America, when we step back and look critically at her pedigree, is a strange animal. And America is so big, such a world unto herself, and has done so much to shape the world around her that we may never really take stock of just how strange we Americans are, in what ways we have seriously deviated from what hitherto appeared to be Nature’s plan for the nations of the world. Indeed, America is not so much a nation in the classical sense as it is a program, an “experiment” carried out over generations. At the center of this experiment would seem to be the notion that all people from all the world can live together in democratic harmony, which in itself has left many people deeply unsatisfied, not to mention dead. To make matters worse, every time the country arrives at what might have been a sustainable hypocrisy in the application of this notion, it insists on calling its own bluff.
16 messages omitted.