A Cultural Schizophrenia

We are an odd country here in the US. The bulk of the leadership structure is corporate/fascistic in nature, but there is always the high wierdness of the socialist and hippie-infested education system that adds to what has to be one of the strangest political cocktails on the planet.

Our national mythology is that the Puritans came over to escape religious persecution and set up the New Zion. The truth of the matter is that they came over to have their own way and oppress the shit out of other folks.  Calvinists have never been anything but a group of creeps that way.  I would wager that as much or more of our national DNA came over as slaves, indentured servants, and transportees as ever came over for religious reasons.

The puritans set up shop running slaves.  The asiento trade was started by the Dutch (again, Calvinist pricks) and was picked up on by the English, with slave hulls running primarily out of good old puritan Boston.  This was the corporate America of early America. 

The educational establishment has all the tools to understand and teach this.  But, as most of them are pasty-faced white liberals who group hug and only look for the positive.  The other side of the coin are the right-wing imbeciles who can't imagine for a moment that our past may contain episodes where we were in the wrong and did evil.

We have buried the idea that we may be less than perfect in our past actions.  You see, then we would have to look at our current lives and realize that our wealth and their comforts are built upon the depredations of the ancestors.  Instead, we steadfastly cling to our false self image of being the highest perfection and personally blessed by the almighty as a justification for our actions.

We are now going through a spasm of payback, the same as we have gone through on a routine basis since the founding.  Everyone speaks of the injustice that the common folk blundered into via the depredations of the financial elite.  You see, this is just another delusion.  No one wishes to speak the truth about the American populace as a bunch of greedy, self-centered brats who ran up the bills.  We instead will cling to the stubborn self-deception that this was done to them by greedy bankers.  We are, after all, blessed by God!

So what we are doing now is giving things back, returning to the mean.  The nation will be poorer, but probably with a very similar happiness quotient.  It will take us a bit of humility, a dash of pain, and a bunch of hard work to rebuild, but it will be possible.  When we begin and start the growing up, we'll be just fine. 

The only thing standing in the way is the politicians telling us we don't have to grow up.  That through the Presto! of cheap accounting tricks and other peoples money, badly accounted for, we can continue our overlong puberty.

Maybe then, when we throw aside the asinine triumphalism and exceptionalism, and the politician themselves become red-faced about their lies of leisure, we can get down to the brass tacks of becoming a mature society.  Instead of the feverish adolescence we have just gone through.