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A Heck of a Good Place to Begin, by Jingo!

Christians and Muslims have been staring at, and shouting at, each other across the Mediterranean for a long time.  Sometimes it has looked like a religious conflict, and sometimes like a conflict between Europeans and Middle-Easterners.  It is both, and the lines are liquid.

Under the Ottoman Empire, Muslims extended their reach far into Europe, and Europeans pushed back.  In 1877 and '78, it was the Russians, trying to regain their influence in Eastern Europe, who engaged the Turkish Empire in war.  A couple of Englishmen wrote a song that became popular in pubs, that gave us the term, "jingoism".

"We don't want to fight, but by Jingo if we do
We've got the ships, we've got the men, we've got the money, too
We've fought the Bear before, and while we're Britons true
The Russians shall not have Constantinople."

Once, the city was called, Byzantium.  The Emperor Constantine renamed it after himself.  Today, Constantinople is called Istanbul, and it spans the Strait of Bosporus, with Europe on one side, and Asia on the other.

"By Jingo!" was a long-established oath, a kind of softening of, "By Jesus!".  Jeez, we religious sorts are a tender lot!  By Golly, are we not!  Even when we are ready to go to war, to kill each other, we try not to take the name of the Lord in vain.

And that little ditty is how "Jingoism" became the term used to describe our keen idiotic willingness to settle almost anything by going to war:  "We've got the ships, we've got the men, we've got the money, too!"  We seem never to learn.

We tell ourselves that we are exceptional.  Exceptionalism is just the morning hangover that comes after reciting to each other that we are God's Chosen People, that we are the New Israel, that we are so very different from rotten old Europe.  If Exceptionalism just meant that we Americans are somehow different from everyone else, we would not be saying anything important.  Everyone, every nation, is different from everyone else.  But it is worse than that, by Jingo!  (Pardon my euphemism!  I meant to say, By Golly!, darn it!)  Of course we have an identity!  But we do not have exclusive rights to decency, or nastiness, or piety, or perversenesss.  We are one of the human kind.  We do not have the best school systems in the world, and we are not free of racism or sexism or brutal poverty.  Just this morning, I read a list of the ten best nations in which to retire:  we were eighth.  Norway was first, and Canada was listed ahead of us, too.

Admitting that we were part of the human race would be a good place to begin.

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