photo by Antonin Kratochvil, VII/New York Times

I love you US of A, your best years are still ahead of you.

Couldn't you have just kicked out the English¹ and let the rest of us stay?

*sulks*

¹ And by "English", I mean of course only the nasty upper class ones of the type likely to be played in films by Jason Isaacs. Not the fine geezers and geezerettes of MeCha for instance.

I feel an urge to stick a feather in my hat, call said feather "Macaroni", and march around with a fife. Or possibly a drum.

It's a great day. I'm at work, and there are 200 new US Citizens here for a naturalization ceremony. This country has been up to some very stupid shit lately, and it grieves me, but it still means something. We re going to have potato sack races and ice cream and decorate bikes with streamers and twirlers, and blow bubbles and eat watermelon and ribs, and listen to accordian music and a salsa band, and it's going to be a very cool day. And I'm in a straw hat with a red white and blue band around it.

We still don't completely suck. Here's to what's beautiful and salveageable about our nation and the true best things in our cutlure.

The ABC (our national, state owned broadcaster), which incidentally you would probably have one of too if you hadn't kicked us out, has recently taken over The West Wing from a commercial competitor. They didn't start from the beginning (and even though I was pissed off about that, in retrospect it was probably the right decision), but they're starting from, I think, season four. I love watching it because, for an hour and forty minutes (no ads, two episodes per night) each week I can live in Miko's USA.

Every now and again, I realise (realize? you say cilantro...) that Miko's USA is still there under all the nasty shit. What helps me remember is varied. It could be a tv show, a tourist, a book, or a website. But this place and the Seppoes here are an important part of it.

So here's to Miko's, Bartlet's, and Jefferson's USA. Happy Birthday!

(Oh yeah, thanks for the help in WWII).

Matteo, that photo is stunningly great, and Miko, your post has made my day. :)

I'm at work, but hoping to leave shortly. We'll probably grill some hot dogs and fire off the rest of our fireworks.

I have been laughing all day over Garrison Keillor's description on "A Prairie Home Companion" last weekend of an overly-ambitious 4th of July display they tried to put on in Lake Wobegon... you can hear it here.

matteo, that photo made me squint - that's what everything looks like to me without my glasses on. Good photo though.

My hat!

(I have a ginormous head... and an Uncle Sam, who's not too well at the moment...)

Happy Birthday, USA, and welcome new citizens!

Happy Birthday, you goddamn gringos. Me and the missus will probably go on a quest for a decent hamburger (not an easy task in Santiago, Chile) tonight in your honor.

One of my closest friends is English, he refers to the holiday as "Good Riddance Day". Heh.

I will be celebrating by doing laundry and paying my bills. Also, flicking between the English, Spanish and French coverage of Germany vs. Italy. Gooooooaaaaaaaaaaaalllllllllllllll!

Happy 230th, USA!

Every time I think of the problems with this country, I remember that in the grand scheme of things, we're still Very Young - maybe this is just our Terrible Twos, or perhaps those trying years between 13 and 20.

While non-Americans cliched critiques of the US still make me a little defensive, the truth of the matter is that this administration and the Americans who have supported it have done more to murder my love for my country than anything else in my 41 years of life. And that includes the years of my growing to learn the true history of the US's foreign interventions.

I suppose I was naive enough to believe that when we've been quite truly the bad guys in the past, we were the bad guys in spite of our better instincts and intentions. I looked at Vietnam not as an example of the US's rotten core, but rather that the unprecedented public awareness of the real conduct of the war and various crimes, and the public's very negative reaction, indicated a transition to a moral maturity. I also took a historical relativist point of view of things, thinking that even though I believe the intentional firebombings in Germany and Japan and the nuclear bombings which followed are all, by any definition, war crimes...that every participant in that war and those which preceded it were also guilty of war crimes. All of us, all the world community, were guilty, but had grown beyond it, I thought.

And, honestly, I still think all those things are mostly true. But what these last few years have demonstrated is just how much regression the US and its citizens are capable of. Our ability to delude ourselves, be hypocrites, and to hold other nations to standards we flaunt is unequaled. Abu Ghraib should have been a watershed moment in which everything changed, the American public woke up. Instead, today we get news on a weekly basis of murderous atrocities we continue to commit in Iraq and the rationalizations and hypocrisy just keep coming.

