[QUOTE=smiling bandit]
I’m awful sick of leftists who loudly declare that America is a has-been, or that it’s weak, or that it can’t succeed - who then demand that America attempts the actually impossible with a 100% success rate and that it must come off perfectly immediately, with no downsides at all. I consider myself something of a cynic, and even I’m tired of the leftist dogma of relative suckiness, whereby they’ve planted a strange lodestone in the culture, religion, and society of the west, and the closer anything is to it the more hideously evil/competant it is and the goofier/incompetent it is.
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You seem to think you are Pitting Der Trihs. Sure, America has many collective crimes to its account, but what nation this side of Iceland doesn’t? My position is and always has been simply that America ain’t so special. We no more have any grand historic mission in the world than Canada has. The difference is that we are a great power, doing as great powers do. Sometimes we are the Evil Empire, sometimes the Beacon of Hope, sometimes (more often, really) both at once. In all circumstances, however, it is more patriotic to focus attention on what America is doing wrong than on what America is doing right. We cannot amend our faults until we recognize them, which is always more difficult than self-congratulation; and since we are a great power, our faults are everybody’s business, i.e., their damage doesn’t stop at our shores and borders. (And if America really is special, shouldn’t it be more appropriate to hold it to higher standards than any other country?)
Loyalty to one’s country should be like loyalty to one’s family. You’re not loyal to your family because it is the best in the world, but simply because it’s yours. However, loyalty to country, like loyalty to family, should be unconditional but never unlimited. If your brother is caught robbing a bank, you say, “You disappointed us, Bro, but hang in there, I’ll get you the best lawyer in town if I have to take out a second mortgage on my house.” You don’t say, “You did the right thing, you deserved that money, and those guards deserved to die.”
“The Senator from Wisconsin cannot frighten me by exclaiming, ‘My country, right or wrong.’ In one sense I say so too. My country; and my country is the great American Republic. My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right.”
– Senator Carl Schulz, 1872
I am a better American patriot than you will ever be, smiling bandit.