Thus, I cringed throughout the first ten seconds of this video clip:
After it was all over, however, I felt a sense of relief that the United States government had nothing to do with the production of this video. This relief, however, was replaced by a sense of projected embarassment on someone else's behalf. Two crucial opinion-shaping institutions in the western world--academia and the electronic media--exhibit growing anti-American bias. This may be mildly true in the United States (I'd reference Ward Churchill, but I hear Errol's insane antics have forever weirded him off CU's campus), but it's even more true in Europe, where, for example, BBC, the most trusted media outlet in the continent, recently admitted they suffer from an anti-American bias. It's stodgy academics and slanted journalists and entertainment producers who need to have their minds changed about the United States, but I suspect videos such as this elicit little more than a snort of derision from those quarters. Hence, my projected embarassment on the behalf of the producers.
And then I thought about it a bit more. All the video flatly states ... is true.
Sure, the United States has selfishlessly screwed over a significant amount of poor countries over the past century. We have been mostly fair but tremendously dedicated capitalists, and our business acumen has enriched our own citizens often at the expense of poorer countries and their exploited laborers abroad. Our weapons of war have repeatedly, through malfunction or user incompetence or purely rotten happenstance, taken the lives of thousands of innocent people. And our massive production industries have created environmental hardships for multiple countries around the world. Hell, the United States likely wouldn't even exist today had our ancestors not routinely enslaved and massacred weaker groups of people.
That's a tremendously dark picture, and I don't really fault critics of the United States for experiencing feelings of cynical pessimism (I frequently experience them myself). But I do fault the majority of critics for allowing their minds to stop there. I fault them for closing their eyes and plugging their ears and relentlessly claiming that, though they grew up patriotic, they've since taken the red pill and have followed Neo down the rabbit-hole where they've achieved enlightenment and no longer need to listen to viewpoints which contradict theirs. The notion that the United States is, in actuality, the one true evil empire befouling the planet is an irony too delicious for many to move away from.
The reason that irony is so delicious is because it betrays an obvious truth: with regard to the United States, the glass is obviously half-full. You'll find it's true if you scour all sides of all issues with your critical intellect fully engaged. If you haven't the time or the intellect, then take it from me: a man with no family or social life, but with plenty of time, an internet connection, and a curiosity to listen to all voices on any issue which is of interest to me at the moment. I've turned into an all-seeing, all-consuming devourer of news and information. Sure, my sanity is questionable (see last post), but when I'm lucid (as I am now) you can believe me when I say the United States may have a grey-colored past and present, but the truth is our shade is far closer to white than black. Americans do far more good to the world than evil, and, who knows, maybe in coming weeks I'll introduce a moral weight scorecard to this blog with graphs and pie charts that prove what I'm talking about.
Until then, you'll have to accept the simple apparent truths that are right in front of your face and on videos such as the one above.
PS: Matt's a big poopy-pants.
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