Cleveland Americana Revisited
By former Clevelander Kelly McCloskey of Abingdon, England
British resident and Cleveland ex-pat Kelly McCloskey wrote Cleveland Americana here, and Cool Cleveland reader Nick Stallard responded with a letter to Cool Cleveland in Yr Turn, quoted just below. Following is McCloskey's subsequent reaction to Stallard's response.
Whilst I obviously prefer happy emails - or at least emails that have some sort of logic associated with them and have been composed by someone with a brain stem, I do quite enjoy these slices of vitriol. If he's this pissed off then I've most definitely hit a nerve which means he's thinking - hell, maybe he's even fuming about it right this second.
Let's all take a moment to send Mister Nick Stallard some happy pink-fuzz thoughts, shall we? He's obviously a sensitive, insecure man boiling over with rage he can't seem to get a grip on.
More disturbing, though, is the fact that he couldn't see past his own child-like and sycophantic love for the current Administration. No doubt that sentence alone scared him off from reading the rest of the article (which I thought was overall very upbeat and even bordered on happy!) for fear that I would dare to say anything else negative about Bush or America in general.
Let's put aside for a moment that he obviously dreams of using the Bill of Rights as his own personal toilet paper, let's instead focus on the more dangerous message being said here. Basically it's the same as a lot of ultra-conservative folks and which you can buy as bumper stickers almost everywhere:
America - Love it or Leave It
Things like Americana Revisited, and the Guantanamo Bay Tycoon and World Trade Center Snow Globe parody ads have gotten me a lot of hate mail and grief over the years. And sometimes even my comments on the EinsteinShrugged Yahoo Group incur some wrath onlist and off. People accuse me of being a lot of things heartless, ignorant, arrogant But mostly they accuse me of hating America.
To be fair, there are certainly times when I become a bit shitty, perhaps even arrogant; and I certainly can't deny the fact that I'm ignorant - the amount of things I don't know is absolutely staggering. But I do not now, not have I ever hated America.
I love America. I miss it terribly and I am proud to be an American. I have no real plans to ever leave England because I love it here (aside from the homesickness) but, even so, I have no plans or desire to change my citizenship status. I don't want to be a British citizen and I don't even want Shared Nationality. I am an American through and through and make no apologies for it. I resent the fact that because I'm vocal about my grievances with America I'm branded as some sort of infidel.
It's true that in my opinion America falls well and truly short of anything resembling perfection. It's true I find a certain demented glee in calling Bush all sorts of taunting names (he's such an easy target!) but, to be fair, it's not simply a dislike of Bush that leads me down the road of criticizing the land I love.
And once the criticism begins, it's only a matter of time before someone trots out the ultimate nationalistic catch phrase 'America: Love it or Leave It'. Hell, the idea is so popular that bumper stickers emblazoned with it are pretty common and can usually be purchased in any large truck stop gas station.
Obviously, I think living abroad is a good thing, and something more Americans should do. Everyone should! Living abroad gives you a new perspective, it lets you see your homeland in a detached kind of way. All of its flaws are suddenly thrown into a new light, and so are its virtues. Even when I was living in America, I knew we weren't a country of innocents - it's been a long time since even I've been that naive. But now I have a better idea of how the international community sees us, and I've learned that our reputation for being the bullies of the globe is, sadly, well-deserved.
Our country's history is no less blood soaked than any others. If we heard about a government ransacking a land, killing its native inhabitants and claiming the land for their own today America would be the first to rush in with guns drawn and fingers over the button - and yet that's how America itself began. Its a classic case of 'do-as-I-say-and-not-as-I-do'.
Unfortunately, it's a mindset we've continued to foster. We like to portray ourselves as kindly, benevolent leaders of justice, democracy and fair play. But when we think no one's paying attention we turn into short-sighted, vindictive bullies, hell-bent on achieving our own agenda and forcing our views onto anyone we want. We're a nation of passionate extremes - some of which have helped us grow into the wonderful country we are, but the flip side is ugly.
