One of the questions, one of many, facing us, is what is
America today? Who are we and what is our ''story?"
Much of what defines a people, a state, a culture, a society,
a civilization is the stories that those entities tell about
themselves…The Ancient Roman had their stories of
the Roman removed the yoke of Kings, and the martial
virtues of Rome…From the very beginning of the establishment
of the Roman state, Rome had to fight for its very survival…
and the myths of Rome back this up…
one of the very first acts of the Roman state is the murder of Remus…
violence is present from the very start of the Roman state… and
one of the key myths of Rome was the Rape of the Sabine women…
another act of violence… that the myths of Rome were violent
in nature, tells us something about Rome itself…
for in myths, we can get a sense of what a society/state feels
about itself…
and so, we return to America… what of the myths of America?
what do they say about America and how we think about ourselves…
There are two primary myths of America… One is the Horatio
Alger type, of the poor lad who by hard work, becomes wealthy…
The second myth is the exceptionalism of America… that by
some virtue, America is special in the eyes of god…
and part of this specialness is in another myth, the ‘‘city on the hill’’
myth… That America is a shining ‘‘city on the hill’’ being a beacon
of light and hope for the rest of the world…and being special, means
one never has to say, sorry… and for what crimes has America ever
apologized for? The genocide of the American Indian?
The overthrow of the Shah of Iran? The dropping of the
Atomic Bomb? The Vietnam war? The phony made up war
of Bush/Cheney on Iraq and Afghanistan? Abu Gharib?
The forcible separation of children from their parents as part
of the IQ45 war on immigration?
and his defense, as the defense of many of these actions will be,
I kept America safe… as if keeping America safe justifies
a vast number of evils… the myth that the strong person/country
never apologizes for their actions/crimes…
the myth that by apologizing, we make ourselves weaker,
is just that, a myth… if we cannot apologize for something,
we cannot learn from that experience…
and if there is something about America and Americans that
we can learn, it is this, America/Americans don’t seem
to learn from their mistakes…We make the same mistakes,
over and over again… and why? Because we think ourselves
as special… As the ''city on the hill"… but we are no longer that ‘‘city
on the hill’’… We lost that specific title with the War on Vietnam
and Watergate, and the disastrous presidency of Raygun,
and the election of Bush Jr. and of course, IQ45…
and what are we today? That is the entire question of this thread…
What are we today? Look at our myths today… of gangs taking
over some apartment buildings or of immigrants eating dogs and cats…
Is that how far we have fallen? From being a shining light in the world,
to Haitians eating dogs and cats?
It is an advertising motto that sex sells, but a close second
is fear sells… and that is what the right wing has to offer us,
fear… that IQ45 keep trying to sell an America that is in total
free fall due to liberal/WOKE ideas…
but the fact is that America became the ‘‘city on the hill’’ due
to liberal ideas… that the idea of democracy itself, is
a liberal idea… the idea that everyone getting to vote, is
a liberal idea… that every child should be publicly educated,
is a liberal idea… that workers should have a number of
workplace protections… that is a liberal idea… that workers
should only work 5 days a week with vacations is a liberal idea…
In fact, every single idea that made America a ‘‘shining city on
the hill’’ is a liberal idea… name me a conservative idea
that help make America a ''shining city on the hill"
and that brings us back to the myths of America today…
that we are a ‘‘Christian’’ nation, that we are exceptional,
that we are favored by god… I reject each and every single one
of these myths…
I play sports as a kid… in high school, I would have been
identified as a ‘‘jock’’ and I would have self-identified as a ‘‘jock’’,
an athlete… and the one thing you learn in sports, is that
even if you win a championship, that is no guarantee of
success next year… every single day, you have to go out
and prove that you are champion material…
and what did IQ45 do in his 4 years to prove that he/America
was championship material? nothing… Championships are
won by outworking and outplaying the competition…
America is resting on its laurels of the past and that isn’t
going to get a win in today’s modern world… you want
to defeat China? then you have to outwork and outplay them…
and we are not doing that today… and we don’t even have
any myths going right now that support that idea that we must
outwork a country to win the battle…
What have you done today, to make yourself better than you
were yesterday? and that in a nutshell is what makes
a champion? every single day working hard to improve oneself…
and where are the myths that support that position?
I can’t find any either… most of our myths of working hard
come into play with the accumulation of wealth,
not in the improvement of the body/soul…
in working hard to become a champion… not just making
money…
with that in mind, how does giving massive tax cuts to already wealthy
people, help America become stronger/better? it doesn’t…
the evidence is quite clear, that every single major federal
tax cut has within a few years, has created a recession/depression…
every single one of them… But Kropotkin, what about the
Kennedy/Johnson tax cut? we were actually coming into a recession
by 1966/67, but remember that the war in Vietnam was going into
high gear… and the Keysean’s economics of war, kept America out
of a recession… which finally hit around 1970 or so…
we can use ideas like this to work out what policies we should have…
that trickle-down economics don’t work, that nothing good can come
out of our ever-increasing income inequality…
that policies that favor the few, the rich are the path to failure…
but do our myths of today, do they even suggest this? No,
and that is partly the failure of the myths of today… that they
have failed to guide us… and the evidence increasingly
suggests that our myths no longer help or aid us as they once
did… they no longer suggest to us a path into the future…
that we cannot depend on myths to give us some answers into
what worked in the past and thus might work in the future…
is our age, the end of the age of myths? Perhaps…
Kropotkin