From Charlie Pierce, of Esquire:

[volstork]

We Are a Nation in Need of Help. Are We Big Enough to Ask For It?

Charles P. Pierce

This week, the New York Times unlimbered the timber and laid some serious wood on what we used to call American Exceptionalism, which seems at the moment to be disappearing in the rearview mirror at transwarp speed and into that limbo of lost American identity phenomena, right next to theosophy, Millerism, anti-Masonism, and the Nehru jacket. Instead, the Times committed the once-unpardonable sin of pointing out that we, as Americans, are coming to the point at which the rest of the world looks on us as pitiable souls in need of help.

The pandemic has ravaged Europeans and Americans alike, but the economic pain has played out in starkly different fashion. The United States has relied on a significant expansion of unemployment insurance, cushioning the blow for tens of millions of people who have lost their jobs, with the assumption that they will be swiftly rehired once normality returns. European countries — among them Denmark, Ireland, Britain, France, the Netherlands, Spain and Austria — have prevented joblessness by effectively nationalizing payrolls, heavily subsidizing wages and enabling paychecks to continue uninterrupted.

As cases increase at an alarming rate in much of the United States, the reliance on an overwhelmed unemployment system — the next infusion of money perpetually subject to the whims of Washington — leaves Americans uniquely exposed to a deepening crisis of joblessness. Europe appears poised to spring back from the catastrophe faster, whenever commerce resumes, because its companies need not rehire workers.

“You just send an email, and that’s it — you’re ready to go,” said Jonathan Rothwell, principal economist at Gallup, the American polling firm, and a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. “There’s no recruitment or negotiation.”

Our devotion to rugged cowboy individualism always has been half-smoke. Its political manifestation—small government, paeans to the idea of the lonely entrepreneur, and almost everything that is the basis of the modern conservative creed—always has been almost entirely mist. One of the most remarkable speeches I ever heard came at the 2012 Republican National Convention, when Mary Fallin, then the governor of Oklahoma, described to the assembled delegates how Oklahoma was built through the ferocious energy of individual Sooners, and without any help from the ol’ devil, big government.

(This speech took place on “We Did Build It” Night, a preposterous evening’s program meant to spin off President Barack Obama’s unremarkable assertion, borrowed from Elizabeth Warren, that nobody builds a business without the help of government roads and government fire and police departments, a publicly educated workforce and (yes) the taxes that pay for all of them. So the Republicans lined up a number of speakers, including Fallin, for rebuttal. A startling number of them mentioned that their parents had started this upward climb in a big government project called the U.S. military.)

I was so struck by the ahistorical nature of Fallin’s speech that I began taking careful notes for posterity. I blogged about one particular passage that, in our current context, bears repeating.

The history of my great state of Oklahoma offers a great example of pursuing the American Dream. It was built and settled by pioneers moving west to seek better lives. During the Great Land Run of 1889, thousands of families rushed to put a stake down on empty plots of land. They built tent cities overnight. They farmed the land and they worked hard. And, in 1897, eight years after the land run, a handful of adventurous pioneers risked their own money — not the federal government's money — to drill Oklahoma's first oil well, the Nellie Johnstone. By doing so, these early-day pioneers changed the future and Oklahoma forever and today Oklahoma is one of the nation's key energy producers and job creators. President Obama wants us to believe that Oklahomans owe that success to the federal government — to the Department Of Energy ,to the EPA, to the IRS, or maybe even to him. Mr. President, we know better. As we say in Oklahoma, that dog won't hunt.

Which, I thought, required a slight corrective.

My god, Oklahomans wouldn't even have Oklahoma without the federal government, without the Homestead Act of 1889 or the Railroad Act — both, by the way, achievements of a Republican presidents named Abraham Lincoln and Benjamin Harrison. And the land wasn't exactly "empty," Governor. It got emptied by a big-government program called the United States Army. You know what your state would be without the federal government, Governor, without the votes for the legislation from congressmen from the east and north, without the soldiers from New England and the Great Lakes? You know what Oklahoma would be? Sand, with a whole lot of pissed-off Native Americans.

This was a great game of historical hide-and-seek while it lasted. It survived all the way from Appomattox to the year of our Lord 2020, at which point it stood revealed as the empty farce into which it had been evolving for decades. The only thing exceptional about America today is the exceptional clusterfck it has created out of itself. We are helpless against a pandemic, helpless against the ensuing economic calamity, helpless against an inattentive and lawless administration*. We can’t figure out how to run a proper election so we can solve the latter problem.
Image
Mary Fallin offered a vision of Oklahoman Exceptionalism.
The final step in the evolutionary process was the fealty that one of America’s two political parties—a party that already was in hock to plutocrats and splinter American Protestantism—pledged to a vulgar talking yam, whom the country then elected president*. He thereupon brought the country and its institutions onto a high-wire act above reason, science, reality and, ultimately, sanity. His fellow elected Republicans went along willingly. The rest of us got dragged out onto the wire and, sometime near the end of winter, everyone fell off and fell down, hard, back into reason, science, reality, and sanity, which did not exactly welcome our return.

