DisUnited States

I learned from maverick psychologist James Hillmann to listen for the shadowy backgrounds driving apparently unobjectionable daylight discourse. Take the Christian Church, for instance, with its themes of unity and love and forgiveness. You don't have to be anti-Christian to notice how difficult these values are to maintain in Christian history. How many separated churches are there? And it started very early. What the foreground discourse praises is often the background Achille's heel.

So it is with the United States of America. What contemporaries forget is that this country has always been a struggle to keep together and united groups who are naturally at odds with one another. Any study of the Revolution and its aftermath would clarify that. North vs South, large colonies vs small, etc. The word "united" reads as if it were a description of something already completely achieved. Apparently the Civil War era did not get that message. And the USA in the last 45 years or so has been in the throes of what sometimes feels to me like a second civil war, but without the guns.

The fact that Obama is President, a man who refused to wear his country's flag on his lapel and who sat uncomplainingly through decades of anti-American rants from his pastor, and who's wife, a beneficiary of several white-guilt programs, could only muster pride in her country when her husband was nominated....That such people sit at the apex of power is profoundly disturbing to me.

Americans apparently did not react with alarm at their antics and elected him. To me, it is a sign something is very wrong.

I trace it to Martin Luther King and to the Vietnam War. The technology of the time allowed the issue of black resentment and the details of war to create an image of America, for Americans, as deeply flawed, even evil. And a whole generation created its identity over that divide, spinning a narrative which essentially made the USA prior to 1965 a kind of nightmare. And now they run the country. And are determined to create a new country that they could be proud of. Much of that project means rejecting the actual country prior to Enlightenment.

I would not vote for Barry Hussein Obama for dog-catcher. Especially after seeing him in action in office. And it troubles me that the people of this country elected him.

We have always had to hold a lot of disunity and centrifugal forces together in these United States. I wonder if we have lost even the will to try.

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