September 6, 2005
You can't fool the precious few Americans who really know their country's history. They know that America's big talk (dating from Puritan times) about God's plan for America to redeem the world is largely the product of religiously inspired self-delusion or outright propaganda. They also know that, far too often, the big talk has been belied by extremely low-class performance. Now it's happening once again in the events surrounding hurricane-ravaged New Orleans.
"Third world" TV images beamed from the Crescent City—where the rich and white escaped Hurricane Katrina, while the poor and black suffered and died in apartheid—have exposed years of banana republic-like neglect by America's political elite, from President George W. Bush on down. Thus, those images mock America's incessant bragging about its mandate from God to redeem the rest of the world for democracy.
As the whole world now sees in New Orleans, America has miserably failed even to account for its poor and minorities, let alone "form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility…promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity"—as its much ballyhooed democratic Constitution promised.
One can credit the low-class, "enrichez vous" greed of corporate leaders and their political action committees, as well as the Presidents and Congressmen executing and legislating for their bribes, for bringing America to this shameful state.
But, let's try removing the God-tinted glasses, which severely distort our views about America's behavior, both at home and abroad. Ask yourself; did God support America's genocide of Native Americans? Did God support slavery, the Civil War, Jim Crow, Hiroshima, or Vietnam? Did God support 9/11? How about the devastation of the great city of New Orleans?
When one asks such questions, the mixed results of these disasters suggest that God does not care any more or less about the fate of the United States than He does about the fate of Israel, Russia, India, China, Iran or Cuba. Thus, God doesn't even care whether America wins or loses the "global war on terror," let alone our immoral, illegal invasion of Iraq.
Consequently, we must not only heap scorn upon the idiocy spoken by Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, when they interpreted al Qaeda's terrorist attacks on 9/11 as God's retribution for America's evil ways. We also must decry the idiocy of Nation of Islam leader, Louis Farrakhan, who "suggested that the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina was divine punishment for the violence America had inflicted on Iraq."
We should be equally outraged by the statements of Repent America's leader, Michael Marcavage, who claimed that Katrina was "an act of God" because it "destroyed a wicked city" on the eve of a large gay festival. Finally, we must equally repudiate all those mentally challenged folks who believe: (1) that Hurricane Katrina was God's retribution for Bush's highly dubious electoral victory in 2000 or (2) that God had a hand in Bush's victory. Please, all of you. Get real!
Unfortunately, this isn't new to America. If one were to read chapter two of Robert H. Wiebe's book Self-Rule: A Cultural History of American Democracy, he or she would learn that America's exceptional democratic and Christian mission was repeatedly tainted by low-class performance as white male rule spread across the frontier.
Titled, "The Barbarians," Wiebe's chapter two is filled with hilarious accounts by horrified nineteenth century Western European travelers to America. Prominent European writers noted America's "uncouth mosaic of expectoration and nutshells," [p. 45] dishonesty in commerce, bad manners, lack of imagination, "insensate gobbling of whatever food was laid before them," [p. 49] cheap value placed on human life, slavery and, most ominously, a violence that places "society at the borders of jungle terror." [p.51]
As Wiebe notes, "Cheap lives and violent ways came with the origins of white culture in America, moving through the starving times and the slaughtering of natives in the 17th century into the paramilitary settlement of farm lands in the 18th." [p. 53]
Indeed, the huge gap that separates America's braggadocio about its God-inspired exceptionalism from its actual low-class performance originated in Puritan Massachusetts. But a singularly important, precedent-setting example of that gap can be found in the all-too-common greed for land, wealth, and stature by an ambitious surveyor named George Washington.
As historians Fred Anderson and Andrew Clayton explain in their book, The Dominion of War, Washington and his fellow Virginians sought to expand their colonial possessions to the West, in order to enrich themselves further on the backs of yet more Negro slaves.
