The phrase American Exceptionalism is being thrown around this election cycle more than “Family Values” were during the George Bush Senior years. But what the hell does it even mean? I will do a college debate trick here and go to the dictionary for help.
Exceptionalism: a theory that a nation, region, or political system is exceptional and does not conform to the norm.
I have gotten into a few arguments as to the true definition of this term. The conservative friends that I have will quickly amend their statement that “American Exceptionalism” is not a by-product of the American government, but rather a product of the exceptional American people. And it is this later statement that I would like to address in this rambling piece today.
I for one have believed for many years that American’s themselves are a good and moral people; that when push comes to shove that we do the right thing and we look out for those around us and for those around the world. It is with a heavy heart that I write this piece as I have (for the most part) lost that long held belief. Will American’s help those in need? Of course… We sent hundreds of millions of dollars to the ravaged areas of Sumatra. Here in this country we sent billions in private funds to the devastated areas around New Orleans. But for a person to be fully honest, one must look beyond the one dimensional view of “giving money” as a sign of being a good and just people.
I personally know of several people that gave up their vacations and went down to New Orleans to help with the re-building of New Orleans. I don’t know of anyone personally, but I am sure thousands did the same in Sumatra. They risked their own lives and went into the devastated areas and spent weeks in the rebuilding effort. These people are getting a lot closer to this idea of “American Exceptionalism” if not diving over the goal line and spiking the ball. But how many people actually go to this level of giving and sacrifice in America? I would put the number at well below 1%.
The other 99% are then to be considered part of the “I gave money at the office” crowd of people whom are part of this American Exceptionism. And it is to this crowd that this article is devoted.
How many of you give money to charity? How many drop dollars in the collection at church or at some social function? I am sure the large majority of you do, as do I. But does this make you a moral person? Does this mean that you are a giving person or an exceptional person? I would argue whole heartedly that YOU (we) ARE NOT.
The subtitle of this piece is called “or my daddy is a gangster”. Some of you will be able to make this leap pretty easy, but for others it will be a long hard stretch. So let me jump right into the analogy and see if I can make it stick.
We will call our new gang by the name of Ameros. And we are the youngest child of the gang’s leader. As such we are heavily shielded from all that the gang does. What we see when we walk around the neighborhood is respect and even a little fear (which we are kind of secretly proud of). We see that people respect our father and they bend over backwards to thank him for the smallest of deeds that he does for them. As he walks proudly through the neighborhood, people stop him and ask him for favors or offer him a free apple or a haircut. It has been this way for as long as we can remember, it is just the way things are. Our father is a very important man in the neighborhood, and we have been told that he is the biggest of all the gang leaders in the city. Even other gang leaders show our father respect and they fear him. This is just the way life is for us as the youngest child of the Ameros gang.
As a child of the gang leader, we are given a very luxurious life. The kids at school leave us alone and we get the best of everything. We get all the good stuff before anyone else in the city or neighborhood. As we have grown older we have expressed an interest in understanding more about what our father does, but he politely pats us on our head and tells us not to worry about it, that he doesn’t want us to get involved. He loves that we are so naïve and innocent. He doesn’t want us to lose that EXCEPTIONAL quality that we possess.
We ask those around the neighborhood about how our father operates and what he does for a living. For the most part people are reluctant to talk to us openly. They heap on praises for our father and tell us what a great and generous man that he is and that we look just like him. We try and gain the favor of the people in the neighborhood by spreading around some of the money that our father gave to us in our allowance. And this makes us feel really good and the people seem to really like us.
As we get into our teens we can’t help but want to know what our father does for a living. He doesn’t go off to work at 7:30am like the other fathers and he comes and goes as he pleases, whereas the other fathers are stuck in jobs that take them away all day and even on the weekends sometimes. Our dad is also way richer than the other dads, which is puzzling to us. The other fathers work their asses off all day long and our father just seems to be raking in the money left and right and yet he doesn’t seem to go to work like the other dads.
We remember one day when we were supposed to stay in the car and we snuck into the laundry guys store after our father had already entered. We peaked around the corner and saw our father screaming and poking the laundry guy in the chest. Our dad had 4 of our “uncles” standing around the man and the laundry guy looked really scared. We remember this guy as he always gave our father free service and hand delivered our clothes to the house. We were just starting to contemplate this new understanding of our father when one of our uncles grabbed us from behind and quickly shooed us out of the store. When father got to the car he was pretty angry, but he explained that Carl the laundry guy was trying to steal money from us and that he was just trying to set him straight. Our father gave us some money and promised us a movie the next evening and all was forgotten.
As we got even older we started to notice that our dad had lots of big guys around him at all times. We hadn’t really noticed it before because they were just our “uncles”. We grew up with these guys for Pete’s sake. But after watching that episode where our father was threatening Carl, we started to see our Uncles a little bit differently.
