America Sucks, Except When It Doesn’t
By: John Devore
Tags: Patriotism, Election 2020, Politics, Feelings, Masculinity

I’m sober 10 years now but I can go off like an alcoholic dive bar political pundit on all the many reasons America sucks. I’ll start with war — we love it. There is no geopolitical problem too complex that a bomb can’t solve. The U.S. has happily rained fire down on people half a world away so the gas tanks of our SUVs are cheaper to fill. Whenever we ran out of enemies we waged wars on nouns, like terror and drugs. Violence is the love language of the United States of America.

America has been called a shining city on a hill but I’m sorry we’re more like the last house on the left. Are there other countries that are worse than America? Sure. But I’m a person who likes to keep his eyes on his own paper. I don’t think “not being the worst” is, in fact, being the best. America does not treat its own citizens well, and it should.

For a country of pioneering individuals, we love rubber bullets and batons too much. There is no domestic problem too complex that a militarized police force can’t solve. And the primary domestic problem is systemic inequality. When too many throats fill with cries for freedom the U.S.’s first response is to put on steel-tipped boots.

America sucks because we celebrate men who slaughtered indigenous people and kept slaves. America sucks because a few of us have way too much and everyone else next to nothing. The new American dream is becoming so rich and powerful that laws are just suggestions. The only right equally distributed is the right to sneer. The educated look down on the uneducated. The upper-middle-class looks down on the lower-middle-class. And so on. A human centipede ouroboros of resentments.

America sucks because it turned Jesus Christ into Ronald McDonald. America sucks because it will always choose the easy thing over the hard thing. Sure, we put a man on the moon but we put countless men behind bars because of their circumstances. Revenge is easy. Selfishness is easy.

Do you know what’s hard? Doing the right thing.

The U.K.’s wartime prime minister Winston Churchill is alleged to have said, “You can always count on the Americans to do the right thing after they have exhausted all the other possibilities.”

He was a man of his time: a racist, a misogynist, a xenophobe. But he loved killing Nazis so, you know, respect where respect is due. This quote, though, is one of my favorites even if I don’t believe it. Churchill was a political sentimentalist who understood how to stir the emotions of his island nation but I don’t think he got the U.S. as much as he thought he did. He was a master of rhetoric but this alleged one-liner was more wishful thinking than reality.

When has America done the right thing? Not the necessary thing but the moral thing? America does the politically expedient thing all the time. We do the profitable thing. We’re more than happy to do the wrong thing if it means the status quo of a small powerful minority is preserved. But the right thing? The Civil War? The Voting Rights Act a hundred years later? The legalization of same sex marriage in 2015? Are these “the right things” or just accidents of history? Does America ever do the right thing or does it play moral Russian Roulette, one chamber loaded with love and charity and compassion? When I vote am I just pulling a trigger and hoping for the best?