Dear America,
I find myself wondering about "American Exceptionalism," which I always associate with Newt Gingrich for some reason. The reason is the four swimmers in Rio who trumped up--and I use the phrase "trumped up" with some admitted deliberation--a robbery for some unknown reason. I say that the reason is unknown because if I had done what they did on that occasion, I would have tried to not just keep it to myself, but to forget about it, because as it turns out, they weren't being robbed when the incident occurred; they were vandalizing a gas station rest room either after or before urinating on the wall of the building it was in. They were also apparently drunk after being at a party, which is another issue; who did they know in Rio de Janeiro with a place at his or her disposal in which to have a drunken bash, other than other Olympians living in quarters provided for them by the Brazilian government or the International Olympic Committee, at such a distance from their own quarters that they needed a cab to get back to their rooms. But set aside what seems to be the wont of star athletes to indulge in excesses of one kind or another because they feel entitled to do so without consequence, and the apparent lack of supervision that these obviously adolescent boneheads were in need of, but didn't get. I used to be the campus judicial officer at a small division III college, and even there...where the star athletes were universally destined to sell tires at Sears more than they were to play even minor league professional sports...that snotty attitude was rampant among the BMOC's, who didn't realize yet that their self-endowed grandeur was more a delusion than qualification for privilege, and that's the ultimate issue. It's the other thing I think of when I think of American Exceptionalism: snotty attitude.
There was a time when all the world admired the United States of America. We were the righteous power in the world under whose aegis much of the rest of the world indulged in freedom and democracy. We were provident and compassionate...benevolent and virtuous. But somewhere between, let's say, the Korean Conflict and about 1975 we took a turn for the worse as a nation. We went from being a beacon of light and hope to being crass and arrogant as a nation. We began telling others not that we could help them be more like us, but that they should be more like us, and that we were going to make them be so whether they liked it or not. We had Vietnam, Granada, and then a series of wars in the Middle-East that have left us not just with enemies, but with terrorist threats and the hatred...not just the distain inspired by tourists wearing sandals and socks with their Bermuda shorts making demands for service...the outright animus of nations. We have carried weapons great destructive power to nations all over the world, which we have used as if we were doing them a favor by ridding them of tyrants whom we replace with chaos and violence. I'm not saying that the petty vandalism of a quartet of conceited, ephemeral sports stars equals in consequence the enormity of the devastation and death that has resulted from our nation's international officiousness and contempt for the suzerainty of nations with which we disagree. But I am saying that the behavior that has ensued upon the popularization of the concept of American Exceptionalism has not reflected well on us, much less demonstrated any kind of exceptionalism other than the kind evinced by those four swimmers in Rio de Janeiro. Their conduct is merely a miniscule reflection of the conduct of our nation in the world and the ethos that inspired it, and we are right to apologize for it as our own Olympic committee has now done.
Don't get me wrong. I would still rather be an American than a citizen of any other nation. I still think we do good things that no one else could or is willing to do. I still think the values we ostensibly profess and advocate are noble and worthy of proliferation. But I don't think that it is unpatriotic to be critical of the way in which we do what we do, and the four boys in Rio make my point. The most prominent of them, Ryan Lochte (and I mention his name because he deserves to be named, mostly because he had the audacity to complain about the incident instead of confessing that he had done a bad thing), is primarily responsible for the public nature of our national shame over this incident, though the shame belongs to all of us. Our culture indulged his arrogance over the course of his twenty-odd years of life because he was a star, and then we sent him abroad in spite of it just so he could reflect some glory onto us...never thinking about the potential consequences of letting a punk like him loose in another country, as it appears that these people weren't under any kind of adult supervision at all.
You may think that my fervor in this matter is unjustified, but I will not apologize for my vitriol.
This incident should be a lesson to us on a much bigger scale than just its own parameters. If the best of us seem to the rest of the world to be nothing but self-entitled hooligans, we can expect more of what we have been getting lately, including terrorism. As a nation, we need to rehabilitate ourselves, and thus our reputation. We need to return to charitable concern for our fellow men and women across the world and reign in our tendency toward chauvinism and narcissism. Maybe we should also desist in our saber rattling and return to leadership by example. And it wouldn't hurt for us to acknowledge that equality in this country is something of an illusion, though as a creed it continues to guide us. Maybe we can start by informing the stars in our society that in the final analysis, they are just like everyone else, and when they disrespect everyone else, there are consequences.
Your friend,
Mike
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