We're #1 Or How I Choked To Death On The Stars And Stripes

Isadora Duncan is famous not for the revolutionary dance she created in life or the choreography that ushered in a new wave of stage theatrics.  She is famous, rather, for the way she died.  Her long scarf caught in the wire wheels of her car and strangled her.  Gertrude Stein, upon hearing of the tragic death was quoted as saying, "Affectations can be dangerous."

In graduate school, my thesis was a study on what is commonly called Civil Religion, which is, simply and succinctly, a theological deification of the state, or entities of the state.

Washington, in his Inaugural address said,

"No people can be bound to acknowledge and adore the Invisible Hand which conducts the affairs of man more than the United States.  Every step by which we have advanced to the character of an independent nation seems to have been distinguished by some providential agency."    Indeed, Washington even talked about the "Propitious smiles from Heaven" blessing our nation.  That 'providential agency' seems to refer to God in his heaven.

And De Tocqueville wrote "The greatest part of British America was peopled by men, who, after having shaken off the authority of the Pope,  acknowledged no other religious supremacy: they brought with them into the New World a form of Christianity which I cannot describe than by styling it a democratic and republican religion."


America's religiosity can be seen in all ways almost daily.  Our money, a clearly governmental entity, has "In God We Trust" on all of it.  Reciting the Pledge of Allegiance or silent prayer before school and governmental business is or was common.  There is even a Congressional chaplain.  In fact every President from Washington has invoked God to protect us, to give us strength, to help destroy our enemies, to heal our wounds, and to keep us at the head of all nations.  Every church in America has a U.S. flag somewhere on the altar.

Ronald Reagan told people that he felt God commissioned him to bring an end to Soviet Communism, to rid the world of nuclear threat and to make America, once again a "city shining on a hill."

Now, let me be clear, almost all nations use civil theology to bolster their state.  Communist nations take away organized religion and place it into a religiosity of the state.  One need only look at North Korea which has established a god-like deist nation with their leaders, to see an example in the extreme.

Let me also add, Civil Religion is not necessarily a bad thing.  Franklin Roosevelt's invoking God to help us beat Japan and Germany is a way to not only get all people behind the effort, but to also place God squarely on the side of good ole USA.  Since Nazi Germany had long promoted anti-church and anti-Christian legislation,  and Japan was  godless anyway, recruiting Him for our side was pretty easy.

So what does all this have to do with Isadora Duncan?  Americans, peculiarly enough, seem to enjoy wrapping their religious flag around themselves and like Silverbacks proclaiming their territory, beat their chest and tell every other country in the world, "We're #1".

We brag on endlessly about being the shining city on the hill to every other nation in the world.  We like bellowing to anyone who may listen about our American exceptionalism.  As Lewis Black says during one of his routines, "No other country in the world tries to tell everyone else in the world that they're the best like the U.S. does. If you had a coworker who came in every day  of the week and screamed - 'I'm the best, I'm number 1' - by Friday you'd be ready to beat the shit out of him."

All this to simply point out a few facts you may be interested in knowing.

1.  American healthcare is not number 1.  In fact it is dead last among industrialized nations for preventable deaths.  And number 37 in the world by WHO for overall healthcare, right behind Costa Rica.  (http://www.reuters.com/article/2008/01/08/us-deaths-rankings-idUSN0765165020080108)

2.  America is rated 20th out of 178 nations for a freedom index.  We even scored behind Uruguay.  (http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/2011/04/let_x_units_of_freedom_ring.html)

3.  In education American ranked 15th out of 34 in reading comprehension, 17th for science and 25th for math. (http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5juGFSx9LiPaur6eO1KJAypB2ImVQ?docId=CNG.5337504e8f65acf16c57d5cac3cfe339.1c1)


We have, however, achieved elite status in one area: executing our citizens.  We rank fifth in the world right behind China, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Iraq for executing our own people..

Iran executing young homosexuals.

Anytime you can be in such company as nations who hang kids for being gay and even have to use mobile execution vans to handle the backlog on people who need to be killed is, well, sobering.     

This from a futurist:

We live in the declining years of what is still the biggest economy in the world, where a looter elite has fastened itself upon the decaying carcass of the empire. It is intent on speedily and relentlessly extracting the maximum wealth from that carcass, impoverishing our former working middle class. But this maggot class does not invest its profits here. By law and by stock-market pressures, corporations must seek their highest possible profits, no matter the social or national consequences -- which means moving capital and resources abroad, wherever profit potential is larger.

The looter elite systematically exports jobs, skills, knowledge, technology, retaining at home chiefly financial manipulation expertise: highly profitable, but not of actual productive value. Through “productivity gains” and speedups, it extracts maximum profit from domestic employees; then, firing the surplus, it claims surprise that the great mass of people lack purchasing power to buy up what the economy can still produce (or import).

Barring unprecedented revolutionary pressures, this is the actual future we face in the United States, too. As we know from history, such societies can stand a long time, supported by police and military control, manipulation of media, surveillance and dirty tricks of all kinds.

The U.S., which has a long history of violent plutocratic rule unknown to the textbook-fed, will stand out as the best-armed Third World country, its population ill-fed, ill-housed, ill-educated, ill-cared for in health, and increasingly poverty-stricken: even Social Security may be whittled down, impoverishing tens of millions of the elderly.

As empires decline, their leaders become increasingly incompetent -- petulant, ignorant, gifted only with PR skills of posturing and spinning, and prone to the appointment of loyal idiots to important government positions. Comedy thrives; indeed writers are hardly needed to invent outrageous events.

Americans like to think of ours as an exceptional country, immune through geographical isolation and some kind of special virtue to the tides of history. Through the distorted lens of our corporate media, we possess only a distorted view of what the country is really like now. In the next decades, we shall see whether we indeed possess the intelligence, the strength, and the mutual courage to break through to another positive era.


Ernest Callenbach, author of the classic environmental novelEcotopia among other works, founded and edited the internationally known journal Film Quarterly.  He died at 83 on April 16th, leaving behind this document on his computer.





Sometimes our patriotic fervor gets in the way of our common sense.  America is a great nation, bestowed with great people, great resources and great entreprenuralism.  It is right that we pray for guidance, and hope that God looks charitably upon our endeavors.  But ignorance is a breeding ground for false ideas and ill-conceived movements.  Like Isadora Duncan we can sometimes be too much aware of our glamour and image and fall prey to "dangerous affectations."