We were just starting to get really suspicious of our father as we turned 16. As we got older we started to see our father in a different light. He was getting older and it was getting harder for him to shield us from some of the more blatant things he was doing. But then one day something horrific happened. One day 2 cars pulled up in front of our house and one pulled up in front of our dad’s social club where he and the boys hung out and worked, and they exploded. Our dad escaped unharmed as did our family, but several of our uncles were killed and a lot of people in the neighborhood were killed.
Our dad told us it was a terrible gang from the other side of town. That they were trying to take over our part of the city and that if we let them, we would lose everything that we owned and that our entire way of life would be gone. It was imperative, he told us, to get behind him and to not question what he was doing for us and our family. After this episode it was hard not to have great sympathy for our father. He worked tirelessly to rebuild the neighborhood and to make sure those that were injured were taken care of and that those that lost loved ones were looked after. This made us so proud of our dad, and all thoughts of our dad being a low life were set to rest. We knew we needed to step up and be the son that our father would be proud of. We went out into the neighborhood with a new vigor and we were determined to make those in the neighborhood see how great our father was. But we were dismayed to see that the people in the neighborhood were still somewhat wary of me. We gave freely of our money and we even asked father to give us a lot more so that we could help build an exceptional legacy that he could be proud of.
But try as we might the people took our money and politely smiled, but you could just sense that they were only grateful on the surface. That they did not share our awe inspired love of our generous father was incredibly irritating to us. We kept pushing though and we kept giving money to those that lived in our neighborhood and we even went outside our area and started to drop some money to build some parks and other things in our enemy’s backyard. We got a big kick out of that one, wouldn’t dad be surprised to find out that we were over in our enemy’s backyard trying to turn his own neighborhood against him. What a riot that was. But after awhile we noticed that they still were openly hostile to us. They didn’t dare lay a finger on us, but you could see it in their eyes that they really hated us.
Was it our suit? Was it our education and our free way of living? Why were these people so resentful of us and our father? It was absolutely maddening to us.
On our 18th birthday we decided to go against our fathers demands and we went over on the other side of the city for a drink. This turned out to be a turning point in our lives. As we got out of our car we were set upon by a small group of men who threw us in the back of their car and were rushed off to some unknown house. When we got there, they removed our hoods and in front of us was a man. We immediately recognized him as Carl the laundry guy. We remembered that several years ago he closed up his shop and we never saw him again. Our dad said he was a thief and that we were better off without him around. We always liked Carl, even though we didn’t really ever get to know him.
Carl had a very strange look on his face and behind him were several TV monitors and a dozen or so DVD players and stacks of disks. Carl told us that he had great sympathy for us and that he felt that at our core we were good, but that he had some very disturbing things that he had to show us, and how we reacted to these videos would determine whether he ccould still think of us as being “good”.
Over the next hours and days he showed us stacks and stacks of videos of our father beating the shit out of poor vendors and shaking them down for their hard earned money. It showed pictures and videos of our uncles sneaking into other gang’s hangouts and murdering them in cold blood. The video also showed that these other gangs were no saints either and that they treated the people in their neighborhood pretty shitty as well. But our father was the best and even those gang leaders gave our father tribute in the form of money and loot; money and loot that was stolen from the people in THEIR neighborhoods.
And suddenly it all made sense to us. The cold looks we would get from the people in other neighborhoods. They were not mad that we had an Armani suit, they were mad because the money that bought that suit was, at least to some degree, was money that was stolen from them. They didn’t care about our carefree lifestyle; they were PISSED OFF that it as being paid for by their hard work and sweat. The people in my own neighborhood weren’t overjoyed at the exuberance we showed for our father because they were scared to death of him. Sure they got a lot of benefits for living under his banner, but they were not free, not like us. They had to work hard for everything they got and they had to hand over a good portion of it to our father who in turn paid us our allowance. No wonder they weren’t impressed when we would show up with a fistful of dollars to spread around. They were probably thinking about how much of that money was THEIR’S IN THE FIRST PLACE!
And so here we sit on this sidewalk. Trying to figure out how to reconcile all we have just seen. Are we GOOD? Are we Exceptional? Up to this point we could always point to how incredibly well our father shielded us (and lied to us) about how our money was made. But from this point forward we can no longer pretend that we don’t know. Before we kind of played dumb and allowed ourselves to be deluded. But we cannot do this anymore, we are now fully awake. So what are we going to do when dad shows up to pick us up? He is likely going to see it in our eyes. Do we pretend that we don’t know? Do we just accept what we are and just go along with it all? Do we spit in his face and tell him to fuck off? We better figure it out soon, because he will be here soon………..
