Is America crazy?

Courtesy of Common Dreams:  

Americans who live abroad -- more than six million of us worldwide (not counting those who work for the U.S. government) -- often face hard questions about our country from people we live among. Europeans, Asians, and Africans ask us to explain everything that baffles them about the increasingly odd and troubling conduct of the United States. Polite people, normally reluctant to risk offending a guest, complain that America’s trigger-happiness, cutthroat free-marketeering, and “exceptionality” have gone on for too long to be considered just an adolescent phase. Which means that we Americans abroad are regularly asked to account for the behavior of our rebranded “homeland,” now conspicuously in decline and increasingly out of step with the rest of the world.

In my long nomadic life, I’ve had the good fortune to live, work, or travel in all but a handful of countries on this planet. I’ve been to both poles and a great many places in between, and nosy as I am, I’ve talked with people all along the way. I still remember a time when to be an American was to be envied. The country where I grew up after World War II seemed to be respected and admired around the world for way too many reasons to go into here. 

That’s changed, of course. Even after the invasion of Iraq in 2003, I still met people -- in the Middle East, no less -- willing to withhold judgment on the U.S. Many thought that the Supreme Court’s installation of George W. Bush as president was a blunder American voters would correct in the election of 2004. His return to office truly spelled the end of America as the world had known it. Bush had started a war, opposed by the entire world, because he wanted to and he could. A majority of Americans supported him. And that was when all the uncomfortable questions really began.

Yeah you know after the election of 2004 I too thought that we must be crazy.

Here are a few of the questions that the author, Ann Jones, has been asked over the years:

• Why can’t you Americans stop interfering with women’s health care? 
• Why can’t you understand science? 
• How can you still be so blind to the reality of climate change? 
• How can you speak of the rule of law when your presidents break international laws to make war whenever they want? 
• How can you hand over the power to blow up the planet to one lone, ordinary man? 
• How can you throw away the Geneva Conventions and your principles to advocate torture? 
• Why do you Americans like guns so much? Why do you kill each other at such a rate? 
• To many, the most baffling and important question of all is: Why do you send your military all over the world to stir up more and more trouble for all of us?

You know in our defense I would like to suggest that America is not so much crazy, as it is schizophrenic. In many ways we are quite a reasonable, intelligent, progressive nation.

However sometimes we hear voices whispering in the dark. And those voices are not quite as reasonable, intelligent, nor progressive.

I call those voices "Republicans," and it seems to be that more and more these days they act like the Joker in "The Dark Knight" movie. And by that I mean, as Alfred Pennyworth explains, some men just want to watch the world burn.

So is America crazy?

Not always. But sometimes, yes most definitely.