So Much for Moral High Ground

Hi, I’m new here, or anyway I haven’t been around that long. I just wanted to stop in, introduce myself, and maybe start up a dialogue about, you know, not ruining everything, for a while, anyway. If that’s cool?

It’s just that I remember reading, back in the old days, about how we Americans were pretty great. We won World War One and World War Two! Remember that shit? It was wild. Humanity faced an unprecedented evil in the Nazi empire and Europe couldn’t do shit about it. Who stopped that mess? America. Fuck yeah.

And we, like, rode that for a while. We couldn’t pay for a drink if we tried, remember? It was sweet. The planet even overlooked that whole thing where we murdered 250,000 civilians with nuclear bombs. We couldn’t get away with that anymore (right?). But then anymore it sort of feels like we’re resting on our laurels a bit, aren’t we?

Sure, we liberated the concentration camps in Germany, and that was rad. Mad credit, really. But now we’re just stocking our own concentration camps with the stolen children of refugees? What the shit is that? And what’s our end game there, anyway? Is this one of those things where we take all those kids and give them to good Christian families with impotent men? Isn’t that just The Handmaid’s Tale?

I mean look. Let’s be honest. We don’t have a great track record in Latin America. We’ve done a lot – a lot – of overthrowing democratically elected governments there in support of our trade interests. But folks pretty much looked the other way because of the whole Nazi thing. And I’ll say it again, beating the Nazis at war was badass. Nice job team.

But then now we’re in this sticky spot, you know? Our position in the world for the last, what, like 80 years has been built on this resume of killing a lot of Nazis, and here we are in 2018 electing fucking Nazis in state-level elections. At at the national level, in the White House, we have Nazi sympathizers literally filling concentration camps that are more brutal, more cruel, than the last time we concentrated ethnic minorities into encampments without due process.

This will not be news to non-Americans, but guys we’ve kind of used up our goodwill. It’s sort of like if your roommate borrows your car once, and when you get it back not only is the tank full, but it’s been detailed. Sweet! Good on your roommate. But then you find out that over the next year he’s been taking your car without asking. And returning it dirty. Without gas. And racking up parking tickets. And using it to rob liquor stores. And commit hit-and-runs on cyclists. Suddenly that one time you got it back clean doesn’t really carry quite as much weight, you know?

That’s sort of where the US is these days: the shitty roommate who has long worn out his welcome. That’s not to say there’s no coming back from this. But maybe let’s quit it out with the fascism, right? And jingoism? The xenophobia? It’s not a good look. People are staring.

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