Excerpt: "Of the 35 most economically advanced countries, the United States ranks 34th, edging out only Romania (in prevalence of child poverty)."

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Washington
IMAGINE a presidential candidate who spoke with blunt honesty about American problems, dwelling on measures by which the United States lags its economic peers.
What might this mythical candidate talk about on the stump? He might vow to turn around the dismal statistics on child poverty, declaring it an outrage that of the 35 most economically advanced countries, the United States ranks 34th, edging out only Romania. He might take on educational achievement, noting that this country comes in only 28th in the percentage of 4-year-olds enrolled in preschool, and at the other end of the scale, 14th in the percentage of 25-to-34-year-olds with a higher education. He might hammer on infant mortality, where the United States ranks worse than 48 other countries and territories, or point out that, contrary to fervent popular belief, the United States trails most of Europe, Australia and Canada in social mobility.
The candidate might try to stir up his audience by flipping a familiar campaign trope: America is indeed No. 1, he might declare — in locking its citizens up, with an incarceration rate far higher than that of the likes of Russia, Cuba, Iran or China; in obesity, easily outweighing second-place Mexico and with nearly 10 times the rate of Japan; in energy use per person, with double the consumption of prosperous Germany.
How far would this truth-telling candidate get? Nowhere fast. Such a candidate is, in fact, all but unimaginable in our political culture. Of their serious presidential candidates, and even of their presidents, Americans demand constant reassurance that their country, their achievements and their values are extraordinary.
Candidates and presidents generally oblige them, Barack Obama and Mitt Romney included. It is permissible, in the political major leagues, for candidates to talk about big national problems — but only if they promise solutions in the next sentence: Unemployment is too high, so I will create millions of jobs. It is impermissible to dwell on chronic, painful problems, or on statistics that challenge the notion that the United States leads the world — a point made memorably in a tirade by the dyspeptic anchorman played by Jeff Daniels in the HBO drama “The Newsroom.”  (Alan: The video clip is at http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2012/07/aaron-zorkins-newsroom-season-1-episode.html)
“People in this country want the president to be a cheerleader, an optimist, the herald of better times ahead,” says Robert Dallek, the presidential historian. “It’s almost built into our DNA.”
This national characteristic, often labeled American exceptionalism, may inspire some people and politicians to perform heroically, rising to the level of our self-image. But during a presidential campaign, it can be deeply dysfunctional, ensuring that many major issues are barely discussed. Problems that cannot be candidly described and vigorously debated are unlikely to be addressed seriously. In a country where citizens think of themselves as practical problem-solvers and realists, this aversion to bad news is a surprising feature of the democratic process.
“I think there’s more of a tendency now than in the past to avoid discussion of serious problems,” says Allan J. Lichtman, a political historian at American University. “It has a pernicious effect on our politics and on governing, because to govern, you need a mandate. And you don’t get a mandate if you don’t say what you’re going to do.”
American exceptionalism has recently been championed by conservatives, who accuse President Obama of paying the notion insufficient respect. But the self-censorship it produces in politicians is bipartisan, even if it is more pronounced on the left for some issues and the right for others.
FOR instance, Democrats are more loath than Republicans to look squarely at the government debt crisis indisputably looming with the aging of baby boomers and the ballooning cost of Medicare. Republicans are more reluctant than Democrats to acknowledge the rise of global temperatures and its causes and consequences. But both parties, it is fair to say, prefer not to consider either trend too deeply.
Both parties would rather avert their eyes from such difficult challenges — because we, the people, would rather avert our eyes. Talk to any political pro about this phenomenon and one name inevitably comes up: Jimmy Carter, who has become a sort of memento mori for American politicians, like the skulls in Renaissance paintings that reminded viewers of their mortality.
Mr. Carter, they will say, disastrously spoke of a national “crisis of confidence” and failed to project the optimism that Americans demand of their presidents. He lost his re-election bid to sunny Ronald Reagan, who promised “morning in America” and left an indelible lesson for candidates of both parties: that voters can be vindictive toward anyone who dares criticize the country and, implicitly, the people.
This is a peculiarly American brand of nationalism. “European politicians exercise much greater freedom to address bluntly the uglier social problems,” says Deborah Lea Madsen, professor of American studies at the University of Geneva. An American politician who speaks too candidly about the country’s faults, she went on to say, risks being labeled with that most devastating of epithets: un-American.
The roots of this American trait are often traced to the famous shipboard sermon the Puritan lawyer John Winthrop preached on his way to help found the Massachusetts Bay Colony nearly five centuries ago.
“We must consider,” he said, “that we shall be as a city upon a hill — the eyes of all people are upon us.” Winthrop’s metaphor has had a long life in American speechifying, prominently quoted by both President John F. Kennedy and Reagan. But if, for Winthrop, the image was something the colony should aspire to, for modern politicians it is often a boast of supposed accomplishment, a way of combating pessimists and asserting American greatness, whatever the facts.
Could a presidential candidate today survive if he promised to wage a war on poverty, as President Lyndon B. Johnson did in 1964? It seems unlikely, and one reason may be that Johnson’s effort fell short, revealing the agonizing difficulty and huge cost of trying to change the lives of the poor.
Indeed, in the current fiscal environment, promising an ambitious effort to reduce poverty or counter global warming might imply big new spending, which is practically and politically anathema. And given the increasing professionalization of politics, any candidate troubled by how the United States lags its peers in health or education has plenty of advisers and consultants to warn him never to mention it on the stump.
“Nobody wants to be the one who proposed taking the position that got the candidate in trouble,” says Martha Joynt Kumar, a political scientist at Towson University who studies presidential communications.
Of course, the reason talking directly about serious American problems is risky is that most voters don’t like it. Mark Rice, who teaches American studies at St. John Fisher College in Rochester, N.Y., said students often arrived at his classes steeped in the notion that the United States excelled at everything. He started a blog, Ranking America, to challenge their assumptions with a wild assortment of country comparisons, some sober (the United States is No. 1 in small arms ownership) and others less so (the United States is tied for 24th with Nigeria in frequency of sex).
“Sure, we’re No. 1 in gross domestic product and military expenditures,” Mr. Rice says. “But on a lot of measures of quality of life, the U.S. ranking is far lower. I try to be as accurate as I can and I avoid editorializing. I try to complicate their thinking.”
A reporter in the Washington bureau of The New York Times

