Why America is the greatest country in the world?
OK, so this speech has been cropping up enough on my dash that I went me along to YouTube and watched the whole scene in its entirety. And I was right there with it until the bit that comes after the section that everyone’s quoting - namely, the part about how America used to be the greatest country in the world. Which goes as follows:
We stood up for what was right! We fought for moral reasons, we passed and struck down laws for moral reasons. We waged wars on poverty, not poor people. We sacrificed, we cared about our neighbors, we put our money where our mouths were, and we never beat our chest. We built great big things, made ungodly technological advances, explored the universe, cured diseases, and cultivated the world’s greatest artists and the world’s greatest economy. We reached for the stars, and we acted like men. We aspired to intelligence; we didn’t belittle it; it didn’t make us feel inferior. We didn’t identify ourselves by who we voted for in the last election, and we didn’t scare so easy. And we were able to be all these things and do all these things because we were informed. By great men, men who were revered. The first step in solving any problem is recognizing there is one—America is not the greatest country in the world anymore.
To which all I can say is: ROMANTICISED. FUCKING. BULLSHIT.
What about slavery? What about McCarthysim? What about sexism? What about colonial wars of aggression? Bullshit America never used to bang its chest; bullshit it was made wonderful exclusively by great men; bullshit that ‘we acted like men’ is the highest fucking praise you can heap on a country’s past; bullshit it didn’t wage war on poor people - what the fuck were Hoovervilles and the Great Depression? what the fuck were ghettos and slavery? I just, seeing this part of the speech in abstract had me all ready and willing to watch the show despite my intense dislike of Aaron Sorkin’s internalised misogyny (among other things), and now… no. If the base premise is going to be a romanticised yearning for some unspecified past pinnacle of American greatness which, by definition, must have been when racism and colonialism were even worse than they are now, when sexism and homophobia and transphobia and ableism and classism every other thing that’s wrong with the modern world abounded, but where presumably it was still great to be a straight white man with money, then NO.
I do not hold - have never held - with patriotism. I don’t believe that any one country in the world is inalienably or intrinsically better than all the others, or greater, except maybe in some very specific, very narrow sense that’s backed up by statistics and evidence, as per the statement, 'Country X is the safest place in the world for women to give birth,’ or 'Counry X has the lowest rate of gun crime anywhere in the world.’ But as much as I hate modern nationalism, I hate even more the sentiment that any modern nation still dealing with the ongoing toxic legacy of imperialism, racism, persecution, sexism and general fuckedupedness used to be better before the point in recent history at which it was pointed out that all that shit should stop.
So, to Aaron Sorkin: no. The first step in solving any problem is recognizing there is one—America was never the greatest country in the world, because apart from anything else, there’s no such animal.
(via the-clash-at-demonhead)
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