Thus, Governor Dinwiddie gave Washington the task of carrying a message to the French containing the demand that they immediately leave British territory. As Anderson and Clayton note: That this aspiring gentleman emissary "spoke neither French nor any Indian language, had little formal education, knew nothing of native cultures, and utterly lacked diplomatic experience were not obstacles." [p. 116]
Instead, possessing "the self-confidence of the truly ignorant," [p. 117] Washington pressed on until May 28, 1754, when forty men under his command blundered into attacking "a detachment of Canadian militiamen" that was escorting a French officer on a diplomatic mission to Virginia. "The actions of the young Washington, eager to prove himself and bold to the point of foolhardiness, sparked a cataclysm long in the making" [p. 118]—the French and Indian War.
The new war between France and England sucked new troops and resources into North America. But when the victorious British sought to impose new taxes upon its colonies, in order to defray the cost of that war, the Americans famously refused.
Less known today, however, but equally disturbing then to both Indian-hating backwoodsmen and land speculators like Washington, was Britain's Proclamation of 1763, which prohibited further western settlements in America. Not only did Washington violate the prohibition, his decision to support the break with England was influenced by his personal land-speculator self-interest in America's imperial expansion.
Little was said about such petty self-interests during the American Revolution or in the immediate aftermath of victory. Instead, New England clergymen characterized the ongoing struggle as a conflict between "God's elect" and the "Antichrist." And victory moved the president of Yale College, Ezra Stiles, to proclaim America to be "God's New Israel" and to compare George Washington to "Joshua commanding the armies of the Children of Israel and leading them into the Promised Land." [Richard M. Gamble, The War for Righteousness: Progressive Christianity, the Great War, and the Rise of the Messianic Nation, pp. 10–11]
But American messianic propaganda never sunk so low as it did when Southern clergymen, during the Civil War, had the audacity to suggest, "God ordained the war, just as he had ordained slavery, and the Confederacy consequently represented the will of the Almighty." [Ann Sarah Rubin, A Shattered Nation: The Rise and Fall of the Confederacy, 1861–1868, p. 17]
Minister James Henley Thornwell assured the faithful that "the cause it not ours, but God's," [Rubin, p 37] and Reverend Joseph Atkinson "argued that the Confederate revolution was even more deserving of God's favor because its leaders—particularly Stonewall Jackson—were so pious." [Rubin, p 39.] No doubt the South was full of pious racists. Probably still is.
Finally, we have the example of Reverend Stephen Elliott who assured his fellow Southerners that their independence would not be won until "England and the North were 'convinced that slavery, as we hold it here, is essential to the welfare of the world… a sacred trust from God.'" [Rubin, p.40]
Thus, many in the South actually invoked God's will to justify their evil ways. And thus, we shouldn't be surprised to find that many Americans today support President George W. Bush's evil war against Iraq.
After all, Bush told Mahmoud Abbas, "God told me to strike at al Qaida and I struck them, and then he instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did." But, did God also tell Bush and company to exaggerate and lie about Saddam's weapons of mass destruction and ties to al Qaida? Was it God who rendered so many Americans stupid enough to believe such lies and exaggerations? And why did God, who supposedly told Bush to invade Iraq, then trap American troops in a quagmire that exposed Bush and company for the rank amateurs they are?
Iraq is the early 21st century's object lesson exposing the chasm separating America's messianic rhetoric and belief from the reality of its illegal, immoral and low-class performance.
George W. Bush talks big. Remember, "Bring 'em on!" How many Americans and Iraqis have died since then? And at what personal risk to himself? But, America's worst president and biggest phony wraps himself in God. And by doing so in this country, he's able to get away with murder.
Moreover, at this very moment, he and his political advisers (including the ignoble Karl Rove) are crafting and acting upon the propaganda designed to disguise the Bush administration's shamefully incompetent response to the disaster caused by Hurricane Katrina. Can it be that Americans are the only people unable to see through their bullshit?
Walter C. Uhler is an independent scholar and freelance writer whose work has been published in numerous publications, including The Nation, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the Journal of Military History, the Moscow Times and the San Francisco Chronicle. He also is President of the Russian-American International Studies Association (RAISA).
