søndag den 9. august 2009

Den tossede tredjedel

Det drejer sig ikke om, at USA grundlæggende er godt eller skidt - entydige holdninger hører kun autoritetsdyrkende borgerlige og autoritetshadende venstreorienterede til - men om, at totredjedele af amerikanere er søde og fornuftige mennesker, og at den sidste tredjedel er aldeles bindegal. Og at den tossede tredjedel har haft magten i verdens mægtigste land de sidste otte år.

Mange borgerlige har et abstrakt forhold til USA, hvorfor støtten til Bush's udenrigspolitik var et spørgsmål om at støtte USA i det hele taget, i stedet for at diskutere, om det konkret var en god idé at invadere Irak eller ej. Det svarer til EU-tilhængere, der hellere vil diskutere EU's betydning for trans-europæisk fred siden 2. Verdenskrig end fiskekvotefiaskoen, eller socialister, der hellere vil snakke marxistisk teori end kommunismens praksis, og nok egentlig mest af alt skælde ud på USA.

Dette.
They have always been with us, the people who believed in manifest destiny, who delighted in the slaughter of this land's original inhabitants, who cheered a nation into a civil war to support an economic system of slavery that didn't even benefit them. They are the people who bashed the unions and cheered on the anti-sedition laws, who joined the Pinkertons and the No Nothing Party, who beat up Catholic immigrants and occasionally torched the black part of town. They rode through the Southern pine forests at night, they banned non-European immigration, they burned John Rockefeller Jr. in effigy for proposing the Grand Tetons National Park.

These are the folks who drove Teddy Roosevelt out of the Republican Party and called his cousin Franklin a communist, shut their town's borders to the Okies and played the protectionist card right up til Pearl Harbor, when they suddenly had a new foreign enemy to hate. They are with us, the John Birchers, the anti-flouride and black helicopter nuts, the squirrly commie-hating hysterics who always loved the loyalty oath, the forced confession, the auto-de-fe. Those who await with baited breath the race war, the nuclear holocaust, the cultural jihad, the second coming, they make up much more of America then you would care to think.

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