The Things America Stands For
By Crispin Sartwell

"These actions are fundamental violations of the most basic American values, the things America stands for. 99.9% of our heroic military men and women are dedicated to these values. And now their efforts are in danger of being discredited by a tiny minority."

Politicians greet with relief the opportunity to put their brains on automatic pilot and repeat what everyone else is saying. The stampede toward unanimous automatism started the day the pictures of prisoners being abused were released.

Perhaps the point of these words is not what they mean, but the sheer fact that they are something to say. But if they meant something, would they be true?

What does America stand for? This, I suggest to you, is an extremely complex question. Certainly, we have a fierce history of articulating and defending basic freedoms. These are expressed in our founding documents: The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, and by many of our greatest citizens, from Henry Thoreau to Martin Luther King.

But we also have an overwhelming legacy of cruelty, torture, domination and genocide. We practiced slavery long after it was banned in the rest of the "civilized world." Without compunction, we slaughtered the native peoples of the continent we inhabit. In both cases we appealed to God, truth, and the superiority of our values and our God.

Central to our values as well, and related to these forms of slaughter and oppression, is greed. We are fundamentally a commercial people. We defend acquisitiveness as the basis of human nature, and entrepreneurship as the acme of goodness. Toqueville noticed this about us, and so has everyone else. For Republican administrations, this is explicitly a virtue.

We fight wars for freedom. We fight also for greed, as is shown by the Mexican and Spanish-American wars, for example. Our corporations dominate the world economy, and are largely responsible for both the uplift and the degradation it offers.

We are a democratic people. Of course, it takes a couple of hundred million dollars to be democratically elected. That is why Halliburton shapes American foreign policy and reaps its astounding rewards. That is one of many reasons your vote and your voice count for so little. That is why we are in Iraq.

We are a generous people. But we are also a cruel people. We threw Vietnamese prisoners in Tiger cages. We interned Japanese-Americans. We used the forced labor of convicts and immigrants to build our transportation systems. We execute more prisoners than almost any other nation. There has never been an enduring society that imprisoned more of its population.

And though we defend democracy at home, at least rhetorically, we have a rich history of undermining or destroying it abroad: from Central and South America to Africa, to Vietnam, where we propped up a puppet dictatorship at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives.

Of course no politician can afford to criticize our noble military men and women. But a little skepticism from non-politicians is in order. Of course "99.9%" is just something someone made up. But let's go with that for awhile. It's a stunning coincidence that of this 99.9% who would never commit acts of cruelty, 99.8% of them never really got a proper chance. The .1% of the military that is capable of sadism was assigned to our "detention facilities."

This in turn suggests two possibilities: (1) That the Pentagon managed to identify the sadists and send them to the assignments in which their appetite for cruelty could find an outlet. Or (2) that the astounding purity of values displayed by the other 99.9% of American troops is in fact a matter of never really getting a proper chance to put Iraqis on leashes and make them bugger one another.

The exposure of these practices is, it strikes me, rather an odd occasion for self-congratulation. As we offer ourselves once again as a beacon to a benighted world, it might be well to think a little more honestly about who we actually are. Rather than a moment to desperately prop up our self-delusions, it's a moment to gaze at the heart of our own darkness.




Crispin Sartwell's most recent book is "Extreme Virtue: Leadership and Truth in Five Great American Lives."