Ouch!
What is it that causes, not just our politicians, but ordinary Americans, to speak of American exceptionalism?
I don't want to spend the time to rehearse the history of Israel--"God's chosen people"--and of the relationship of Christianity to Judaism, when Christians spoke of themselves as "the new Israel", nor of the arrogance of all those Europeans who inherited the remnants of the Holy Roman Empire, nor the battered and religiously desperate early settlers who came to this country to escape their own persecution in Europe, and who almost immediately assumed the role of religious arrogance they were fleeing from.
But here we are, touting our "exceptionalism" as if it were a virtue, or even a fact!
We--that is to say, everyone who stumbled here, poorer than church mice, together with a few who had memorized the rituals of the churches where those mice lived--happened upon a huge, resource-rich continent populated by people who were less advanced in terms of tools and weapons of war--and we took it. We discovered the codfish banks, and the whale oil, and the deep soil of Indiana and Iowa. We dug up the gold, and the coal, and made the rivers into liquid highways. We did well.
"God has chosen us", we said, in order to explain to ourselves how, as a nation, we became so rich, so fast, so unexpectedly. God didn't choose us. We just got lucky, and lost our reason. Had the Chinese "discovered" America, and planted rice in California and corn in Iowa, they might have said something stupid, too, about being a Chosen People, an exceptional people. They didn't. We did.
To listen to our unexceptional politicians and to ordinary unexceptional Americans speak, one might think that God has anointed us to . . . I don't know what . . . perhaps a kind of calloused sainthood. We aren't exceptional. We are just ordinary human beings, who were lucky enough to land here, and everywhere we look in the world, we can see other people with better schools, better health care, better living standards, better roads and bridges and shipyards than we have.
If God chose us to become a light unto the nations, a beacon on a hill, a rich people in a poor world, why did God decide that Haiti should be desperately poor, or that Africans should be slaves for the new Americans? Why did God decide that Europeans, and not the people who actually lived here, should own this continent? When did God decide that the Spanish should own the gold in Central and South America to pay their European debts? And why?
I cringe when both Democratic and Republican politicians are required, by our beliefs, and by their own beliefs, to end every stump speech with, ". . . and God bless America". If they do not say that, the media would report that they did not acknowledge that God blesses America, but not the Canadians, some of whom still speak French; although peculiarly.
What kind of God would choose some people to be rich and arrogant? What kind of God would bless Native Americans with smallpox? What kind of God would consign Black people to slavery, and Episcopalians and Presbyterians to slave ownership?
What kind of a brutal beast would do that? Assign a part of the human race to a land of milk and honey, and assign most of the rest of the human race to looking for water in searing sand, or eating insects in the brush?
I don't want to hear of "American exceptionalism". I want honest talk about our history, and our good luck, and our failures and our successes. I want our politicians, and our citizenry, to speak honestly about the fact that our school systems are ordinary, at best, and that our treatment of Native Americans and Blacks and almost anybody from anywhere other than Europe has been lamentable. I want to hear people say that this crap about Barack Obama not being an American--who is, in fact, as American as every other immigrant and derivative immigrant to this continent--has as much right to be President as any ragtag Anglo-Saxon on one of those wooden ships that heaved the dregs of Europe onto the rocks in Massachusetts or Virginia.
We aren't exceptional. We might have the chance to become exceptional, someday, not because God anointed us, but because we determined to think clearly, and speak honestly, not only about our good luck (and our ordinary perversities), but of our aspirations, and of our commitments to form a more perfect union than anything we have done before.
It isn't a massive, depressing task. It just requires honesty. Truth telling. Things like saying, "Barack Obama was born in Hawaii, and he is our President". Things like, "Our schools are not as good as they need to be". "Our health care system is not as good as it is in lots of other places". Or that, "Too many kids are hungry, and too many old people are afraid of what will happen to them". And that we can, and intend, to do better.
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