The Three Faces of Uncle Sam

Michael Brenner’s post with the above title on the Huffington Post website struck a chord with me. I have thought these things for many years and have articulated them in more than one of my Hipfish columns.  We are the country without a sense of shame, the country without any sense that we might ever be wrong about anything.  We have an almost cartoonish sense of grandiosity.  And we do use 9/11 the way our alter ego, the Israelis, use the holocaust.  It justifies any brutality on our part, any and all interventionism, any and all expansionism and imperialism.  In an individual our national sense of ourselves and our complete inability at self insight or self criticism, and our division of the world into two apocalyptic categories of good and bad, with ourselves possessing a virtually godlike good, would be utterly pathological – at least on the level of paranoid personality, with a heavy admixture of anti-social personality (i.e psychopath, sociopath).  We see this most resplendently in the Republican blowhards in Congress and media, but there is a dangerous admixture of it also in the Council of Foreign Relations crowd that runs the Democrats’ foreign policy.