Not That Innocent: Rosenblatt on US Purity Via NY Transfer News * All the News That Doesn't Fit NOT THAT INNOCENT Rosenblatt: "US not Innocent, but still able to trend toward perfection!" April 30, 2002 And if you'll buy that, you'll buy the Golden Gate from me. (Email me for details and due diligence.) The PBS "Newshour" had an interesting Roger Rosenblatt essay last Friday on the topic of American Innocence, or the lack thereof. It was highly irritating for what it omitted - but it floored me that they ran it at all. He basically comes right out and says "nope, we're not innocent beyond the sense of we weren't expecting it." Unfortunately, his arguments about the lack of innocence all revolve around domestic affairs with the exception of My Lai, which he mentions but does not analyze. This permits him to introduce the Supreme Court as what makes the US Special, and More Able than Most to address its failings. This approach hides the fact that most of the citizens in thrall to the American Empire have no recourse to its Supreme Court. The US decided some time ago that actually incorporating other countries was far more trouble than it was worth - it gives the greedheads and military douchebags a lot more leeway if they're opening fire on people who aren't in New Mexico and Arixona and West Virginia. I think the copper and coal strikes in the early 20th century taught the bosses an important lesson: if they aren't citizens, we can fuck em good and no one will even report it. So stop the expansion already, except where we really need the state as a military staging point (Hawaii, Alaska). The people who live in Argentina, Chile, Cuba, Venezuela, Brazil, Peru, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Vietnam, Indonesia, the Phillippines, Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine, South Africa, Nigeria, the Congo, and on and on - the people the US isn't just treating badly but has spent decades killing for the worst possible motives - have no recourse to the Supreme Court of the United States nor any way to enjoin American behavior. The US courts are notoriously unwilling to take anything with even faintly international jurisdiction, so the worst abuses - the abuses that motivate the most warlike postures against the US - are within reach only of the two of our three puppets. And the two they're in reach of are the two that get the great big subsidies from, and pay the great big subsidies to, the industrial behemoths. So, for me, the Rosenblatt essay really fell on its face; it claimed to be set in the context of WTC, but confined itself almost exclusively to domestic reforms - reforms only made possible by the US deforming of the world economy to benefit its residents at the expense of others. And since WTC was many things, but one of the things certainly seems to have been international in motivation, setting the essay up to address it and then pulling it back in and restricting it to navel gazing made it absurd. It did, however, give Rosenblatt a great reason to sum up with a rehash of "but of course, the system here is the best it is - it's not a perfect system, but it recognizing its flaws, so it can move ever in that direction, unlike the systems of those silly countries which are willing to apologize for their crimes!" Pheh. -- PB http://www.pbs.org/newshour/essays/jan-june02/rosenblatt_4-26.html NOT THAT INNOCENT April 26, 2002 ROGER ROSENBLATT: People said that we were shocked by the attacks of September 11 because we're an innocent country. But except in the narrowest definition of innocence, being taken by surprise by an aerial attack, there has never been anything innocent about us. What's more, we know it. We consistently and justifiably beat ourselves up over a history of Indian slaughter, slavery, the crushing of workers, the abandonment of the poor, child labor, blacklists, poll taxes, segregation, the harassment of homosexuals, anti-everyone behavior, the internment camps, the suppression of women, Mai Lai-- shall I go on? A nation with a history that includes such events only regards itself as innocent as a bit of convenient folklore. But we use the word, nonetheless, to reestablish the vision of the ideal state, like the untrammeled virginal American landscape that allows us to think of ourselves as a better people than some of our history might indicate. This, in fact, is a very good idea. Out of a yearning for a moral Eden, the forward motion of other, brighter history is born. Recall "Brown vs. the Board of Education." In the early 1950s, Linda Brown, an African American fifth grader in Topeka, Kansas, was denied admission to a white elementary school. The case was ruled on by the Supreme Court in 1954. The ruling, simply and clearly, was that the "separate but equal" clause in "Plessy vs. Ferguson," 1896, which sanctioned segregated schools, violated the children's 14th Amendment rights. And with that decision, bad law was made good. "Brown" did not simply right a wrong law; it exposed and thus held up to contempt a widespread assumption that blacks were an inferior people. This had been a guilty not so secret American secret. It did not arise out of innocence, but neither could it have been obliterated by innocence. Only because the country was made aware of its lack on innocence could it at last do the right thing. There is a different route that nations can take when they want to make up for guilty episodes. They can make public apologies. NEWSREEL SPOKESMAN: The world bowed its head in sorrow over France's desecration. ROGER ROSENBLATT: France did that when it owned up to its collaboration with the Nazis against its Jewish citizens. The Vatican, too, though cagily, has acknowledged its history of anti-Semitism. Japan has apologized, sort of, for its treatment of Koreans and Chinese. All of which is very nice and commendable, but also a little silly and wholly without effect. The most effective apology for something in the past is to correct something in the present, thus "Brown"; thus Title IX, which gave women a level playing field; thus the laws concerning the handicapped; thus "Miranda" and the notification of the suspect's rights. None of these corrections would have been necessary in a truly innocent nation, but what nation can possibly be innocent? I do not mean to dwell on "Brown" as an example of our being cleansed on the spot and instantly reborn, but rather the opposite. After "Brown," there was Selma, there was Birmingham, there were church bombings and civil rights workers murdered and children clubbed in the streets. 40 years after "Brown," the country has a very long way to go in race relations. But the impulse to clean up our act could never derive from a state of innocence. America has been through the mill, often one of our own manufacture. Innocence is a preposterous and useless condition: First, because it makes a people vulnerable; second, because no improvement can come of it. The test of a civilization is not that it struggles against poverty and need. The test of a civilization is that it struggles against itself-- its guilty, sinful, human self. The balance of powers created by the Constitution was a clear statement of low expectations. We have frequently lived up to them, which is how we exceed them. I'm Roger Rosenblat ================================================================= NY Transfer News Collective * A Service of Blythe Systems Since 1985 - Information for the Rest of Us 339 Lafayette St., New York, NY 10012 http://www.blythe.org e-mail: nyt@blythe.org ================================================================= nytmed-05.04.02-03:32:19-919