Whilst we have no mass graves of our own, we turn a blind eye to torture when it serves us and have even been known to torture our own citizens.
Think I'm full of shit?
I wish I were ...
The Tuskegee Syphilis Study where 600 low-income black men, 400 of whom were infected with syphilis, were monitored for 40 years. A readily available treatment for syphilis became available in the 1950s but the experiment continued well into the 1970s.
Or perhaps you'd prefer to read up on MK Ultra and learn about how the CIA got its rocks off twisting the minds of random people with full-throttle LSD before eventually abandoning the project and unleashing the drug on the hippies in an attempt to subvert their cause.
The Guantanamo Bay detainment camp in Cuba where, according to Amnesty International, the conditions are "reminiscent of torture methods used in eastern Europe in the 1970s". As an added bonus, some prisoners are held their for years without ever being charged with a single crime. Not so long ago, a three British Citizens were released without charge after being held captive for nearly three years.
And these incidents are all from within the past 35 years (the Tuskegee experiment didn't end until 1972). Delve further back and there's no end to it - slavery, McCarthyism, even our Space Program has benefited from torture. (Take the Super Fun "Friend or Foe" Quiz to find out more)
Let's be honest here - there's no way to rationalize or justify these actions. I can't help but wonder how FOX News would treat stories like these coming out of any other country.
Which brings me to the whole 'America: Love it or Leave It' mantra. Ironically, its hard to think of anything more un-American than this dodgy old bumper sticker ideology. I love America, but I do not love the things we choose to do to fellow human beings. The whole point of America was supposed to be that, if you didn't love it you could work to change it. Even the men who set the whole thing up assumed future generations would be coming back to re-work it all a bit here and there. But we're not ... and I don't understand why.
We storm around a lot, beating our chests and using the planet as our pissing ground and then seem unable to understand why we're not very well received when we finally get around to traveling outside our own country. Some people say they don't care what other countries think of America and I wonder why not? Don't they ever wonder why people have this twisted impression of who we are and what we stand for? Aren't they the least bit concerned that the world isn't seeing the good in us? I do. I worry about it a lot. Because I live here among them and it saddens me to no end to see people who never get the chance to see how great we really are. They're not just pulling these opinions out of the thin air.
Yet, to live in or visit America is to know real kindness. You only have to think back to the attacks in September of 2001 to see how Americans react to tragedy. In the weeks after the World Trade Center's untimely demise, Americans poured help into New York City - donations of cash, food and clothing, blood and even manpower flooded in. Americans didn't think twice about offering whatever they could and collections were even conducted in the middle of traffic. I went to New York a month after the attacks and the place was still crawling with volunteers.
So where's all that kindness now? Where's our global kindness? Hell, where's the kindness to our own people? America seems more divided than ever. On the one hand we have a substantial number of people willing to help, willing to fight for what's right, willing to stand up and be a true American and then we have people like Mister Stallard who stomp off in a strop the moment anyone says anything negative.
It's okay to be upset with America - it is, in fact, the best way to show your love. You should never love your country the way a child loves its mother. That's a blind kind of love. "Mommy can do no wrong and if anyone says otherwise we shall throw rocks at them on the playground!" America deserves better than that. It deserves a grown up kind of love. We need to call it on its stupid decisions and thoughtless actions. We need to make sure anyone responsible for such actions is brought to book and made an example of. Torture isn't okay. The derailment of the rights of citizens isn't acceptable. The continuing attitude that no one really matters but us simply cannot continue.
So let's not hide our heads in the sands. Let's not claim to be patriots when we're really just trying to scare people into agreeing with us. Let's stand up and start looking around. Let's stop lying and hiding being blustering bravado. Let's get some discussion going and figure out a way to change this. Let's find a way to show the world how fabulous, intelligent, strong, courageous and kind we really are.
If I'm to be branded a "Bitch/Beast" because I love America enough to speak up when we're doing something wrong and to appeal to my fellow countrymen to help change it, then hear me roar.
From Cool Cleveland commentator Kelly McCloskey einsteinshruggedATyahoo.com
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