Well said
This superb Globe & Mail article perfectly expresses the way I (and a lot of other people, I suspect) feel about America, a great country that's losing its way.
The trouble with America
By BOB LEVIN
From Saturday's Globe and Mail
"If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost Middle America."
Back in the day, a pronouncement by one man could tell a president all was lost. Walter Cronkite, fresh from reporting on the 1968 Tet offensive for CBS, declared the Vietnam War unwinnable, and said the United States should get out. Mr. Cronkite was "America's most trusted man" and Lyndon Johnson, utterly defeated, was soon its ex-president.
There is no such figure today, not in the splintered media universe. No network anchor holds that singular place in the national psyche; no one voice can persuasively declare the signature policy of George W. Bush's presidency, the war in Iraq, an abject failure.
But an approval rating mired in the 35-per-cent range is plenty eloquent.
This is not an easy moment for Americans. The Fourth of July fireworks whistled skyward as usual this week, but there was something hollow in the display, a gnawing discomfort, a reminder that the rockets' red glare over foreign lands has failed to subdue enemies or secure peace, and that somehow the United States isn't practising the very values in whose name it fights.
Iraq -- there is no escaping Iraq, not for Mr. Bush or anyone else. The word carries all the queasy-making resonance of Vietnam, the fetid smell of death and defeat and lies and deluded policy. It means Abu Ghraib, Haditha -- exotic names added to the American lexicon, beside My Lai and No Gun Ri. It means America, the one celebrated in story and song and crackling fireworks, is not the America it's supposed to be.
I am an American, born and bred in Philadelphia, where independence was declared and freedoms enumerated. I drank patriotism like milk. I still say, even after Vietnam and Watergate and El Salvador and all the other myth-exploding episodes of a lifetime, that the United States is not supposed to torture prisoners and slaughter civilians, is not supposed to twist intelligence or tap its citizens' phones illegally.
Naive? Maybe. But, as the founders put it, we hold these truths to be self-evident.
Mr. Bush, of course, denies the worst and justifies the rest in the name of 9/11, his very own Alamo. And the U.S. is winning the war on terror, he insists, all evidence to the contrary. In a recent survey of 100 leading foreign-policy analysts, 86 per cent of the bipartisan group said the world has become more dangerous, and the Iraq war -- plus Guantanamo detentions and America's Iran policy and dependence on foreign oil -- are reasons why.
All this gives the country a severe case of what the shrinks call cognitive dissonance.
More than 2,500 Americans have been killed in Iraq; they cannot have died for nothing.
Okay, Bush backers say, so there was no connection to 9/11, no weapons of mass destruction. But freedom for the Iraqis, isn't that worth the fight?
And we caught Saddam Hussein and killed Abu Musab al-Zarqawi -- that's two fewer bad guys on the loose -- and there's talk of withdrawing some troops come September.
Except the chaos continues, the daily deaths on TV. It doesn't look much like freedom.
Bush bashers are conflicted too. Decrying a war, as Americans learned the hard way during Vietnam, should not be confused with disrespecting the troops fighting it. You can hate Mr. Bush -- wish nothing but further disaster on his undertakings -- without wanting even one more American killed in Iraq, not to mention innocent Iraqis.
You can hate the war but still wonder if a unilateral pullout would create full-blown civil war and an even more destabilized Middle East.
There's disturbing news wherever you look. The Taliban, seemingly vanquished in Afghanistan, are newly resurgent. Iran and North Korea keep playing weapons games, poking the giant. There's an unconscionable federal budget deficit, driven by indefensible tax cuts, while officials are preoccupied with illegal aliens from Mexico and paranoid about terrorists from Canada.
Donald Rumsfeld is still employed. Not only that, but it's hurricane season again, a reminder of the post-Katrina bungling by an administration whose supposed strength was keeping Americans safe.
Ahead lies the fifth anniversary of 9/11, an event so perverted by politics it's difficult to recall the pure human horror, and it's sure to be exploited anew as congressional elections loom in November.
Already many Republicans are running away from their President. Democrats, cowed and incoherent throughout the Bush years, still can't explain why they're running. Even Superman, afraid of offending foreign ticket-buyers, no longer fights for "the American way."
No, this is not an easy moment for Americans, 230 years since the nation was founded. But the United States is famously a nation of optimists, and in that spirit it is worth noting that a country's politics are only part of its story, and that American values -- the founders' values -- are no less admirable today, only less apparent.
This is a lament for America, not a eulogy. It is a great country with appalling leadership, but the latter, in the way of all democracies, can happily be changed. We hold that to be self-evident too.
