The New Yorker's John Cassidy asks: "Is America Crazy?" -- and offers "Ten Reasons It Might Be"

Plus, Alex Koppelman ponders "Mitt
Romney, the Gun-Control Candidate"

This lovely Mike Twohy cartoon graces John Cassidy's newyorker.com blogpost "Is America Crazy? Ten Reasons It Might Be."

"Call it what you want, the upshot is the same: a failure to look reality in the eye and deal with it on a sensible, empirical basis. Which, if you think about it, pretty much defines Washington politics over the past twenty or thirty years."

-- John Cassidy, in the above-cited blogpost

by Ken

One of these days I will get caught up on the Aaron Sorkin-written show The Newsroom, which has been piling up on my DVR since the pilot episode, which I actually liked a lot. At the moment, though, I'm recalling the remarkable live-on-air diatribe that news anchor Will McEvoy (Jeff Daniels) delivered in that episode in response to a mindless audience question about "why America is the greatest country in the world." When normally let's-make-nice, never-take-a-stand Will was finally bullied into giving an answer, he began, "It's not the greatest country in the world."



Talk to any sane non-American for a while, in particular one with extensive experience of living here, and you're likely to hear astonishment -- and not a little hostility -- registered on the subject of American exceptionalism, the belief that not only is this the greatest country in the world but the gap between us and No. 2, whoever that might be, is so enormous as to constitute a formality in the ballot-counting. As we're reminded in particular during national election seasons, going against this belief amounts to political suicide, no matter how carefully the suicidal devil may try to distinguish between a country's aspirations and its reality.

What makes this all the more exasperating is that, thanks to the traditional American tolerance of ignorance, which has grown to a positive mania, and the carefully cultivated passion for delusion, our "greatest country"-ists know:

* nothing at all about any other country

* at best slightly more about our own

I've had nothing to say here about our latest gun massacre-horror show, because what is there to say? Well, quite a lot, but it's the same quite a lot that there's been to say after each of its horrific predecessors, and it mostly hinges on a conversation that the world's greatest country psychotically refuses to have, as The New Yorker's Adam Gopnik pointed out, well, pointedly in a recent blogpost, "One More Massacre," which I should have commended to your attention -- the post to which John Cassidy refers in his new post. For reference, this is the paragraph to which Cassidy raises his "only quibble":

Only in America. Every country has, along with its core civilities and traditions, some kind of inner madness, a belief so irrational that even death and destruction cannot alter it. In Europe not long ago it was the belief that "honor" of the nation was so important that any insult to it had to be avenged by millions of lives. In America, it has been, for so long now, the belief that guns designed to kill people indifferently and in great numbers can be widely available and not have it end with people being killed, indifferently and in great numbers. The argument has gotten dully repetitive: How does one argue with someone convinced that the routine massacre of our children is the price we must pay for our freedom to have guns, or rather to have guns that make us feel free? You can only shake your head and maybe cry a little. "Gun Crazy" is the title of one the best films about the American romance with violence. And gun-crazy we remain.

Gopnik is speaking to "the reality that no one -- really no one -- anywhere on the political spectrum has the courage to speak out about the madness of unleashed guns and what they do to American life." I have my own quibble here (as I often do with Gopnik, a writer I admire enormously, but always seem to have a quibble with), namely that the statement just isn't true. I hear plenty of people speaking out about "the madness of unleashed guns and what they do to American life." They're not, by and large, people in the mainstream of American political life, but they're sure as shootin' somewhere on the political spectrum. Still, the fact that would-be players on that spectrum almost all lack that courage, just as Gopnik says, actually seems to me to make his point more emphatically.

Here again is the link for the new Cassidy post, and a link as well for the earlier post of his own to which he refers, "Why Obama Shouldn't Write James Holmes Out of History," also very much worth your attention.

"Every country has, along with its core civilities and traditions, some kind of inner madness, a belief so irrational that even death and destruction cannot alter it."

That was my colleague Adam Gopnik commenting the other day on America's attitude toward gun laws. Having read some of the comments on my own post about President Obama's failure to pursue more restrictions on the sale of firearms, I can only agree with Adam. When Bill Moyers, Keith Olbermann, Mayor Bloomberg, and Rupert Murdoch [see links onsite -- Ed.] are all in favor of something—in this case, tougher gun laws—and there's still no chance of it being enacted, you can rest assured that forces other than reason and partisan politics are involved.

