Dear Readers,
Ann Jones reports on questions about America's sanity raised by citizens of other countries. America is certainly psychopathological. The nation suffers from developmental trauma disorder: the nation was born out of the traumatic murder of the Native American People who lived here. America continued in trauma in the form of slavery. America was also formed to promote business. It has served our collective denial well to say we came her to escape religious persecution, but that is not true. The pilgrims came here to escape the control of the British East India Company and the domination of business by the wealthy elite.
America has never come to terms with its traumatic origins, never made amends for genocide against the Native People or for slavery. We hold an enormous collective guilt which is the basis of our sadistic treatment of defenseless nations (Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Grenada, Panama, Philippines, Mexico, Nicaragua, etc.); our sadistic treatment of the poor, homeless, sick, mentally ill, veterans, or minorities; and our masochistic belief espoused by Fox News, the Republican Party, the NRA, etc. that we are victims. We take pride in debasing ourselves as a nation because then we don't have to accept responsibility for the horrors we perpetrate.
The corporations that now operate America for their benefit are a natural extension of the founding of our nation as a place where trading could occur without oversight or accountability. America has a state religion and that is business enterprise. Money is the savior and profit is god.
We continue to re-enact and re-experience the traumatic origins of our nation in our relationships and institutions. Divorce is much more prevalent than stable marriage. Spousal abuse is rampant. Drug abuse has corrupts every segment of society. The institution of family is an empty shell. We murder each other with impunity. Police murder citizens without consequence.
We are a nation in profound denial. We are also a deeply narcissistic nation. Finally we are also a fragmented nation, there is no American Identity. Instead there are many, competing, limited identities. Given our origin in trauma and the consequences thereof, America qualifies for a diagnosis of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.
Star Man
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Is This Country "Crazy"? Inquiring Minds Elsewhere Want to Know
Monday, 12 January 2015 10:30 By Ann Jones, TomDispatch | Op-Ed
Downloaded January 12, 2015 from
https://truth-out.org/opinion/item/2...e-want-to-know
https://truth-out.org/opinion/item/28487-is-this-country-crazy-inquiring-minds-elsewhere-want-to-know
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.
In the early fall of 2014, I traveled from my home in Oslo, Norway, through much of Eastern and Central Europe. Everywhere I went in those two months, moments after locals realized I was an American the questions started and, polite as they usually were, most of them had a single underlying theme: Have Americans gone over the edge? Are you crazy? Please explain.
Then recently, I traveled back to the “homeland.” It struck me there that most Americans have no idea just how strange we now seem to much of the world. In my experience, foreign observers are far better informed about us than the average American is about them. This is partly because the “news” in the American media is so parochial and so limited in its views both of how we act and how other countries think -- even countries with which we were recently, are currently, or threaten soon to be at war. America’s belligerence alone, not to mention its financial acrobatics, compels the rest of the world to keep close track of us. Who knows, after all, what conflict the Americans may drag you into next, as target or reluctant ally?
So wherever we expatriates settle on the planet, we find someone who wants to talk about the latest American events, large and small: another country bombed in the name of our “national security,” another peaceful protest march attacked by our increasingly militarized police, another diatribe against “big government” by yet another wannabe candidate who hopes to head that very government in Washington. Such news leaves foreign audiences puzzled and full of trepidation.
Question Time
Take the questions stumping Europeans in the Obama years (which 1.6 million Americans residing in Europe regularly find thrown our way). At the absolute top of the list: “Why would anyone oppose national health care?” European and other industrialized countries have had some form of national health care since the 1930s or 1940s, Germany since 1880. Some versions, as in France and Great Britain, have devolved into two-tier public and private systems. Yet even the privileged who pay for a faster track would not begrudge their fellow citizens government-funded comprehensive health care. That so many Americans do strikes Europeans as baffling, if not frankly brutal.
In the Scandinavian countries, long considered to be the most socially advanced in the world, a national (physical and mental) health program, funded by the state, is a big part -- but only a part -- of a more general social welfare system. In Norway, where I live, ...
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