[Springboard] NO LIMITS TO POWER STUDY: #1 The introduction

[James Wiegel]

So, as I understand, Bacevich is saying, in the introduction, that, Americans have a pumped up image of themselves as some how special (American exceptionalism) -- and that collective image has come to mean the freedom to do what we want and to expect that others should want to be like us because we are special.  And that as we operate out of that image, we are assuming more and more imperial pretensions in order to protect that image.  Is that at all correct? 
 
So, 2 questions:  If you were Obama, and you knew this, what would you (could you) do to deal with it?  If you were an ordinary citizen, what would you (could you) do to deal with it?  What social mechanism would you use?

Jim Wiegel

I
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--- On Sun, 11/9/08, James Wiegel <jfwiegel at yahoo.com> wrote:

From: 







an expression of domestic dysfunction — an attempt to manage or defer coming to terms with contradictions besetting the American way of life. Those contradictions have found their ultimate expression in the perpetual state of war afflicting the United States today. 
16.        Gauging their implications requires that we acknowledge their source: They reflect the accumulated detritus of freedom, the by- products of our frantic pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness. 
17.        Freedom is the altar at which Americans worship, whatever their nominal religious persuasion. "No one sings odes to liberty as the final end of life with greater fervor than Americans," the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr once observed. Yet even as they celebrate freedom, Americans exempt the object of their veneration from critical examination. In our public discourse, freedom is not so much a word or even a value as an incantation, its very mention enough to stifle doubt and terminate all debate. 
18.        The Limits of Power will suggest that this heedless worship of freedom has been a mixed blessing. In our pursuit of freedom, we have accrued obligations and piled up debts that we are increasingly hard- pressed to meet. 
 
24.        In our own day, realism and humility have proven in short supply. What Niebuhr wrote after World War II proved truer still in the immediate aftermath of the Cold War: Good fortune and a position of apparent preeminence placed the United States "under the most grievous temptations to self- adulation." Americans have given themselves over to those temptations. Hubris and sanctimony have become the paramount expressions of American statecraft. After 9/11, they combined to produce the Bush administration's war of no exits and no deadlines. 
 
 
39.        Niebuhr once wrote, "One of the most pathetic aspects of human history is that every civilization expresses itself most pretentiously, compounds its partial and universal values most convincingly, and claims immortality for its finite existence at the very moment when the decay which leads to death has already begun." Future generations of historians may well cite Niebuhr's dictum as a concise explanation of the folly that propelled the United States into its Long War. 

 

Jim Wiegel

I know nothing grander, better exercise, better digestion, more positive proof of the past, the triumphant result of faith in human kind, than a well-contested American natonal election. Walt Whitman

401 North Beverly Way 
Tolleson, Arizona 85353-2401
 +1 623-936-8671 
 +1 623-363-3277 
jfwiegel at yahoo.com
www.partnersinparticipation.com



      
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