Chris hedges AND george Monbiot ON THE IGNORANcE - ColdType

what next?
My Michelle moment
For one day, david Michael green feels proud to be american
we talk a lot about
democracy here,
but i’m wondering
how much of it
i’ve ever actually
witnessed in my
lifetime
14 thereader | November 2008
American democracy is a tattered
thing. One could devote a lifetime
to describing its major failings,
many of which are baked
right into the institutional structure of the
practice.
American democracy is a heartbreaking
thing. To be a progressive, caring citizen of
this country is to live a life of almost unmitigated
disappointment and startling affronts
to a compassionate moral code.
American democracy is a chimerical
thing. In my half-century on this planet
I’m not particularly sure it has ever quite
shown up in any serious fashion.
To be an American means to suffer serious
anguish, not only because of the horrifically
stupid things your people can do, but
precisely because of the unique potential of
this country to do better. There actually is
something to the idea of American exceptionalism,
in ways that are completely antithetical
to those used by regressives when
they hijack the idea, but also in ways that
progressives are often blinded to because
of our laudable compulsion towards egalitarianism.
But this country is unique in
that it is founded on ideas, not geography
or ethnicity or some other form of empty
primordialist affinity. And that uniqueness
still resonates today in the standards we
hold for ourselves. To have violated them
so egregiously of late is all the more devas-
tating than to have never held such standards
at all, as is often the case elsewhere.
To be American means not having the easy
comfort of jaded cynicism to resort to when
your government or your fellow citizens
break your heart.
We talk a lot about democracy here, but
I’m wondering how much of it I’ve ever actually
witnessed in my lifetime. Sure, there
were decisive elections in 1964, 1972, 1980,
1984 and 1994. Voters were presented with
real alternatives in those races, and they
went heavily one way, suggesting that the
fundamental democratic principle of rule
by the people was truly at work. But in every
one of those cases, I would argue, there
was massive deceit on the part of the winning
team, to the extent that voters didn’t
really know what they were choosing after
all.
johnson’s monstrous lie
Lyndon Johnson campaigned as a guy
who would never “send American boys off
to fight a war that Asian boys should be
fighting for themselves”. But the reality of
his Vietnam policy, which came slamming
home less than a year after the election,
could hardly have been more different from
the promise he made as a candidate. In fact,
it was a monstrous lie, since Johnson knew
full well before the election what he was
going to do in Vietnam. Then, not much