The Arrogant American

"To them, I said, the truth would be literally nothing but the shadows of the images." - Plato

Published Tuesday, June 07, 2005 by Los | E-mail this post

I grew up feeling proud of America. I had deep emotions in saying the pledge of allegience in class. I was patriotic before it was in style. I remember the waves of emotion running up and down my spine when I sang or heard the star spangled banner. That was then. Now I stare in interest and slight amazement at people standing and hypnoticaly repeating in unison these things. Reminets of 1984... An article titled Arrogant Nation was posted today at Signs of the Times said:

(...)
But how did things get to such a point? What was it that allowed our
country to have become so arrogant? Was it our taming of The West? Was it our near annihilation of The American Indian, the original inhabitants of this
country? Was it our ability to have been so successful in an enslavement of The
African American people? Was it our capacity to have economically ravaged
Central America and The Caribbean? Was it our capacity for technological
development? How about our having bombed Viet Nam and Cambodia into near
stone-age oblivion? Then there was our war with Iraq in 1991, and the fact that
we were able to kill 350 Iraqis for every American soldier who died. And what
about our ability to have been so good at polluting the earth's atmosphere
setting the stage for a rather tragic warming of the world? Or the fact that
four percent of the world's population has been so successfully able to have
consumed 35% of the world's wealth? And what about the fact that we, no doubt,
have the greatest military force in the history of the world, one that could
destroy the entirety of the human race several times over? And what about our
willingness to have thumbed our noses at nearly every institutional effort to
resolve some of the world's most grave problems (The World Court, The Kyoto
Treaty on Climate Change, The Anti-Ballistic Treaty with Russia, The 2001 UN
Conference on Racism, as well as other international attempts to resolve pending
world problems). And finally, we can bask in the glory of having been so
successful in bringing peace, prosperity and security to a democratic
Iraq!
(...)

Why is the US so arrogant? Why is any particular person arrogant and what creates that? As the author above suggests the US has been built on and continues to grow from its foundation of destruction. Any good house needs a strong foundation; the US was created on the grounds of freedom and democracy- there might of even been a few who really believed in 'freedom for the people.' A good lie only survives from living off of a good truth. Welcome to the United States of America, the biggest and best liar of modern history. Democracy my arse.

Dictionary.com defines arrogance as:
"overbearing pride evidenced by a superior manner toward inferiors "

Certainly without a doubt a major characteristic of America(ns). There is a bumper sticker on a building I pass most everday which is also on many American vehicals that says, "The Power of Pride." Indeed. Very powerful. But I think only in mantaining illusions. I think this is ment to be a unifier of togetherness, but there is no unity in lies. There is this percieved ownership of a communties accomplishments - one can see this with sports fanatics (I've never understood why people take possesion of a group of peoples activities that occur within a fairly local distance and experience a wide range of emotions from this...pretty interesting) But from this I think we can see that this identification with dominance is where Americas pride comes from. America is proud they dominated (ephamism for maimed, tourchered, slaughtered, butched, murdered, stole from, etc.) American Indians, African slaves, Mexicans in the U.S.-Mexico War, the Phillipines in the Spanish American War, the Japanese in WWII (and this unthinkable act of devistation of the nuclear bomb is even celebrated today in the US - Victory Day, how incredibly sad and appauling), and so on and on. I didn't include the Germans in WWII because the US in not responsible for 'beating' them, the Russians are. They suffered over 27 million deaths in that war, they were in the battles; the US came in at the tail end after commiting genocide in Japan. The Russains played the bigger part, but Americans not surprisingly like to identify and take credit for accomplishing all. [I left out and information about WWI because that is an area of history I have not studied, but as Amercia is pretty consistant I cannot imagine things being any different; I've also left out current events and Vietnam as those are things which I'd like to cover induvidually].

There so much for Americans to be proud of and to be so arrogant about.

1 Responses to “The Arrogant American”

Los on 2:26 AM

An interesting thing, the post I just wrote was in relation to the specific article I quoted. I had not read the other articles at the Signs of the Times when writing this post. The very next article found at www.rense.com/general65/mighty.htm which was posted following the original article at SotT, describes in better detail than I, the main topics I just wrote about. I love sychronocity (after the fact).