Jobless data reveals how the pandemic has assailed American workers with exceptional force. The unemployment rate in the United States has soared nearly eight percentage points since February — it registered 11.1 percent in June — while France, Germany, Ireland and the Netherlands have all limited increases in the jobless rate to less than one percentage point. “By and large, the European social model has proved quite adept and robust for this kind of crisis,” said Jacob F. Kirkegaard, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington.

None of this offers guarantees about the future. In many countries, the United States included, pandemic aid programs are set to expire in coming months. Given persistent fears about the virus, an abrupt elimination of relief would be damaging. In Britain, nine million workers have officially been furloughed while continuing to draw paychecks under a government program. But as many as a fourth are at risk of being fired when the government reduces the subsidy in September, according to Bloomberg. In the United States, extra jobless benefits expire at the end of July, prompting worries that the removal of this aid will spell a loss of spending, further damaging businesses and producing another spike in unemployment.

We are a nation in need of pity. We are a nation in need of help. Are we a nation big enough to ask for it? Are we a big enough nation to take it?
I grew up with CARE packages. I grew up with the hospital ship Hope. I grew up with the Peace Corps, and the Alliance For Progress, and not very long after the Berlin Airlift. My father was a port director in Niigata in Japan during the occupation after World War II when, as we were taught, the U.S. helped rebuild an enemy country it had shattered from the air. I grew up in an America that was proud, right up to the thin edge of hubris, of its charitable deeds around the world. It did not ask for help. It gave it, willingly. That’s what they taught us, anyway, and that’s what we believed. Some of it even was true.

The illusions started steadily dropping away in the 1960s. Too often, our help came with the added bonus of repressive dictators, coups d’etat, and manipulated elections. Too often, the CIA and its various playmates inserted wormwood into our good deeds. We bombed a small corner of the world longer and harder than we had bombed Germany or Japan. We couldn’t seem to keep our presidents, or our moral leaders, from being gunned down in public. Reagan came along and did yeoman work to rebuild the old hubris, “shining city on he hill,” and all that, a magic incantation borrowed from Puritan father John Winthrop, another social reactionary. Come 2016, and Donald Trump put together another, similar illusion. He promised another shining city on the hill, but, as it turns out, every building in it was either a pawnshop or a whorehouse.

Right now, I would suggest modestly that we need United Nations election monitors, the same way we would demand them in Pakistan or Colombia. I would suggest modestly that we could use the help of international aid organizations like Doctors Without Borders to help with the rapidly deteriorating conditions in our emergency rooms and ICUs. I would suggest modestly that our leaders consult with officials from the other advanced countries that have more successfully dealt with this crisis and that they actually take their advice.

Would any of this happen?

You’re kidding, right?
Image
Donald Trump put together another, similar illusion.
Even with a conventional president, this would be a long pull. Humility never has been a big part of our national character. But, as with all things, not only would this president* spurn the very idea of help from other countries as petulantly as he spurns, well, other countries, but at this point, it is far from certain that other countries, or international aid organizations, even would offer it. In 2005, the world came together to help New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. In 2017, when Hurricane Harvey rampaged through Texas and swamped Houston, that aid was a comparative trickle. And, as this piece from Politico reported, the ill-feeling was mutual.

A Mexican official, however, noted that Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas had accepted the offer. The official told POLITICO that Mexico "will be working with FEMA and Texas authorities in the following days to deliver the aid," suggesting the U.S. federal government had signed off. Venezuela's government, which the U.S. increasingly identifies as a dictatorship, said it would provide $5 million worth of aid to deluged stricken communities through its subsidiary company Citgo Petroleum Corp.

"We express our solidarity with the Americans affected by the hurricane," Venezuelan Foreign Minister Jorge Arreaza said, according to media reports.

It was an astonishing offer, given the deepening poverty inside Venezuela, where people are having problems buying food, medicine and other basic necessities. The Trump administration is unlikely to accept it given the growing animosity between the two governments — in mid-August, Trump even said the U.S. would consider taking military action against Venezuela.

The Alliance For Progress seems a bit frayed these days. It is remarkable how small a nation can become in less than four years.



NOTE: This is a copy of an email I receive weekly because I subscribe to Charlie Pierce's blog. I do not have a way to link to it, so have provided the entire text. No copyright infringement is intended.

[samnsara]

1. my grandfather was born in Oklahoma Territory....

......he and his young 16 yr old bride (and my 16 yr old grand daughter is horrified!) migrated to Washington State after he rode the rails and discovered the Pacific Northwest.

