pot, many cultures.
you are over complicating the basic ability to identify reality. I mean you are suggesting "constant effort" and "digging deeply" are necessary to determine simple fact from fiction and that the lines are "blurred." It's exhausting.
All these narratives assume the reader needs to be slowly walked through the process of thinking.
The transparently false gibberish that regularly oozes from the right does not have the slightest bit of legitimacy and is easily dismissed.
Yes there are long held beliefs/myths in all societies and history is biased by individual perception. Yes the rich have too much power and continue to manipulate weak ignorant uneducated fools into defending a process that is taking away their freedom because it gives them permission to hate.
These things are not difficult to understand nor do they need to be gotten to the bottom of. Trying to give reason or provide context to the cult members is just a self serving excuse to feel superior while you generate excuses for active willful ignorance in the name of ugly racism and hate. It doesn't matter WHY anymore!
you are brooding over issues that are woven into our history and culture, presenting another reason for people to oppose each other, another distraction. another excuse for inaction.
we must focus on what we can DO now! what we can change NOW! The lives being lost NOW. Simple common sense and the natural instinct most of us have to do the right thing, that is not complicated, the lines are NOT blurry between right and wrong. You are simply offering another overwhelmingly dystopian view of this country pretending it is relevant intellect when it's just self indulgent noise.
Ain’t that a fucking understatement.
Thank you so much for this article, David. I write about Vietnam (I was there as a child just before the Fall of Saigon) and it has been painful to confront our shortcomings on so many levels in that “era.” And yet over and over, I encounter moments not of greatness or exceptionalism, but of people striving to come to terms with the reality of what happened, often personally to them. The struggle—and the way we connect through that struggle (I am speaking of personal conversations here, not of universal musings)—are subtle, genuine, and powerful.
For all of us, I think it’s worth considering that two very disparate things can be true at once: America has fallen terribly short from its inception *and* in the midst of our very shortcomings and vulnerabilities may be the place where ideals can take root.
“Where we stumble, there lies our treasure.” ~Joseph Campbell
This is an excellent essay, David -- thank you. I have had a problem with the notion of "American Exceptionalism" since I moved to Canada 42 years ago and began to understand that the rest of the world did not see the US in the same way it saw itself through these mythologies of Greatness. These days, I feel angry every time some pundit refers to Trump as "the most powerful man in the world," by virtue simply of his position as POTUS and nothing more. He is NOT, unless you define "most powerful" as the guy with his unstable, unpredictable, ketchup-covered finger on the nuclear button. Perhaps we should start calling him "the most dangerous person in the world." The US is a great country in some regards, but in many, it is not and never has been. We were not taught our true history in school, and as progressive movements took hold and grew throughout the late 20th century -- civil rights, second-wave feminism, gay and trans rights, indigenous, and disability rights movements -- the white men and women who were fed the lie that as others gained their rights they would lose theirs became angrier and angrier, their anger aimed at the wrong people -- not the billionaires who were stealing everything for themselves, but the "minorities" who were merely asserting their rights to a seat at the table. Then came the invention that has hailed and hastened our demise: social media. Once the techbros figured out that rage was infinitely more powerful than empathy and care, it was game over for us, IMHO. I feel like we're now living in the opening scenes of one of those dystopian futuristic movies where a few people survive a world-wide apocalypse and have to figure out how to rebuild society from nothing. We are living in the moments just before the destruction of all we hold dear. Will we rise up and stop the coming demise of our social order? Or is it now too late? One thing is for sure -- if we choose to do nothing, we're done.
I prefer Canadian 🇨🇦 exceptionalism, ever since a story about a maple syrup heist (in QB I think) made The Economist, sorry no cite handy