“Americanism” Torn Apart in Short Order
I’ve recently been accused of “anti-Americanism.” If you’d like to read the conversation, just click on “Whats in a War” and read the comments below the post. This accusation of “anti-Americanism” starts with an interesting premise, the nation-state. Even though there are two contents called America, I believe the reader was referring to the United States government and segments of American culture that this blog criticizes. Assuming he wasn’t most angry about my apparent disbelief in doctrinal Christianity and my apparent distaste for MTV and other mind-dulling facets of American culture, but that he was most angry about my criticism of actually policy, we should examine the nation-state to understand the criticism.
For all of those readers lucky enough not to have spent hours scouring political text, the nation-state is this relatively new concept that really arose in the wake of the enlightenment. After loyalty was not required to our sovereigns, the bourgeois and the remaining landed class came up with this idea of the nation-state and the idea of nationalism that comes with it. It wasn’t long before the Kaiser drummed up a great deal of Nationalism and used it to start the Franco-Prussian war, the precursor in many ways to the world wars to follow.
Still the nation-state is a tricky concept. A nation is a people. A state is a group with enough guns to gain the moral legitimacy to use them. There can be state-less nations, like Palestine, though Hamas seems to be evolving into state. There are also perhaps nation-less states. The Vatican could be an example, a sovereign territory with-in a city with out a real people to govern.
So a people don’t need a state to be a nation, and a state only needs enough people to man the guns to be a state. The question to ask then is what is our state’s relations ship to the people. Then we can perhaps discern what this “anti-Americanism” means. One of the interesting things about the modern nation state is the inevitable coalescence of the forces of business and the state. In fascism the state directs the private industry. In communism the state owns the industry. In capitalism industry subverts the state. Thanks to the privatization of our money-supply, revolving door policies, and a thriving corporate-lobbying sector much of the businesses world is for all intents and purposes part of the government. So now matter what form of government, political force (the sticks, guns) and economic force (the carrots, money) end up on the same side in order to exploit the proles. The proles aren’t just the working class, technology has made every white collar worker a slave to their cell. A prole is anyone who hasn’t fallen off the assembly line. Anyone who can’t see through the smoke screen. If you don’t know what I’m referring to, take a look in the mirror. You are a prole.
The latest, greatest rip-off our nation-state has orchestrated against the proles is the Wall Street bail out. The tax-payers effectively gave trillions of dollars to the banks that they have to pay back to the FED at interest! All those T.A.R.P. funds that were plucked out of the air have to be paid back by the tax-payers or else the country will go bankrupt. The bonds backing the dollar won’t be paid back with dollars already created and the value of the dollar will fall to zero as it’s value is undermined. So we created a huge glut of funds for the banks to loan out to us at interest, that we are going to have to pay back in taxes at interest. Several firms handed out record bonuses again this year. Meanwhile one in fifty Americans is living on food-stamps with no form of cash income!
I hope my “anti-Americanism” is offensive, compared to the Americanism I’m up against it better be.
Now I promise not to bitch about political apathy in middle of the game. I won’t talk about how fucked the meat industry is while you are enjoying a porter-house. I won’t criticize foreign policy at a soldiers wake. I even try not to talk politics when drinking, even though the American revolution was spread through the pubs. However, if you find yourself at this site, don’t bring any weak-ass O’riellian arguments. This ain’t Fox News. I am not going to pretend that such arguments are relevant. I will happily dissect them to prove that such critics are too short sighted see past their own dicks (or tits). So unless you want to get cyber-bitch slapped, you best save any tricks you learned from Ann Coulter for the next Palin book signing. Either engage the argument at the points of the argument or shut the fuck up. That should be plenty of room for you to express your opinion with-out sullying the parking-lot fields with regurgitated talking points that don’t really mean anything.
The Parking Lot Fields 