A looooong rant. If you haven't got the time, scroll on. 😊 But the more intrepid, or foolhardy, among you may glean some meaningful tidbit out of it....
Two stories.
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The "Ugly American"
On one of the anniversaries of 9/11, at Ground Zero, a crowd of Americans was approaching the memorial, all of them carrying large bouquets of flowers to place at the site. One of them noticed an Asian woman likewise approaching the site, but she had a single rose in her hand. This particular American found that offensive. He approached her and began to berate her for the meagerness of her expression of sympathy, calling it an insult to the United States and all the innocents who perished on 9/11. The woman, who was in fact a tourist and knew almost no English, and who had seen in her single rose an expression of simple, humble sympathy, was confused and mortified as other people began to stare, and the American only went on yelling at her louder and louder.
How does that make you feel about Americans?
Actually...it didn't happen. I made it up. Here, the second story, is what really happened.
(Note: this story is NO reflection on the Armenian people. I love my "Armenian" life and the many people who are dear to me there. But in Armenia like everywhere, as the old saying goes, "it takes all kinds"....)
I was in Armenia on their Remembrance Day, when thousands and thousands of Armenians stream to the Genocide Memorial, bouquets in hand to lay at the site in honor of the million or more souls who perished under the Turkish genocide. I'd been invited to go along with my students that day. Classes were cancelled after lunch for the event. I was fairly in the blue as to what was going on and the picture came into focus only gradually as we were approaching the site. it was a blazing hot day, which wilts me to the point of disorientation, and I was enveloped by a sea of thousands, which is precisely the environment I avoid as if my life depended on it, so I was doubly out of sorts. And it took hours to reach the memorial, so make that triply. As I realized what this was all about, and noticed everybody with flowers, and I had none, I asked one of my students to hand me a flower from his bouquet, which he did. Suddenly some man, not part of my immediate company, noticed me with my one flower and started yelling at me. He yelled in Russian (I'm plainly, at a mere glance, not an Armenian, so his default conclusion was "Russian"), so I understood everything. He berated me for insulting his country, and "Would you bring just one flower to your loved one's funeral?" ("I might," I thought.) I argued something back to him, though I don't remember precisely what. I think, in essence, I told him he was being very rude to a foreigner who was sincerely trying to show sympathy. Thankfully my kind students intervened and shooed the belligerent fellow away.
Now let's say that, instead of starting with my made-up story about the ugly American yelling at the poor well-meaning Asian lady, I had kicked this off with "A Story," about "An American" (you don't know who), who went to Armenia and, on their great day of public mourning when everybody brings a bouquet to the memorial, this boorish, ugly American sauntered up to the site with a single, pathetic, peremptory, drooping rose. And then asked, "How does that make you feel about Americans?"
Your answer would likely have been the same as it was to my made-up story about the nasty American mortifying the Asian lady at the 9/11 memorial: "Boy, Americans are just the worst, aren't they...."
In other words, for the "ugly American", whether he's the yell-ER or the yell-EE, it's a lose-lose proposition. He's just "the worst." If he's yelling at a foreigner in America, he's a boorish imperialist dolt, and if he's getting yelled at AS the foreigner elsewhere, it's because he's a boorish, imperialist dolt.
Either way he's the ugly American, and "don't it just go to show ya...." (Which, if I understand correctly, would be what they call "bias confirmation.")
In all cases the default conclusion is, he's the guilty party. Not because it's based in objective reality but because the Ugly American is central to a polemical-demagogic myth at the core of a calculated political philosophy. That myth has been so popularized and "orthodox-ized" by entrenched, invested, power-wielders that to question it is to call the Maelstrom down upon your head.
In my case, the reality is that I was "the Asian lady", but the only way you (or, if not you, then many) could possibly have heard, or heard out, my story without a presumption of my ugliness was to hear it disguised, a parable, with me as the Asian lady accosted by an American at the World Trade Center. Then, you were full of unfiltered, unguarded ("Am I rooting for the politically correct person?") sympathy.
How dreadfully rare it is that we're not guarded.
The Myth has hard-wired us NOT to sympathize with the American. The Myth has predisposed us, in fact, to view the world through a grossly warped, fantastical lens.