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Alan here...

The French writer Alexis de Tocqueville first wrote about "exceptionalism in his 1831 work, Democracy in America:[15]
"The position of the Americans is therefore quite exceptional, and it may be believed that no democratic people will ever be placed in a similar one. Their strictly Puritanical origin, their exclusively commercial habits, even the country they inhabit, which seems to divert their minds from the pursuit of science, literature, and the arts, the proximity of Europe, which allows them to neglect these pursuits without relapsing into barbarism, a thousand special causes, of which I have only been able to point out the most important, have singularly concurred to fix the mind of the American upon purely practical objects. His passions, his wants, his education, and everything about him seem to unite in drawing the native of the United States earthward; his religion alone bids him turn, from time to time, a transient and distracted glance to heaven."

As practical, utilitarian people only intermittently attentive to the real substance of religion --  love, service and the contemplation of glory -- Americans use "exceptionalism" to justify a toxic brew of ignorance, arrogance and bedrock irresponsibility.

As neo-Puritans (but without Puritanism's original commitment to The Common Good) American "exceptionalists" are blindly faithful that "God will save his chosen people."

Deus ex machina - raining manna from heaven - is a singularly childish False God who seduces Americans to believe salvation is  assured without troubling themselves (or reaching into their wallets) to insure a well-educated citizenry.

As my brother Bill put it: "We are all up against The Wall of Convenience." 

Nothing is more convenient than the desperate belief -- rooted in Bad Religion -- that God will save us, without good works, even if it takes Armageddon to do it. 

According to this desperate credo, The Rapture will secure every exceptionalist, while God's enemies are consigned to a Lake of Eternal Fire. 

Is this convenient, or what? 


America's core contempt for paying necessary costs -- like educating its citizenry and providing good healthcare for all citizens -- is rooted in religious immaturity and the wishful thinking that "God will miraculously provide for His chosen." 

And so, "The Chosen" are "free" to exempt themselves from building a decent world for The Human Family

Chesterton - widely admired as an exemplary Christian apologist - offers this insight: “The work of heaven alone is material; the making of a material world. The work of hell is entirely spiritual.” 

We labor under the God-damned curse of sola fide "religiosity." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sola_fide

The Great Refusal to "pay up" - and the cornerstone irresponsibility on which this Refusal depends - can be analyzed in many ways.

It is easiest, however, to reach "end game" through Grover Norquist's No New Tax Vow, and the reality-denying suppositions on which it's based. http://www.ted.com/talks/michael_specter_the_danger_of_science_denial.html

To believe that taxes can only "go down" (or "remain the same") is to deny Life's essential polarity: sometimes "The Great Sine Wave" goes up, and sometimes "The Great Sine Wave" goes down. 

Any other persuasion is demonstrably lunatic.

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"Taxes are the price we pay for civilization." (How is civilization defined? http://www.metronc.com/article/?id=1933)

Simply put, modern Americans refuse to pay enough tax for civilization to thrive. 

If the Armageddon Cheerleaders get their way, Americans may refuse to pay enough for civilization to  survive.

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"Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction."
Blaise Pascal