I believe that whatever is true of the basic American character, good or bad, the US of 2006 has become an evil nation. Each of us, as citizens, has some of this blood on our hands, and thus July 4th has become a day of an evil mockery of the good. If we ever deserved our imperial position, we no longer do—what we deserve now, today in 2006, is humiliation and decline.

the US of 2006 has become an evil nation

No, it's an evil government and there's a difference. I did everything in my power to keep this goverment out of power. I don't belive in guilt by association when it comes from the McCarthy's of the world and I reject it now. Don't embrace it, my friend.

I agree with jonmc. I also did what I could to keep this government out of power, and am angered by what has gone on. But God bless the men and women stuck in a ridiculous war, doing their jobs and dying for it. It's the majority of the people whom I love-not the twisted, priveledged, paid for politicians that have skewed this country in the direction it has gone.

Miko, that's what i need to do--it'd restore my hope.

we're complicit in every bad thing they do, and by not stopping them, nor shouting/screaming for them to stop, nor shutting them down, etc, are allowing them to continue doing it in our name. They're nowhere near done, either.

Every horror our soldiers commit, every bomb we drop, etc, will rebound on us enormously, and our leaders don't care.

Every horror our soldiers commit, every bomb we drop, etc, will rebound on us enormously, and our leaders don't care.

Yes, but we do. There is a differrence between the people and the governments in other countries and the same is true here. I refuse to prostrate myself in guilt for something I have no responsibility for. Sorry, but that's the way I see it.

im going to eat a hot dog.

≡ Click to see image ≡

im going to eat a hot dog.

unKosher!!!

In a democracy, the buck stops with the citizens. All of them. Those of us who have opposed this administration may be less responsible for what it does, but we are not blameless and can never be blameless. This is how responsibility works. This is what communal responsibility means.

It seems to me that the argument "I did everything I could to oppose this outcome, therefore I'm not responsible for this outcome" is a morally immature understanding of responsibility. It misses the point.

There's a categorical argument behind my assertion about the nature of responsibility ("nature"), but let's put that aside and just look at it pragmatically. In practice, the quantification of "doing as much as one can" or even "doing as much as is reasonable" is extremely difficult. That being the case, it is very easy for anyone to make such claims about their own actions or the actions of others and thus absolve themselves of any guilt and place it upon some other group. Because do not be confused about this important point: absolving oneself or others of responsibility implicitly shifts that same amount of responsibility onto those remaining. It being easy to do—deeply tempting to do—then the result is that all fingers are pointing elsewhere, everyone is self-satisfied about their own decisions and actions, and no responsibility for the outcome is taken by anyone. And this becomes a habit of thought.

Indeed, it's a deeply familiar habit of thought in the very context in which this discussion is taking place: it's how this administration approaches the idea of responsibility.

all fingers are pointing elsewhere, everyone is self-satisfied about their own decisions and actions, and no responsibility for the outcome is taken by anyone. And this becomes a habit of thought.

I'd say this is also what's going on in the culture at large, which is why the message of this administration (and perhaps not so coincidentally, the many evangelical churches whose theology actually leads in this direction) has taken hold so easily and comfortably for most people.

But kmellis, your argument about responsibility seems to run counter to your statement earlier that we simply deserve decline. In the earlier statement, it was almost like you were implying that American citizens should do nothing to try and turn the tide. Whereas your second one seems to suggest that would be immature.

Which is why I posted what I did. I still believe this country may be salveagable and may climb its way back to a respected position in the world. It may take fifty years or more, sure. But if it happens, it will be because enough of us clung doggedly to shared civic values. Compare the world reputation of the United States (such as they were) in 1860-1880 or so with the reputation it held fifty years later, going into World War II. In the earlier period, there was slavery, corruption, a stupid war, profiteering, racketeering, government collusion with big business, the collapse of Reconstruction, etc etc etc. God, and then there was the Spanish-American war, as trumped-up, nasty, imperialist, and cruel a conflict as we've ever been in. We've never been pure as the driven snow, but we've managed to keep it on the rails because some varying proportion of people constantly insisted on referencing the ideals. If we let go of the ideals and give up, the decline and fall becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

No, I didn't mean to appear to be advocating apathy. What I think we deserve, and what I think we should try to prevent, are two seperate things.

But maybe I am more than a tiny bit apathetic. I do think regularly these days about how nice it would be to live, permanently, in one of a few other countries. That's something I never thought about before.