Anybody with even a modicum of international, cross-cultural experience, unless he/she is so viscerally devoted to the Myth as to have attained consummate myopia, knows very well that Americans haven't anything remotely like a monopoly on xenophobia, ethnocentrism or insularity. People are, in fact, the same everywhere. They are conditioned and adapted to their social, cultural, psychological and physical environments with their particular assumptions and rules and in those environments they scramble to...survive. At least that. At the outside, maybe to be happy. They cope, they navigate, they "stuff it" when they have to, and on rare occasions they cautiously buck a local norm. (And there's always things about their own cultures they hate.)
But mostly they want to give their children a good life. That's a universal. Probably THE universal.
And 99% of humanity has no time to be ethnologists. So they aren't.
And even when they and their neighbors speak two or three languages, it's not that they are endowed with a naturally superior humanitarian sophistication. It's because those two or three languages are, taken together, "the local language" and you can't FUNCTION in that neighborhood without them.
(How tiresome the snooty aspersions get, about the benighted state of American "Anglos" who only know one language "unlike the REST of the world"...though I have done a fair amount of travel in my time and have yet to bump into this monolithic-polyglottic "rest of the world." Odd, considering how vast it's purported to be.)
No. In point of fact, everybody does what they must to survive and not, in most cases, considerably more than that. "Survive" encompasses physical and, conditions permitting, psychological and emotional needs (love, intellect, aesthetics, sport, etc.). Under lavish circumstances, "survive" includes a lot of what one would like to think one needs but, existentially speaking, doesn't. Under catastrophic circumstances, everything but the scramble for physical survival is jettisoned.
Another story. Or parable, if you like.
Imagine: it's eve-of-Hitlerian Germany, say around 1929, 1930. The monstrosity hasn't fully bloomed yet, but its budding is unmistakable. Among the society's leading classes and élite, in industry, the arts, education, science, medicine, commerce, the word is out: "Jews are the enemy. Don't ask why, they're just the enemy. If you have to ask why, then you're the enemy, too. Toe the line or be cast out along with them."
And imagine some grand cultural event in a massive hall in Berlin, with hundreds of the ruling class, the beautiful people, in attendance. Maybe the Monster is there, too, not that it matters to the story. And some honored figure, say a great violinist, is eagerly urged by the audience: "Speech! Speech!" He steps up to the microphone, takes a breath and utters: "I want to say that in my experience I have found the Jewish people to be no different than any of us, indeed I have found them to be noble and honorable people of good will."
Knees are jerking, breath is arrested, armrests gripped, eyes bulging and pulses racing, horror has seized the hall. That is NOT Beautiful People Speak. The Official Line that a political-philosophical monolith banks on for conceptual coherence--its "glue"--has been slandered, because someone dared to say something...well, true. Even on the merest level of his personal experience it's true. But that doesn't matter. True or not, it's heresy. It's a slander against the Line, the Speak, therefore...hateful. When the Maelstrom comes down on the violinist's head, it will have nothing to do with truth. It will be the Urge to Power sweeping him out into oblivion along with everything else it has marked for elimination.
It strikes me that, albeit it on a thankfully lower scale and intensity (so far), this same Urge to Power has, today, in our present sociocultural conflict, marked out for elimination every utterance, and utter-ER, that runs athwart the Elite Line, the Official Narrative, the Polemical Myth, The Speak. The concentration camps aren't up and running...yet...but you'll be screeched and hollered off college campuses, banished from social media, exiled from public forums, news and entertainment industries, slandered and smeared with the most vile filth (I offer Alan Dershowitz and Jordan Peterson as recent objects of such frenzied rabidity), by the masters and guardians of the sociocultural plantation whose portfolios and bank accounts depend on the Myth's ascendancy. Truth hasn't the least to do with it.
It sure does seem very...mmm...1930s-Germany-ish.
"We're the beautiful, the serene, until you violate our Speak."
Among many other truths, the particular one I'm addressing here, i.e., that the "Ugly American" vs. a world of intrinsically superior and more HUMAN human beings is a myth and a fraud, is one guaranteed to set off the jerking knees and racing pulses. It violates the Speak. The hardwired response is "Eliminate!"