Lots of history back there!

[Laelth]

2. Beautifully written, as usual.

And, yes. We need help. We’re less likely to get it because the Narcissist-in-Chief has ticked off so many of our allies with his misguided, jingoistic “America First” nonsense.

-Laelth

[malthaussen]

3. "Every building... was either a pawnshop or a whorehouse."

That's great prose, there.

-- Mal

[malaise]

4. Sad but true

The only thing exceptional about America today is the exceptional clusterfck it has created out of itself.

[luvtheGWN]

8. Whoever started the myth about "American exceptionalism"

has a great deal to answer for.

Thankfully we Canucks are basically realistic about our origins -- from the Vikings who first discovered Newfoundland, to the French explorers who discovered the great St. Lawrence River, to the Brits who decided the best way to get along with the indigenous peoples was to befriend them, not kill them, and to the NorthWest Mounted Police (now the RCMP) who maintained a fairly reasonable form of law and order as settlers and businesses and the railroad moved west.

Not once have I ever heard the phrase "Canadian exceptionalism".

But I have often heard the phrase "Please, America, get over yourselves". And please forgive me if anyone here is insulted by that. We want only the very best for our southern neighbours, and our collective hearts ache for the tragedy that is tRump.

[malaise]

9. I agree

Not one country on the planet is exceptional but big powers create some amazing myths about themselves.

[RVN VET71]

13. I doubt if anyone at DU will be insulted.

It's a slogan on a T-shirt we'd all wear -- if not for the gun toting NRA-Republican-Trumpers* who might take offense and implement the famed 2nd Amendment solutions their leaders have rhetorically endorsed.

*60,000,000 of those suckers helped put Trump in office despite/because of his public racism, misogyny, xenophobia, religious bigotry, and callous disdain for morality, decency, and democracy -- all traits which were manifest in his own public utterances before the day he slithered past Mrs. Clinton in 2016. And most of them have guns, and most of them don't know how to store or use them properly, and most of them have anger management problems. That's why a cool T-shirt would be very risky to wear south of the Canadian border -- and north of the Mexican.

[niyad]

5. Thank you, Charles.

[llmart]

6. Eye opening piece of writing.

Depressing because it's true.

[BarbD]

7. Thanks for posting this extremely profound explanation

of where the "United" States is today. Reality is tough to swallow, but here we are.

It challenges us to rise above and work our asses off to get Democrats elected up and down the ticket. Our only hope is working together.

[pandr32]

10. Bookmarked

This is a keeper.

[George II]

11. If it was sent in an email it isn't a copyright infringement.

[volstork]

14. Thanks.

I got dinged here on DU for posting an entire email from C. Pierce before, so just covering my....

[CatLady78]

12. Bookmarked

Not sure if I will ever get around to reading all that I bookmark..but sigh...

[Lonestarblue]

15. The excerpt from Fallin's speech reads like today's history textbooks.

Republicans determined decades ago to take over the boards of education and impose their version of history on schoolchildren. They succeeded all too well. Our history books present whitewashed versions of how real Americans (read: white males) pulled themselves up by their bootstraps and created this exceptional country through a free market. We do not teach the history of this country—and perhaps we never did—we teach an idealized version of how we want to portray ourselves for posterity. The justification for the Civil War is a good example. The articles of secession plainly stated that the right to own slaves was the reason, but that reason morphed into a states’ rights issue rather than slavery because it allowed racists to pretend that they didn’t secede over the right to own another human being.

I’m wishing my life away, but November 3 cannot get here fast enough. Between being forced to stay at home to avoid the virus and the consumption of far too much news, and thus Trump, I despair for the future of our country. It will improve with a Biden win, but it’s concerning that we have a significant slice of our population that worships someone like Trump and buys into his values.

[volstork]

16. Great points, Lonestar

I highly recommend Lies My Teacher Told Me by James Loewen and The Way We Never Were by Stephanie Coontz as more accurate versions of the history we learned growing up.

I graduated from high school in the mid-80s, and we never made it through the Eisenhower Administration in History Class. Not teaching recent world and American history keeps us blind, as does not teaching other ways of structuring government and economy. American exceptionalism, and in particular the hubris that accompanies it, will be our ruin.

[Lonestarblue]

18. Thanks for the book recommendations.

I graduated from high school in the late 60s, and history was taught as a recitation of facts, mostly from war to war with a few periods in between. Boring, boring, boring. I didn’t like history then, but I learned to love it after retiring as I can delve into topics of interest and spend as much time with them as I want.

[volstork]

19. It's been a while

since I have read these, but remember them both as really compelling and have been referring to them often of late. Loaned The Way... to a friend recently, who found it eye-opening.

[cp]

17. Pierce is a brilliant chronicler of our time

Thank you for this!