Past due: Constructive national self-examination

[babylonsister]

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/6361

Past due: Constructive national self-examination
by Pierre Tristam | Mar 27 2007

Thanks to the conservative resurgence that began with Ronald Reagan in 1980, the 1960s took a severe and mostly undeserved beating. It was supposedly the decade when the country began "slouching toward Gomorrah," in the words of Robert Bork, the former federal appeals court judge who tends to slouch toward anything suppressive and autocratic. But the conservative storyline about the 1960s is bankrupt. Iraq and the Bush years have exposed conservatism for the duplicitous opportunism that it's been. Ronald Reagan is crying on the cover of Time because he sees what's coming. It's a matter of time before the '60s experience a resurgence of their own -- as a model of constructive self-doubt and social renewal.

The 1960s are the last time the nation really questioned itself about its role in the world and its purpose as a nation. The wars in Vietnam and on America's streets were unhealthy symptoms of a nation in trouble. But they provoked healthy soul-searching.

snip//

For a moment after 9/11, we did have the glimmer of a nation stopping to wonder: Who are we, what are we becoming, who could possibly wish us such harm that we don't quite understand? And for a moment, the world's solidarity, Iran and China included, was with the United States. But just as Bush was to squander a world of good will in the aftermath of the attacks, he also squandered a chance at redefining American purpose in the world. He reduced absolutely everything, to that Manichaean view of the world as good and evil, us versus them.

That's not to say that the acts that had targeted the United States weren't evil and that there wasn't a world of good to defend against them. But all of a sudden we were caught in the juvenile world of comic-book and superhero dialogue at a time that evoked something closer to Dante's Inferno or "Paradise Lost." There was no national discussion, no questioning. Can any of us think of a single great speech delivered in the past six years that comes anywhere close to the kind of self-reflective themes Martin Luther King tackled in his Beyond Vietnam speech? Where were the debates? Where were the discussions?

Subversion doesn't happen only against governments. The most effective purveyors of subversion are governments. They subvert the truth. They subvert history. They subvert the healthy will to doubt, to question, to oppose. The Bush administration did all those things in the last six years. The country is slouching as a result -- back to the healthy subversions of the 1960s. It's about time.
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[Karenina]

1. Not sure...

Americans must first pop the bubble of their exceptionalism. THAT is a tall order.