American Exceptionalism: An Inquiry

Harry T. Cook

By Harry T. Cook
7/3/15

 

Americans are about to celebrate the 239th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence and, by extension, the invention of the United States, which was accomplished by their foreparents over the following decade.

That invention was celebrated by Alexis de Tocqueville in his 1835-1840 work Democracy in America, in which he said, "The position of the Americans is ... quite exceptional." He traced that exceptionalism to their "strictly Puritanical origin, their exclusively commercial habits" along with what he called our predecessors' "neglect of the arts" unlike their European counterparts.

Later on, American exceptionalism took on the concept of "manifest destiny," which was used as an excuse to deprive native populations of their land so that the United States could expand. Not so long after came talk of America being "God's country."

Such ideas are what aided and abetted the country's entry into the conflict known as the Spanish-American war, later into the Korean war in 1950, the Vietnam war a few years on and finally the 2003 preemptive invasion of Iraq, then a sovereign nation with which the United States was not at war. We knew then and know now that bald-faced lies in high places were given as the casus belli for the latter.

What lay at the base of the invasion of Iraq was the unacknowledged loss of the Vietnam war with its specter of evacuations by helicopter through the roof of an embassy annex. For those who became known as neo-cons, America's withdrawal left a bitter taste that had somehow to be eradicated.

That process began in June 1997, when a document known as the "Statement of Principles" of an organization called "The Project for a New American Century" was issued. One of its principles introduced strategies for the shaping of "a new century favorable to American interests ... to challenge regimes hostile to [American] interests ... to preserve "an international order friendly to our security and our prosperity."

The signatories of that document included John Ellis (Jeb) Bush, Dick Cheney, Steve Forbes, I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, Dan Quayle, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz -- Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz in particular being the authors of the massively stupid war with and in Iraq, its neverending aftermath being one of the globe's great destabilizers. And they called that war a sterling example of "American exceptionalism." It was, in fact, nationalism.

The definition of nationalism is "a strong belief that the interests of a particular nation are of primary importance with respect to those of other nations." Nationalism tends to be xenophobic, ethnocentric and defensive.

The key word in the definition is "belief." The truth is that one can believe anything he or she chooses to believe, but no one can "know" something except by the hard work of examining data relevant to the piece of knowledge that is sought.

Here are some of the things we actually "know" about America:

+ It was conceived in revolution and born in the framing of its Constitution and Bill of Rights. If one were a Caucasian male landowner, the early years of the country were found favorable but not so much by unmarried women, Native Americans and African slaves;

+ Many of our founding parents owned slaves;

+ Native Americans were demonized and persecuted (see the Trail of Tears);

+ In a frenzy of building, vast forests were felled, leaving behind thousand of

square miles of ruined landscape;

+ In greed to grow and sell wheat, the Great Plains were denuded of prairie grass setting  the stage for the ruinous Dust Bowl of the 1930s;

+ It has evolved a tax code that favors the already wealthy at the expense of a failing

middle class and the hopeless poor;

+ Too many of its governments at the state level are bound and determined to suppress voting by racial minorities and youths for the sake of political gain and to deny women their constitutionally protected reproductive rights.

Some of these are unhappy thoughts to send out on the eve of the Fourth of July, when public attention at its best turns to Old Glory and the land of the free and the home of the brave. No one wants more than I to be able to amass sufficient knowledge to permit belief in a morally exceptional America.

Better thoughts, though: With Beethoven's Freude, sch�ner G�tterfunken playing in my head, I cheered mightily the U.S. Supreme Court's two majorities in rulings last week: the first that secured for millions of Americans the right to have government-subsidized health care, the second that recognized the legitimacy of what we have come to call "gay marriage."

It was a great week, though overshadowed by the funerals of the nine African-Americans shot to death in South Carolina church. But as if to offer a measure of redemption to the grieving, the nation's First Choral Director led a congregation of 6,000 in a rousing stanza of "Amazing Grace."

That's the America I will celebrate through tears on the Fourth of July 2015.

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POSTSCRIPT: I Did It and I'm Glad

The 5-4 U.S. Supreme Court ruling on marriage last week brought me a quiet, inner peace as I remembered a day almost 47 years ago. I was a young assisting priest serving an urban parish that even then was home to all sorts and conditions of people. One of them was a man then probably in his late 60s or early 70s.

He was a regular at the 8 a.m. liturgy, sat by himself in a rear pew of the chapel and spoke only when spoken to. I spoke to him the first day I saw him and discovered a most interesting person. He had played a series of character roles on Broadway and elsewhere. He'd been stranded in Detroit when his theater company was dissolved in mid-tour, leaving him with no train fare back to New York.

He'd met the man whom he would come to love and with whom he would live in a small apartment a short block from the church for the next 30 years. When his partner became mortally ill, he approached me after church one Sunday to ask if I would bless their union.

I could neither refuse nor even think of asking the rector's permission, much less that of the bishop. So on a rainy Saturday morning with no one else but the sexton in the building, I ushered in the two men, lighted the candles on the altar of St. Michael's Chapel, donned my vestments and, using a hastily crafted text, heard their vows and made the sign of the Cross over them.