SUNDAY, MAY 26, 2013 08:00 PM +0900
American exceptionalism is a dangerous myth
Move beyond Tea Party lies and phony patriotism. This Memorial Day, let's remember our history honestly
BY PATRICK SMITH
St. Florian’s project, then, is a monument to forgetting, not remembering. There is no bas-relief dedicated to the atomic bomb attacks on Japan or the fire-bombings in Germany; all that occurred after 1945 disappears into the memorial’s antiquated style.
日本人でもそうだが、多くのアメリカ人の歴史の忘却というのはすさまじいからね。というより、戦勝国の悲劇で、自国の犯した大量虐殺、大量女性搾取について、いまだに直面していない。
Nostalgia is always an expression of unhappiness with the present, and never does it give an accurate accounting of the past. What are we to say about a monument to a nostalgia for nostalgia?
そうかもね
A clue to the collective psychology emerged in the movement’s early days, when adherents dressed in tricorn hats, knee breeches, and brass-buckled shoes. This goes to the true meaning of the movement and explains why it appeared when it did. One cannot miss, in the movement’s thinking and rhetoric, a desire for a mythical return, another “beginning again,” a ritual purification, another regeneration for humanity.
アメリカ保守の理想？
The various symptoms of America’s dysfunctional relationship with its past are all in evidence in the Tea Party, the political movement formed in 2009 and named for the Boston Tea Party of 1773. It would be remiss not to note this. Much has been written about the Tea Party’s political positions: Its members are radically opposed to taxation and favor a fundamentalist idea of the infallibility of markets and an almost sacramental interpretation of the Constitution. They cannot separate religion from politics, and they consider President Obama either a socialist or a Nazi or (somehow) both.
But in the Tea Party we discover the true topic to be the absence of optimism and the conviction that new ideas are impossible. Its object is simply to maintain a belief in belief and an optimism about optimism. These are desperate endeavors. They amount to more expressions of America’s terror in the face of history. To take our country back: Back to its mythological understanding of itself before the birth of its own history is the plainest answer of all.
別にティーパーティーだけではないような・・・・
In an earlier essay I wrote about what a German thinker has called the culture of defeat and its benefits for the future. Defeat obliges a people to reexamine their understanding of themselves and their place in the world. This is precisely the task lying at America’s door, but on the basis of what should Americans take it up? “Defeat” lands hard among Americans. The very suggestion of it is an abrasion. We remain committed to winning the “war on terror” Bush declared in 2001, even if both the term and the notion have come in for scrutiny and criticism. Who has defeated America such that any self-contemplation of the kind I suggest is warranted?
アメリカはある意味、負け知らず、だからね。
The Spanish-American War and all that followed―in the name of what, these interventions and aggressions? What was it Americans reiterated through all the decades leading to 2001―and, somewhat desperately, beyond that year? It was to remake the world, as Condoleezza Rice so plainly put it. It was to make the world resemble us, such that all of it would have to change and we would not. This dream, this utopia, the prospect of the global society whose imagining made us American, is what perished in 2001. America’s fundamentalist idea of itself was defeated on September 11. To put the point another way, America lost its long war against time.
これだな。在日アメリカ出身者のなかにも、こんな使命感を背負っている奴がいるから困る。
What are America’s first steps forward, then, given these inheritances?
The first is to look and listen in another way, to see and hear from within the space of history. It is to achieve a condition of history with memory. This means to come gradually to accept that one lives in historical time and is as subject to its strictures, its triumphs, and its miseries as anyone else. It means accepting that encounters with others are an essential feature of the world we enter upon. Equally, we must begin to make certain links so that we know who we are and what it is we have been doing―the connections between feeling and time and between vigilance and distance and history are examples. Others have done this, made the passage I am suggesting is upon us. In time, history teaches, it becomes clear that it is more painful to resist this than it is to accept it.
We can now speak of empathy, meaning that one sees another not simply as an object but as another subject―an equivalent. This is achieved through a recognition of another’s perspective, intentions, and emotions. This makes one’s objective experiences available to all other subjects: One feels oneself to be a subject among other subjects.
ＮＹＴなど見ている限り無理だろう。ファクラーが自身のナショナリズム性に気づいて、アメリカの偽善を指弾できたら、私も考えを変えるが・・・・
I propose the taking of an immense risk. It is the risk of living without things that are linked in the American psyche: the protection of our exceptionalism, the armor of our triumphalist nationalism, our fantastical idea of the individual and his or her subjectivity.
正しい診断かもしれないが患者は受け付けまい。
