It's said that "hard cases make bad law". Given the state in which we find American politics today, one could make an analogy concerning the relationship of national traumas to the political developments which follow in their wake.
The recent - and powerful - example is, of course, September 11, a trauma which was followed by the so-far disastrous "Global War on Terror". But a quick scan through postwar American history reveals the same pattern, over and over again. Here is a partial list of shocks that have been inflicted on the American body politic since the end of WWII:
The Russian A-bomb
The "loss" of China
The Sputnik launch
The Cuban missile crisis
The Kennedy assassination
The Tet offensive
The RFK/MLK assassinations
The first oil embargo
Watergate
The second oil embargo
The Iran hostage crisis
etc.
Many if not all of these events were, for the most part, unforeseen, and were experienced as sudden and unexpected. In reviewing the list, one could argue that what is now seen as a placid, even boring era was in fact thoroughly riven with disturbance and crisis. And what is now most noteworthy about virtually all of these events is that fact that our responses to them have ranged from the inadequate to the disastrous.
America is a country that has long believed that is exceptional, in many dimensions, but most importantly in the moral dimension. In simple terms, we have always believed ourselves to be "the good guys", and that grossly evil acts are invariably committed by others (a belief greatly reinforced by the Nazi atrocities of the 30's and 40's). In a testament to the ability of the human mind to construct its own reality, this vision has withstood all challenges, even in cases where Americans have perpetrated acts which, when done by others, are roundly condemned. The adoption of slavery and the extermination of the native population are only two of the most obvious examples.
American politics during this era can be seen largely as the attempt to preserve the traditional idea of American moral exceptionalism, even as the evidence accumulates that in fact Americans are people just like everyone else, and that America is - to a great extent - a nation like all others. How could it be anything but a relief at this point to once and for all throw overboard the notion that American is different, a kind of pure shining knight that hews to a higher standard than other nations, and that we are as a result not subject to the same standards as others? Are we not at last exhausted from the effort of maintaining this fiction, a fiction that at some obscure level we recognize as such?
The first of the shocks listed above that affected me personally and emotionally was the JFK assassination, an event that to me stands only with 9/11 in its total disruptive horror. Looking back now, it seems clear that America has never really come to terms with this event, with the notion that our own acts, our own policies, could have horrific unintended consequences, a phenomenon now known as "blowback". And this analysis remains true whether or not the accused assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, was a "lone nut" or part of a conspiracy. Either way, the JFK assassination was in a very clear sense something that we did to ourselves, as were others on (and not on) the list.
We seem to have this idea, outstandingly present in the current occupant of the White House, that only intentions matter, that if our intentions are good then we remain blameless, no matter the actual outcome of our actions. Our intent in attacking Iraq was to create a peaceful, prosperous, democratic society, and it is on the basis of that intent that we wish to be judged, not on the basis of the squalid wreck that Iraq has in fact become. The same is true, to a lesser extent, of Afghanistan. And it is true of virtually all our well-intended interventions going back at least to Mossadeq in 1953.
How is it that we keep making the same mistake over and over again? Why are we always so baffled when yet another adventure turns out badly? It can only be our lack of talent for introspection, our inability to perceive ourselves and our motives as merely ordinary, not "exceptional".
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