verging on random

Boorish ego-tripping

May 29, 2011 on 9:49 pm | In Uncategorized | No Comments

Americans have never been exactly self-effacing but as the US Empire totters, their egotism is becoming insufferably, loudly irrational. More and more frequently when I read Americans congratulating themselves yet again for their own extraordinary intelligence, virtue, courage, self-sacrifice etc I find myself shaking my head wondering “Do they really believe this crock of juvenile bullshit? And even if they do, aren’t they even a little bit embarrassed to be so up themselves in public?” The answers, plainly, are “Yes” and “No” respectively.

The latest example of this overweening self-regard comes courtesy of a bloke with the typically American name of Walter Russell Mead (could be worse, at least he doesn’t have a number like the most egregious wannabe hereditary aristocrats in the Great Republic). I read it several times to make sure it’s not some kind of satire but no, it’s intended to be deeply serious:

As the stunning and overwhelming response to Prime Minister Netanyahu in Congress showed, Israel matters in American politics like almost no other country on earth.  Well beyond the American Jewish and the Protestant fundamentalist communities, the people and the story of Israel stir some of the deepest and most mysterious reaches of the American soul.  The idea of Jewish and Israeli exceptionalism is profoundly tied to the idea of American exceptionalism.  The belief that God favors and protects Israel is connected to the idea that God favors and protects America.

Now to be fair to the writer (who by the way is not some lunatic wingnut blogger but a proper academic and author) he doesn’t say whether he personally subscribes to these bizarre beliefs. Maybe he’s just describing what he perceives others to believe. It’s pretty much beside the point; if his summary is an accurate observation of the mood in Washington (and it seems plausible to anyone who watched in stunned amazement as Congress hysterically acclaimed Netanyahu’s banal collection of clichés last week, mixed with calculated insults to the US president) then it means a majority of lawmakers in the world’s greatest military power have taken collective leave of their senses. Which is not a comforting thought.

Daniel Larison maintains that these views are not representative of the majority of ordinary Americans, which if true is testimony to their good sense. However the US government has repeatedly shown that when it comes to foreign policy it couldn’t give a continental about the will of the people.

It was possible until recently to believe that the contempt for the rest of the world displayed during the Bush/Cheney years was some kind of aberration, and that eventually the forces of common sense would reassert themselves in the USA. Barack Obama’s failure to achieve any significant change in ideology and direction have put paid to that idea. One can only watch now with fascination and trepidation as American governance descends ever further into madness, fuelled by resentment that the New American Century lasted barely one decade.

At the level of disinterested observer it’s compelling to watch. But when we see successive Australian prime ministers falling over themselves to swear eternal kinship with a country whose interests diverge increasingly from ours – motivated presumably by little more than horror at the prospect of having to forge an independent national identity and policy – one can only wonder at the apparent blindness and stupidity of our political class.