Just read Jamelle Bouie's thoughtful essay on Obama's brand of exceptionalism ("The Past Perfect"). Bouie describes a recent speech by Rudy Giuliani to "businesspeople, conservative elites, and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker," in which he lambasts President Obama's character and questions his patriotism. Hardly new. Obama's opponents have been doing that since he first ran for the presidency. Bouie doesn't take on Giuliani, though. Rather, he proposes an explanation for Obama's "less triumphant" version of exceptionalism:
Well, Mr. Giuliani, we did take land by force. Since 1781, how did we gain "land" west and south of the original 13 states? The Seminole wars in Florida, in the first half of the 19th century. The invasion of Mexico in 1846. Warring against Native Americans, from the Cherokee wars of the 1780s-90s, to the last bloody skirmishes in the early 1900s. And there's the War with Spain in 1898, winning "land" in the Caribbean and the Pacific.
And not all forms of colonialism require direct, permanent occupation--just an occasional intervention by US marines, or covert operation (for a list of US interventions in Latin America and the Caribbean, from 1890 to 2009, visit this site).
That said, I do not make the claim that our country is evil. That's too simplistic a characterization of the US's complex history of war-making and foreign relations. As simplistic as Giuliani braying that we are innocent.
I'll finish with these lines from the Nicaraguan poet, Rubén Darío (from the poem "To Roosevelt," 1904):
...You think that life is fire,
that progress is eruption,
that wherever you shoot you hit the future.
No.
The United States is potent and great. When you shake there is a deep tremble that passes through the enormous vertebrae of the Andes. If you clamor, it is heard like the roaring of a lion...You are rich. You join the cult of Hercules to the cult of Mammon, and illuminating the road of easy conquest, Liberty raises its torch in New York.
The best answer, I think, lies in identity. By choice as much as birth, Obama is a black American. And black Americans, more than most, have a complicated relationship with our country. It’s our home as much as it’s been our oppressor: a place of freedom and opportunity as much as a source of violence and degradation. We’re an old American tribe, with deep roots in the land and a strong hand in the labor of the nation. But we’re often seen as other—a suspect class that just doesn’t fit.I have less patience than Bouie with myopic visions of the US's exceptional role in the world. Consider this Giuliani line: “What country has left so many young men and women dead abroad to save other countries without taking land? This is not the colonial empire that somehow he has in his hand. I’ve never felt that from him.”
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| Teddy Roosevelt's Rough Riders, 1898 |
And not all forms of colonialism require direct, permanent occupation--just an occasional intervention by US marines, or covert operation (for a list of US interventions in Latin America and the Caribbean, from 1890 to 2009, visit this site).
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| US-supported right-wing Contras in an Honduran training camp, 1989 |
That said, I do not make the claim that our country is evil. That's too simplistic a characterization of the US's complex history of war-making and foreign relations. As simplistic as Giuliani braying that we are innocent.
I'll finish with these lines from the Nicaraguan poet, Rubén Darío (from the poem "To Roosevelt," 1904):
...You think that life is fire,
that progress is eruption,
that wherever you shoot you hit the future.
No.
The United States is potent and great. When you shake there is a deep tremble that passes through the enormous vertebrae of the Andes. If you clamor, it is heard like the roaring of a lion...You are rich. You join the cult of Hercules to the cult of Mammon, and illuminating the road of easy conquest, Liberty raises its torch in New York.
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