(originally posted to
Myspace 13 April 2008; tweaked
slightly 16 April 2013)
The propensity of the American to view both history and
current events thru the lens of fiction and to take action based on that
fiction should never be underestimated.
The United States of America is, after all, an artificial
nation-state originally cobbled together from colonies established in the “New
World” by several different expansionist European powers—England, Scotland,
France, Spain, the Dutch Republic, Sweden, Russia, Mexico, and itself—specifically
excluding from its benefits and responsibilities the people upon whom it and
they imposed themselves, setting up a republic allegedly based upon the highest
ideals of the Enlightenment, that all are created equal and endowed with
certain inalienable rights, except for those who not male, are under 21, lack
property, are slaves, etc.
Manifest Destiny and Benevolent Assimilation were fictions
of our own imperial expansion, Horatio Alger the prophet of the opiating idea
that the common person had every bit as much equal opportunity to “pull himself
up by the bootstraps” and attain the same level of wealth and material power
which would make him (and now “her” also) part of the ruling elite.
Do you know why the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan was
organized in 1915? Because of that damn movie,
“Birth of a Nation”. And although the
inaugural meeting was held at Stone Mountain, Georgia (now a mere suburb of
Greater Atlanta), its convenor was from Indiana and the rest of the founding
members were almost exclusively Northerners.
Like the fiction of which so many evangelicals and other
right-wingers believe about America being founded as a “Christian Nation”,
despite the fact that not once in either the Articles of Confederation and
Perpetual Union or in the Constitution is the divine mentioned. Nor is their any mention even in Jefferson’s Thomas
Paine-inspired Declaration of Independence, save for the vague allusions to the
deist version of the divine based on ideas from the Enlightenment.
An Enlightenment which took a large portion of its
inspiration from the poetry of Shiraz native Sa’adi, for which French
philosopher and political theorist Montesquieu returned the favor in 1721 with
his first “best seller”, Lettres persanes,
or Persian Letters. More than any other thinker of the
Enlightenment, Montesquieu’s ideas influenced the Founding Fathers.
Speaking of Americans’ love of movie images, the two men
seen, at least by conservative propagandists and their believers, as the
archetypes of muscular American patriotism (John Wayne and Ronald Reagan) have
several things in common, including that they were both actors. They were also both draft-dodgers (during the
Second World War) who later became strong advocates of sending other young men
off to die in useless wars overseas, as well as disdainful of the average
citizen, especially the poor average citizen, and resistant to attempts at
reducing discrimination against blacks, Latinos, and the poor.
Hardly surprising we Americans allowed our fictitiously-elected
resident to lead us into a fictitious war (thank
you, Michael Moore) in Iraq based on fabricated “evidence” of non-existent
WMD’s to impose a phony democracy on an already counterfeit political entity
cobbled together not for the betterment of the people inhabiting its territory
but for the convenience of the imperial power in charge, the United Kingdom at
that time, but now us. “Us” as in U.S.
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