Making America grate again
As hugely as I’ve always admired (the United States of) America’s avowed ideal of achieving greatness by grating against every ideology devoted to denying its own and other people equal rights to ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’, I’ve simultaneously regretted its many failures to keep this noble goal in sight.
Even from the very first, for example, the ringing core statement in the Declaration of the American states’ Independence from the intolerably grating Great Britain that ‘all men are created equal’ and are endowed with ‘unalienable Rights’ including ‘Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,’ was given the lie by the continued acceptance of slavery.
And it took almost a century of berating and grating, not to mention a catastrophic civil war, to unite the previously disunited States in the abolition of this evil obstacle to the nation’s ethical if not economic greatness.
Meanwhile, native Americans or so-called Indians continued to be disgracefully denied not only their allegedly ‘unalienable rights’ to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, but also the freedom to inhabit the lands of their ancestors and ‘Great Spirits’.
Perhaps America’s nearest apparent approaches to ethical and moral and thus not merely territorial or economic greatness came when it belatedly helped save Europe from German militarism in World War I, and again intervened in the nick of time to rescue the entire planet from domination by Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan in World War II.
Though in both cases economics arguably took precedence over ethics, as the US profited mightily through what President Eisenhower later identified as the ‘military-industrial complex’ in his famous warning of the American people against permitting this monster to retain too much power.
But the Cold War and the disastrous expedition into Vietnam that cost the populace so dearly in deaths and dollars so mightily enriched and empowered the military-industrial complex that it morphed into the unholy alliance of the Pentagon, Wall Street and Washington establishments that is so grating on today’s American workers and their families that they have elected Donald Trump to the presidency.