My only quibble with Adam is his use of the singular form: "a belief." Are firearms the only subject on which Americans are, let us say, a little batty? I'm not so sure. Having lived here for almost thirty years, and having been a U.S. citizen for the past five, I am greatly attached to this country and admire many aspects of it enormously. But the dogged persistence of certain American shibboleths has always struck me as somewhat curious.

What are these shared convictions? I could go on all day, but here, for argument's sake, are ten. Not all Americans subscribe to them, of course. In some instances, the true believers may amount to a small but vocal minority. Still, the popular sentiment underlying these statements is so strong that politicians defy it at their peril.

1. Gun laws and gun deaths are unconnected.
2. Private enterprise is good; public enterprise is bad.
3. God created America and gave it a special purpose.
4. Our health-care system is the best there is.
5. The Founding Fathers were saintly figures who established liberty and democracy for everyone.
6. America is the greatest country in the world.
7. Tax rates are too high.
8. America is a peace-loving nation: the reason it gets involved in so many wars is that foreigners keep attacking us.
9. Cheap energy, gasoline especially, is our birthright.
10. Everybody else wishes they were American.

Some of these statements may be true. But truth or falsehood isn't the point here: it is whether or not certain beliefs are amenable to reason. I don't think these are, which is what puts them in the category of irrationality, flakiness, nonsense, nuttiness, absurdity, craziness.

Call it what you want, the upshot is the same: a failure to look reality in the eye and deal with it on a sensible, empirical basis. Which, if you think about it, pretty much defines Washington politics over the past twenty or thirty years.

MEANWHILE, IN THE 2012 PRESIDENTIAL RACE, IS
WILLARD THE REAL GUN-CONTROL CANDIDATE?

This hypothesis is put forward in yet another newyorker.com blogpost, by Alex Koppelman, who first does a quick historical survey of presidential responses to Colorado youth gun massacres and finds President Obama lagging well behind Bill Clinton, who visited the state in April 2000, in the year following the Columbine horror, and said:

Gun safety cannot be the only area of our national life where we say no to prevention. Colorado is here to say we have lost enough of our children; it's time to have prevention, too, in this important area of our national life. I don't want any future President to have to go to Columbine; or to Springfield, Oregon; or to Jonesboro, Arkansas; or to all the other places I have been. It's tough enough to comfort the families of our servicemen and women who die in the line of duty. Children have no duties except to their studies and their families. Our duty is to protect their lives, and give them futures.

The Obama White House seems happy to hide behind the crackpot Supreme Court rewrite of the Second Amendment (by the five ninnies who like to be thought of as the Supreme Court Justices Who Are Too Stupid to Know How to Read), and so in 2012 the President Who Went to Colorado was too craven even to utter the word gun. Koppelman points out that his unflinching cave-in to the NRA during his presidency isn't going to earn him any points.

Throughout Obama's Presidency, even as he’s done nothing to make firearms less freely available, the N.R.A. has maintained that he is coming for America’s guns. In fact, leaders of the organization now argue that the fact that Obama hasn’t pursued gun control during his first term in office is proof that he plans to do so if he’s reëlected.

(He explains this with reference to a truly certifiable heap of lying lunacy published last year by NRA Exec VP Wayne LaPierre, "Obama's Secret Plan to Destroy the Second Amendment by 2016.")

By contrast, Koppelman, writes,

When he was the governor of Massachusetts, Romney signed a ban on assault weapons, like the one used in the movie theatre in Aurora. "Deadly assault weapons have no place in Massachusetts," he said at the time. "These guns are not made for recreation or self-defense. They are instruments of destruction with the sole purpose of hunting down and killing people." Romney also signed a law that raised the state's gun-licensing fee to a hundred dollars, from twenty-five.

It's true that once upon a time -- "in the years before the Democratic Party concluded that gun control was a political loser and abandoned it" -- Barack Obama "supported fairly tough regulations on firearms." Of course Willard too has undergone a reversal of his Massachusetts position, pandering shamelessly to the NRA, but Koppelman argues that they have no better reason to trust his evolution on this issue than the president's. "The N.R.A. might not trust Obama's evolution on this issue, but there's no real reason they should be any more convinced by Romney's."

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