Are we Americans exceptionally stupid, even arrogantly exceptionally stupid? Are we immoral idiots? Are we blending the American Dream with the American trinity of hyperindividualism, hypermaterialism and hyperethnocentrism? Or is it with the OT Israeli Trinity of idolatry, injustice and immorality?
Israel wouldn't repent, even after God sent prophet after prophet to warn them of impending judgment. Their social evil seemed irreversible and led to their exile to Babylon. Is American on a similar irreversible decline?
Has the false belief in American exceptionalism led us to an arrogant stupidity? If so, what is the evidence?
1. Our exceptionally, excessive military spending; we spend nearly as much as all the rest of the world combined; we have military bases all over the world.
2. Our exceptionally, excessive system of unjust mass incarceration of young Black and Latino males; worse by far than any other democracy.
3. Our incredibly inefficient health care system which costs twice as much per capita as any other democracy.
4. Our extraordinarily unequal economic system which has created an enormous wealth gap, especially unjust racial wealth gap.
5. Our exceptionally, excessive use of both legal and illegal drugs; more on this stupidity in my Friday blog.
6. Apart from a few prophetic voices such as John Perkins, Jim Wallace and Randy Woodley, the American church is in bed with the American trinity.
Does an exceptionally flawed Americanized Christianity open the door for the exceptionally evil American trinity to run rampant? Compared to Europe, America is highly Christian; does this indicate that American Christianity is part of the problem?
Again, I would highly recommend reading Randy Woodley's recent book Shalom and the Community of Creation; Woodley is a Cherokee Indian theologian.
P.S. Readers may wish to add to the list of exceptionally stupid things America does such as pollution, climate change, high rates of gun ownership, high rates of abortion, etc.
On some issues, there is too much bipartisan agreement in Washington, but you wouldn't know it from the media headlines. There is tragic bipartisan agreement on:
1. Excessive military spending: the facts: In 2011, the United States spent $739 billion on its military, China, $89 billion, Britain, $62 billion, and Russia, $52 billion. The U.S. world share of military spending was 45%; China, 5%; in other words, the U.S. spends almost as much as ALL the rest of the world combined. Surely we could cut our military budget in half; we would still be the world's most powerful nation by far.
2. Excessive counterterrorism: the facts (from Dirty Wars by Jeremy Scahill): "By mid-2010, the Obama administration had increased the presence of Special Operations Forces from sixty countries to seventy-five countries. . . . Obama and his team created a system "where people are being killed, you don't know what the evidence is, and you have no way to redress the situation," former CIA case officer Phil Giraldi told me. "It's not that there aren't terrorists out there, and every once in a while one of them is going to have to be killed for one good reason or another, but I want to see the good reason. I don't want to see someone in the White House telling me, "You'll have to trust me." We've had too much of that." . . . . "While the Obama administration ratcheted up its drone strikes and targeted killing campaign, al Qaeda affiliates were growing stronger, embolded in part by the US escalation. Although the Obama administration boasted that it had al Qaeda on the ropes, its global assassination program was becoming a recruitment device for the very forces the United States claimed to be destroying.". . . . Colonel Patrick Lang, who spent his entire career in covert operations leading sensitive missions, told me that the threat posed by AQAP had been "greatly exaggerated as a threat to the United States. . . . Yeah. They could bring down an airliner, kill a couple hundred people. But are they an existential threat to the United States? Of course not. Of course not.. . . . We've gone crazy over this. We have this kind of hysterical reaction to danger." Bush and now Obama are now engaged in "perpetual war" against terrorists; terrorists against terrorists??
3 Comprehensive immigration reform: though the Obama administration wants reform, it is not front and center in its public political agenda; immigration reform has been pushed to the back burner. For Republicans, reform is not even on the stove
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