Unfortunately it seems it’s always a matter of which side your bread is buttered on. The real tragedy here is that you cannot live independently for very long or in large numbers. When you’re neighborhood is run by gangs you don’t have a lot of choice in the matter; either you join a gang or you get ganged up on. There are two kinds of self-reliant independence that this country was founded on. One had to do with those who didn’t want to join a gang, those who just wanted to head out west and carve their own futures, embodied by the sort of rough and tumble type who answers to no man. I guess for the sake of today’s post we can call it American Expansionism. Since that is the very picture of our early American roots that we are known for, the Cowboys and Indians meme if you will. The other was the rogue entrepreneur, the plantation owners and timber barons who also answered to no man in their quest to strike it rich. It’s this latter type who really shaped this country in the long run. I think the real lesson in American Exceptional-ism is that we (the collective we) like to believe that we can somehow enjoy all of this wealth and that it would cost us nothing then when we find out the price of it all we can pretend we are offended by the actions used necessary to get and maintain it.
I’ve always wondered why the lie? Why not just admit what we are and why? American Exceptional-ism seems more like closeted homosexual-ism. Then again that explains a lot if you think about it.
This is a great entry Robert, a very good analogy indeed.
Thank you Chief OnaMoose for the great reply.. Not sure if you’ll see this reply or not.. But I agree completely on your take of how the west was “won”…
Thank Redd Dogg as well.. Glad you are still reading my stuff..
Robert
Thanks Robert I’m glad you liked it.
The point I was hinting at was and should have been more clear in-case other readers don’t get it; is that American Exceptional-ism is really more like playing pretend. Americans pretend many things. We pretend that the economy works. We pretend to have universal health care, We pretend to be offended and angered by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. We pretend to be upset by gays and gay marriage when most of our political leaders are themselves gay or porking the interns. We pretend that we are a rough an tough individualistic nation when really we’re a bunch of fat slobs eating donuts and doing exactly the same things our neighbors are doing. In fact most of the sub-culture movements themselves are really just another way to fit in by proclaiming that we don’t fit in. Look at the whole Goth sub-culture, originally supposed to be rebellious and and offshoot of punk yet has it’s own dedicated stores in every city. Has specific gestures and mannerisms, music, clothing, lifestyle and everything. Hell you have to conform to a whole bunch of crap to be goth. Family values??? Really didn’t you pork babysitter last week? Hey lets talk about HOAs. Americans are the farthest thing from individualistic values ever. We like to portray ourselves as cowboys; doesn’t that just sound wonderful. So long as Americans retain their illusions about themselves they are capable of just about anything. Denile isn’t just a river in Africa.
pretend = fraud? I agree…from the top to the bottom and all in between…we are lying to our selves, deceiving our selves and some of us are aware of this and they are defrauding you, me and them selves…
Like your story Robert…very good both writing style and story line.
And thanks Chief for the clarification
As a European (well Irish really) I was always curious to know If American people we really aware of the extraordinary privileged position they held on the world stage, due to the US Dollar as the reserve currency.
I loved your “Sopranos” analogy and will use to explain the “Washington Consensus” to my friends.
And I will be back for more!
Hmmm. Just stumbled across this now….but better late than never.
Regarding the “exceptionalism” of America…I think it’s there, but it’s not something that wells up from nowhere to make people here better than others. Rather, I think it stems from our revolution, the form of government that was put together at that time, and it’s early development. I’m not sure when, but sometime in the 20th century we began to go off the rails. I claim no special powers of insight…I didn’t start to reflect on this stuff until about 2006 or so. I did have the foresight, once I realized our position, to cash out my 401K and pay off all my debts (excluding my mortgage).
But people fortunate enough to live within a country that allows you more freedom than any in the world (which was the case in America until, as I said, sometime in the 20th century) are people who can build the Golden Gate Bridge or Hoover Dam or the Brookline Bridge or the Arc d’ Triumphe or Mount Rushmore. Even the afteraffects allowed us to essentially create the internet, build the world’s leading entertainment and automobile industries, birth the internet, and on and on. They ARE special, even if it’s not much to their own credit.
A large portion of the American population are sheep, it’s true. Not a lot of individualism. But I consider myself an individualist. I don’t put on airs about being anything other than what I am, which is a software developer with a wife and child to care for who has a penchant for motorcycling, fantasy football and spaghetti. Nobody outside of my family knows that I also have been squirreling away lots of supplies in preparation for a collapse of one sort or another. That’s the sort of thing that’s TOO individualistic for the comfort of the powers that be.
But I agree…things are running rapidly out now, on the “City on a Hill” vision of America and also, though many don’t want to admit it, most of the rest of the world as well. After all, while we’re not necessarily naturally better people than others, we’re certainly no worse. And we’ve had the advantage (most of us) of living in a relatively free and stable political system. Why do you think the troubled US dollar is STILL the reserve currency of choice? It’s because the only thing better right now is gold and other precious metals, which is not legal tender in most cases and in any even there aren’t enough of them to go around. In short, the dollar is starting to suck, but everything else still sucks at least as much and in most cases worse.
What’s coming will not be good. You can’t owe $15 trillion with no visible recognition from our leaders that there is a problem and have it end well. Not at all.