Americans as Sociopaths

From an interview with President Bush:

Q: Mr. President, turning to the biggest issue of all, Iraq, various people and various candidates talk about pulling out next year. If we were to pull out of Iraq next year, what’s the worst that could happen, what’s the doomsday scenario?

Bush: Doomsday scenario of course is that the extremists throughout the Middle East would be emboldened, which would eventually lead to another attack on the United States. The biggest issue we face – it’s bigger than Iraq – it’s this ideological struggle against cold-blooded killers who will kill people to achieve their political objectives. Iraq just happens to be part of this global war …

Never mind the hubris, the moral posturing, the blindness. That’s all well documented. Bush is a cold-blooded killer who uses violence to achieve his political objectives. He’s a violent extremist.

That’s well known, though approximately 45-50% of us are in denial about it. What is more interesting to me is an attitude shared by almost all of us – so-called “left” and right alike -that we have to fight “them” over there, or we will have to suffer violence here. It is the height of imperial arrogance – the attitude that we have the right to use lesser beings (of different skin color, religious persuasion, culture) as human shields. So what if Iraqi’s have died by the hundreds of thousands (most of them killed by us)? What’s important is that we don’t have to live with this carnage on our own soil.

Americans seem to believe that they – any “they” – can handle it better. They are less human than us, better able to handle death and gore. They don’t suffer and lash out in righteous anger when someone does violence with impunity on them. They don’t have normal human emotions as they watch their friends and children and parents die.

It’s as if they are not part of us, we of them. We’re detached, like sociopaths.

That’s the kind of attitude that breeds hatred and contempt, the kind of thing that sets us up for special status in the eyes of “terrorists” – that is, those who choose do their killing by more low-tech means than us.

Face it – we’re all killers, we’re all terrorists. And we’re all capable of better things as well. We’re all one. But we Americans have got so much money and so many weapons and we also have this damndable attitude that we’re better than everyone else. The weapons make us better at the killing game, while the attitude allows us to hold them in contempt from our lofty perch. We do more killing, we feel better about ourselves when we do it, and we manage to keep it all out of our sight.

American exceptionalism is a large part of the problem with violence in the world today. If we could join the world, and not set ourselves apart, we might feel some of the pain we inflict on others. In that manner, less of it might come back to visit us, and America would be safer.