The trouble with America
By BOB LEVIN
From Saturday's Globe and Mail
"If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost Middle America."
Back in the day, a pronouncement by one man could tell a president all was lost. Walter Cronkite, fresh from reporting on the 1968 Tet offensive for CBS, declared the Vietnam War unwinnable, and said the United States should get out. Mr. Cronkite was "America's most trusted man" and Lyndon Johnson, utterly defeated, was soon its ex-president.
There is no such figure today, not in the splintered media universe. No network anchor holds that singular place in the national psyche; no one voice can persuasively declare the signature policy of George W. Bush's presidency, the war in Iraq, an abject failure.
But an approval rating mired in the 35-per-cent range is plenty eloquent.
This is not an easy moment for Americans. The Fourth of July fireworks whistled skyward as usual this week, but there was something hollow in the display, a gnawing discomfort, a reminder that the rockets' red glare over foreign lands has failed to subdue enemies or secure peace, and that somehow the United States isn't practising the very values in whose name it fights.
Iraq -- there is no escaping Iraq, not for Mr. Bush or anyone else. The word carries all the queasy-making resonance of Vietnam, the fetid smell of death and defeat and lies and deluded policy. It means Abu Ghraib, Haditha -- exotic names added to the American lexicon, beside My Lai and No Gun Ri. It means America, the one celebrated in story and song and crackling fireworks, is not the America it's supposed to be.
I am an American, born and bred in Philadelphia, where independence was declared and freedoms enumerated. I drank patriotism like milk. I still say, even after Vietnam and Watergate and El Salvador and all the other myth-exploding episodes of a lifetime, that the United States is not supposed to torture prisoners and slaughter civilians, is not supposed to twist intelligence or tap its citizens' phones illegally.
Naive? Maybe. But, as the founders put it, we hold these truths to be self-evident.
Mr. Bush, of course, denies the worst and justifies the rest in the name of 9/11, his very own Alamo. And the U.S. is winning the war on terror, he insists, all evidence to the contrary. In a recent survey of 100 leading foreign-policy analysts, 86 per cent of the bipartisan group said the world has become more dangerous, and the Iraq war -- plus Guantanamo detentions and America's Iran policy and dependence on foreign oil -- are reasons why.
All this gives the country a severe case of what the shrinks call cognitive dissonance.
More than 2,500 Americans have been killed in Iraq; they cannot have died for nothing.
Okay, Bush backers say, so there was no connection to 9/11, no weapons of mass destruction. But freedom for the Iraqis, isn't that worth the fight?
And we caught Saddam Hussein and killed Abu Musab al-Zarqawi -- that's two fewer bad guys on the loose -- and there's talk of withdrawing some troops come September.
Except the chaos continues, the daily deaths on TV. It doesn't look much like freedom.
Bush bashers are conflicted too. Decrying a war, as Americans learned the hard way during Vietnam, should not be confused with disrespecting the troops fighting it. You can hate Mr. Bush -- wish nothing but further disaster on his undertakings -- without wanting even one more American killed in Iraq, not to mention innocent Iraqis.
You can hate the war but still wonder if a unilateral pullout would create full-blown civil war and an even more destabilized Middle East.
There's disturbing news wherever you look. The Taliban, seemingly vanquished in Afghanistan, are newly resurgent. Iran and North Korea keep playing weapons games, poking the giant. There's an unconscionable federal budget deficit, driven by indefensible tax cuts, while officials are preoccupied with illegal aliens from Mexico and paranoid about terrorists from Canada.
Donald Rumsfeld is still employed. Not only that, but it's hurricane season again, a reminder of the post-Katrina bungling by an administration whose supposed strength was keeping Americans safe.
Ahead lies the fifth anniversary of 9/11, an event so perverted by politics it's difficult to recall the pure human horror, and it's sure to be exploited anew as congressional elections loom in November.
Already many Republicans are running away from their President. Democrats, cowed and incoherent throughout the Bush years, still can't explain why they're running. Even Superman, afraid of offending foreign ticket-buyers, no longer fights for "the American way."
No, this is not an easy moment for Americans, 230 years since the nation was founded. But the United States is famously a nation of optimists, and in that spirit it is worth noting that a country's politics are only part of its story, and that American values -- the founders' values -- are no less admirable today, only less apparent.
This is a lament for America, not a eulogy. It is a great country with appalling leadership, but the latter, in the way of all democracies, can happily be changed. We hold that to be self-evident too.