One might argue that individuals define felicity, but gracelessness is universal. To those who attempted to hold a candlelight vigil in rain-soaked Land Park, Sacramento last night, the effigy of an American soldier bearing the sign “Bush Lied. I Died.” displayed on their home by Steve and Virginia Pearcy (and vandalised twice within a week), was a treasonous statement, disgusting, and in the name of democracy had to be removed. Many likely drove to that home in vehicles plastered with “God Bless the USA” decals, as if God would notice a car decal and look upon it favourably, or bless this nation due to it, or blinkered egotism will be accepted universally as a holy mission since a cheap, garish magnet says it is so.
Paul Johnson believes that George Bush is freeing millions of Arabs from the tyranny of slavery and he’s confident that “countless millions throughout the world” are whispering “God Bless America.” He lambasts democratic nations of the world who have “turned their back” on America’s efforts to liberate the Arab world. Germany is a failing socialist experiment that impoverishes its people and the democratic freedom imposed upon them twice by victorious Allies is in peril. France has never afforded its people the feeling that they are in charge of their own affairs. Johnson says this explains why they “take to the streets and block the roads and ports, knowing from bitter experience that force is more likely to get results than arguments or votes.”
Paul dredges the banks of sophism and ends his ode to historical revisionism on this note:
“Just as the appalling 20th century was the age of the totalitarian state, the Gulag and Auschwitz, so the 21st may come to be seen as the age of government “of the people, by the people, for the people.” If so, the U.S., by its courage and persistence, will be able to take primary credit. It has certainly led from the front, and it has shown that it knows how to use its position as the world’s sole superpower with judgment, honor and unselfishness.
I think Abraham Lincoln would be proud of what George W. Bush and the U.S. forces have done. After the freeing of the slaves, what more logical and benevolent step could there be than to free millions of Arabs from the slavery of terror? So I say, God Bless America. And I’m confident that countless millions throughout the world say so, too, even if they do not dare–yet–to say so aloud.”
It isn’t remarkable that so many Americans buy into exceptionalism, or are slavishly devoted along partisan lines to those who sell this nonsense to them. The same God-fearing worshippers who are pacified by such belly-rubs don’t connect overindulgence to the aching since the most of everything is all they’ve ever known. Greed is their right. But isn’t God supposed to be all-knowing? Why would the God of freedom and democracy shrug-off the toppling of democratically-elected governments for failing to serve the interests of the USA, the extermination of anyone in its path, armed-threat or not, the decimation of economies that do not serve America’s powerfull, and the enslavement of millions by the disease, hunger, and ecological devastation caused by the ever-needfull, hardly generous, and always self-serving American empire?
A compassionate nation would have engaged in deep reflection and mourned the loss of innocent lives in its indiscriminate bombing of Afghanistan. A courageous people would not have allowed emotions of revenge to transcend their moral obligation to protect thousands in their quest to kill one. Instead, it got busy silencing critics like 15-year-old Katie Sierra, who was suspended from her high-school for wearing a t-shirt with the handwritten message: “When I saw the dead and dying Afghani children on TV, I felt a newly recovered sense of national security. God Bless America.”
An honest nation would admit it doesn’t give a damn about freeing Afghanis. It certainly didn’t when Australia was sending them to detention camps and using the military to escort them from asylum. How does this God of freedom explain that indifference?
Who represents alternatives to this madness in mainstream media today? Not the racist Bill Maher, whose ascension to a podium of protest was more accidental than intentional, a consequence of an off-handed remark that angered his corporate sponsors. The chairs of popular news programmes are being filled with liberty-hating liberals, a sickly charade that feigns opposition, sending the message there is no other path than one of permanent war.
Real debate has no soldier protecting its forum in America. Iraqis are defended by soldiers like Spec. Matt Hertlein who in his letter home displays his racism like a badge of courage and its overt grotesqueness is received with laughter by his family, not with surprise or concern.
Is democracy’s God amused?
In her keynote speech “God Bless the World“, delivered at MOFGA‘s Common Ground Country Fair on September 23, 2001, Dr. Vandana Shiva was hopefull Americans would redefine the object in this blessing:
“In India when we pray, we say, “Let all beings be happy. Let all beings be at peace. Let all beings be free of disease.” And when we say beings, we mean the grass in this field. We mean the pollinators. We mean all the species in those forests. I do hope that this country too will be able to go beyond the contemporary slogan of “God Bless America” to “God Bless the Earth.”
One of my favorite, favorite Indian rituals is the peace prayer, which we have every time we shift house, someone is born, someone dies, we have a peace prayer. And I love it because it’s not just about a country, a family, it’s about peace of the earth, may the peace of the skies, may the peace of the plants, may the peace of the atmosphere, may the peace of all beings of creation, of the creator, may that tremendously deep peace be with you.”
What does your red-white-and-blue God say to that?