US Politics

9 Feb, ’07

I guess its just old age creeping up on me, but it seems I totally fail to understand the journalistic mind anymore. (Well, I didn’t really understand ‘em during the Vietnam War either.) Currently the press reports have America as being totally polarized over this so called “War on Terror”. Half of us are supposed to be wringing our hands and wailing that it’s all our own fault for mistreating the poor Arabs. The other half are supposed to be demanding a new religious crusade, and apparently we can start by indiscriminately bombing Mosques, schools, and hospitals and the like. Oh yeah, both half’s are supposed to be berating President Bush on the subject as well.

I think the media have it wrong, they’ve completely missed the frame of mind in this country. Americans are polarized all right, polarized over our presidential politics, taxes, unemployment, and a host of other internal problems. We get some jim-dandy arguments going over whether or not we should keep our troops in Iraq, and even over silly things like should we dismantle Iran and North Korea as well. The press, both the world press and our own, seem to enjoy making wild headlines out of all this apparent discord.

The media, and a lot of politicians, always seem to forget something about Americans. We take our wars very seriously, and we certainly don’t like sending our youth off to get killed in some foreign land without a darn good reason. Whatever the cause, we’re prone to argue the case for a long time before anything gets done. Our military may not have a centuries long regimental tradition, but they are a class act on the battlefield, as some of those ancient foreign regiments have learned the hard way. So far, they’ve whipped, decisively, every army in the world that they’ve been sent us against.

Like the Irish, we take our politics quite seriously, and tend to get rather verbal about it. Our political campaign season commonly looks somewhat like a three ring circus to the rest of the world, but no one seemed to notice that even with the squabbles over “hanging chads” and “stolen elections”, we didn’t have another revolution, unlike what would have happened in a good many other countries. Our national policies and goals change with a new administration every four years, which keeps everyone confused, and brings foreign diplomats to complain that Americans are illogical, and certainly not predictable.

Well known authors and college professors constantly tell us all about the things that are “wrong” with our country and our society, but I notice that an awful lot of immigrants are beating at the doors trying to get into this country. We get quite indignant about crime, yet we bend over backwards to assure criminals their rights. Our “Righteous Right” and “Loony Left” constantly wail about how wrong or unfair things are, and get all the press coverage, while the “Muddling’ Middle”, who just happen to make up the vast majority of our population, inevitably get ignored for the most part, much as the “silent majority” was ignored during the Vietnam conflict. One of these days the middle ground is going to figure out just how much weight it actually carries in our politics, leaving the loudmouthed radicals to figure out just how few and unimportant they actually are.

Our society literally worships wealth and all it’s trappings, yet we’re not a nation of misers by any standard. Instead we’re probably the most generous of people, with more major charities per square mile than any other nation on the Earth,. Our armed forces have more experience in handling humanitarian aid missions than they do in actual warfare. In time of a civil disaster, even our national enemies can depend on us for assistance.

Yes, Americans are illogical to a point. We actually pay professional athletes outrageous sums to go out in the back pasture and commit mayhem over a misshapen ball. Many of us get all excited over professional wrestling even though we well know it’s faked. Actors get paid all out of proportion to their abilities, so they can make movies about their version of “reality”, and we call it entertainment. We tolerate congressmen spending our tax dollars on building bridges to nowhere, while the exploration of our solar system constantly gets short shrift. We spend billions on patent medicine cold remedies every year, and almost nothing on a cure for cancer. We weep and wail about our dependence on foreign oil, and do little or nothing to solve the problem.

Certainly we’ve got a few skeletons hidden away in the national closet, and there are a few pages in our history that we’d rather forget. But for the most part we’d prefer to be a peaceful people, going about our daily business, following the “live and let live” philosophy. But that fact about us doesn’t sell papers, and thus never makes the headlines. Instead we’re portrayed as a nation of uncultured gun-slinging mobsters consumed by greed and the pursuit of instant gratification. Certainly some of us fit that description, but by no means all of us.

About 60 years ago a bunch of wannabe world conquerors made the mistake of believing what they read in the American press, and apparently in some wistful thinking as well. They then decided that Americans were a soft people and wouldn’t fight. By 1945 to their sorrow, they had discovered the error of their ways. A handful of disgruntled Arabs started it all over again in 2001.

They forget that while we can be fine friends, we also make terrible enemies. They forget that our thin veneer of civilization covers a rather bloodthirsty bunch of mostly European barbarians, essentially the same European peoples that ran roughshod over the world a few centuries ago, totally crushing any and all opponents. They forget that it always takes us awhile to get our act together, and they also forget what happens when we finally do…

Japanese Admiral Yamamoto made a comment to his staff on December 7th 1941, following the Pearl Harbor attack, that is as pertinent today as it was then. “I fear that all we have done is awaken a sleeping giant, and filled him with a terrible resolve.” Right now, and particularly if they keep pushing us, a lot of freelance Islamic fundamentalists would do well to a remember Admiral Yamamoto’s comment.