AMERICA'S COVERT IMPERIALISM - Reader comments at The New York Sun

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The Imperial Appetite

Submitted by Patrick D.Hazard, Feb 8, 2008 12:03

The Puritan rhetoric (our City on rhe Hill syndrome) which has kept median Americans from realizing how imperialistic we've covertly been , in the last century especially,makes our interface with the competing imperiums of the twenty-first century difficult to negotiate. I first notice this whistling in the dark that night in 1957 when I was celebrating getting my PhD in American Civilization. The metropolitan press was full of ad exec Fairfax Cone's reassurances that we need not fear an impending recession because America was still the All Time Hit on Humanities Hit Parade. As recently as last night, Mitt Romney sealed his abdication speech with the by now boilerplate assurance that America remains the greatest civilization in the history.

This infantile narcissism amuses thoughtful Europans no end, I've observed in my first decade as an exPat. I finally got. it. This is me protests too much reflex is a dangerous psychiatric tick.. The embarrassing disparities between our official ideals and our initial Amerind genocide and continuing corruption of black slavery persuaded us to assume this mask of the Greatest Ever. In what Studs Terkel has shrewdly called these United States of Amnesia, the yawning gaps between quotidien realities and our high fallutin' self image means that in a literal sense most Americans are schizophrenic.

Mark Twain and William Dean Howells railed against the first emergence of extra-continental American imperialism during the Spanish American War, but Hearst's sanctimoniously sanitized media version prevailed.Later our Marine's fronting for United Fruit anticipates the cruel ironies of today's Blackwater. Ask your average American how many military bases we have in the world, and they will be skeptical about those not immediately involved in an out and out war.Depending on how you define them, they approach a thousand!

If we are to stop stumbling into serial moral and economic disasters like Vietnam and the multiple Midlle East entanglements, the country is going to have to go through an intellectual makeover. Russia and China no longer tolerate our supremacist malarkey. It would be helpful if Hillary and Barack had the courage to begin to straighten us out in the impending election. Four centuries of deluding ourselves is a hard row to re-hoe. Patrick D.Hazard, Weimar, Germany.

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