Wednesday, August 27, 2008

Fuck all this shit

After all the speeches, I'm done with American triumphalism. What-fucking-goddamn ever.

Greatest country in the world? Land of promise?

We raise our country out of the cold wasteland. We created the gentlest, kindest, most tolerant society that has ever existed. We have universal healthcare. We care for our poor. We allow gay marriage.

I grant that the US ain't bad. I live here, after all.

But the idea that somehow it's so amazingly more exceptional than we are is ridiculous.

We didn't build our greatness--our little, tiny, small country's greatness--on slavery.

We didn't spend years slaughtering each other.

We were cruel to our aboriginals, but we didn't engage in wholesale slaughter.

Our minorities could vote earlier.

And so, out of the cold, the misery, the snow, the darkness, and faced for almost our entire civilization's existence by the terror of the invasion of the most powerful state in the world, we survived. We threw them back. Our society is the rebuke to the planet that two languages and at least two religions must hate each other.

The only metric the beat us in is their ability to bomb us into the stone age.

They will never beat us on justice, they will never beat us in tolerance, they will never beat us in class mobility, and they will never beat us in caring for our people.

And so when some idiot Yankee politician says the US is the most free and the greatest and with the greatest potential, let us show them our shining, just, safe, gun-free, tolerant and radiant cities are the irrefutable proof that they aren't the only ones who got it right.

We just did it better.