In this Snark-Adoring Age, when infantile mockery is bizarrely exalted as substance, argument, weight and wit (likely because fewer and fewer people are capable of coming up with better, hence the mass scurry to the dreggy bottom), I easily anticipate a sneering attempt (probably not here among Facebook friends, but you know how it would go elsewhere) to dismiss everything I've said with a nasal: "Awww, your widdle Amewican feewings are hurt because people tell you just how bad you are--boo, hoo, hoo...." (I feel ridiculous writing that, but you have to admit it IS the caliber of "argument" that turns online comment threads into such fetid swamps.)
Which of course is no argument or position but a mindless FLIGHT from argument, from thought itself. A knee-jerk, vacuous attempt to stifle and kill dialogue (the polar opposite of classic liberalism) and, thus, keep on perpetuating the Myth in pursuit of political domination.
(It's ALL about power and the illusory self-authentication it tantalizingly dangles in front of you. Which is why "empowered" is the Holy Grail of our day.)
No, it's not hurt feelings. It's a Declaration of Independence (something Americans historically have a yen for). It's all the same to me what others think. But what I think--! Ah hah, THAT is my own, sovereign territory and responsibility, just as what you think is yours. So my point is that, in my humble opinion, each and every one of us has an absolute right to dismiss, reject and conclusively refuse to buy into, or bear on our shoulders, the Myth. It's a lie that shouldn't color our world, predispose our reactions, prejudice our choices, skew our relationships or inhibit our self-expression, no matter how many sneering snarkers, propelled by core maladjustments and a projection of their inadequacies, try to intimidate and...SHAPE us.
To ruthlessly reject their "shaping" is something quantum-ly transcendent to hurt feelings. Their snark is a pathetic attempt to keep you from knowing the difference. But, you do.
Declarations of Independence first lay out what the independence is to be FROM (as Mr. Jefferson eloquently detailed), then they announce, in so many words, "No, not swallowing it anymore." (I'm not sure Jefferson put it exactly like that, but that was the gist.)
"Declaration of Independence" is just one side of this conceptual coin. The other side is this: as a Christian, my priority here isn't to defend America; it's to reject a lie. And to help others shuck false burdens and specious guilt imposed by a barren worldview and political philosophy. God knows, we all have enough real guilt to handle in life, we don't need others getting in our heads to indoctrinate us what we're honor-bound to feel miserable about in the service of their ephemeral political-philosophical fiefdoms.
Forget THAT. Really!
We Americans aren't the worst people in the world, nor is America the guiltiest country in history. (And the hall went silent in horror.)
Even if, to speculate fantastically, America WERE the guiltiest country in history--somewhere, some time, we may suppose there is a winner in that competition--it still wouldn't make YOU "the worst." (And the Beautiful People clutched their pearls and gnashed their teeth.)
No, everybody around the globe is pretty bad, actually. "All have sinned and fallen short...." (And a stampede for the exits ensued.)
As Christians, with a breathtakingly short span to live out on terra firma, our debt is a spiritual one. It's not the suffocating, intentionally IMPOSSIBLE debt to make up for what "we," as defined by self-seeking plantation-masters of one stripe or another, have "done" to others by dint of our being ___________ (fill in the blank...as you know they will!).
Instead, our debt is the supreme, yet POSSIBLE one. It's paid off with every act of grace and love in Christ's Name. We keep on "paying it off," not to extinguish it but for the joy of it. It's not the debt of our guilt but the debt of Love.
Neither of the two debts can ever be paid off, but the one is a bondage while the other is freedom. The one is a fraud and the other is the Way, the Truth and the Life.
The debts the world's plantation-masters want to lay on your shoulders are scams, and they never MEAN for you to pay them off--they mean for you to take them on, psychologically, emotionally, socially, as permanent stigmas, because their whole show depends on it.
The happy news is, you are free in Christ to respond, with respect: "Phthphthpppp!"
Our real debt as Christians is defined by the word "Christian", not by the word "American." This is what we have in common with His Church all around the world. The resources available to us may well determine our fitting responses ("To whom much is given..."), but it remains true all the same that our spiritual debts, our opportunities to "do good to all men," are first and last Christian ones, not "American" ones.
As for our guilt, it has been nailed to the Cross in Him. And life is simply too short to expiate any other kind in the sanctuary of our own spirits. It's a sacrifice God Himself hasn't asked of us, truly a fool's errand. And we weren't called to be fools.
