Exceptional, and not in a good way

This Saturday is the 9th anniversary of the day that's come to shape this country's recent history, for good or ill. When people talk about "the good ol' days", as far as I'm concerned, they're talking about the time up to the morning of September 11, 2001. Since then we've lost our minds, not to mention our souls. On Saturday, a fundie preacher in Florida wants to burn holy scriptures, to, in his words, "teach them a lesson". Never mind that he's ignoring the most fundamental tenets of his own religion and may well be creating a dangerous firestorm that could harm American soldiers around the world. Since 9/11, it's perfectly ok to hate. McCarthyism has returned, only now instead of lobbying the term communist around like a hand grenade, it's chic to hate a whole religion. A planned community center in Lower Manhattan is seen as a desecration of Ground Zero, in spite of the list of innocent victims of 9/11 who themselves read from the Koran. It seems their deaths don't count in the eyes of a huge swath of the country. It's immaterial that some of those particular victims were more heroic than any of the cowards we're hearing from today. The following is from an about.com article on Muslims who were killed nine years ago:

Imagine being the family of Salman Hamdani. The 23-year-old New York City police cadet was a part-time ambulance driver, incoming medical student, and devout Muslim. When he disappeared on September 11, law enforcement officials came to his family, seeking him for questioning in relation to the terrorist attacks. They allegedly believed he was somehow involved. His whereabouts were undetermined for over six months, until his remains were finally identified. He was found near the North Tower, with his EMT medical bag beside him, presumably doing everything he could to help those in need. His family could finally rest, knowing that he died the hero they always knew him to be.

Blogger Japhy Grant says we need a war on stupid.

Truth is being tossed aside for ratings and the end result is a slow legitimization of the idiotic.

The reason for this is cowardice. Our society has come to believe that any viewpoint is a legitimate viewpoint, so long as there’s someone out there to espouse it. While this might make for good jokes on The Colbert Report, it’s actually a greater threat to America than terrorism or drugs or any of the other causes we have decided to ‘declare war’ on. Which is why I am suggesting that America ought to collectively declare war on stupidity. If we are to wage an ideological battle against a concept, let it be against Stupidity.

The right to hold an opinion carries with it the responsibility to defend it. If you believe Obama was born in Kenya, prove it. If you can’t, you and your defenseless opinion don’t deserve a place in the national discourse. Just as we don’t invite the KKK to debate whether blacks and whites should be married, why should we give homophobes a platform to promote a fundamentally and empirically indefensible viewpoint? When Sharon Angle suggests the violent overthrow of the government, someone ought to speak up, not in a tone of ironic snickering, but in indignant rage.

I'd agree with declaring a war on stupidity if that didn't mean that we'd have to take up arms against a few million of our fellow citizens who are just too aggressively ignorant to understand that what they're saying is more antithetical to American ideals than those of the people we've been killing for most of the past decade. First, though, we'd have to sit them down and patiently explain what antithetical means. Nobody has that much time on their hands. The attacks of 9/11 were no more about religion than the invasion of Iraq was about WMD. The new hatred has bred its own code. Even though the US Constitution expressly forbids religious tests for any office in the land, Tea Baggers and Rush Limbaugh are having great fun accusing President Obama of being Muslim. What they're really saying is something else.

The most galling irony is the same Tea Baggers, Dittoheads, and Becktards who insist they want to take the country back from whatever it is they don't like will also insist, without a shred of irony, that we're still the greatest country God ever put on the earth (as if God is so very proud of their hatred of others), and dammit, we have a right to be the greatest. There's a term for that, too. It's called American Exceptionalism, and it's what drove the Bush Neocons to their scorched earth policies for eight years. If only the rest of the world was more like us, they say, it would all be better now.

Except that's not true. What they're really saying is they're contemptuous of the rest of the world. They don't know or care why they should learn or respect the opinions of each other, much less our allies, or even our enemies. They think Randy Newman's classic "Political Science" is a blueprint, not a satirical commentary.



Photo credits: Distress signal, 3950.net.Morans, flickr.com