Twisted Souls, Guns Out the Wazoo, and an Apparently Murder-Loving Society — from Germany, My American Culture Looks beyond Nuts

© 2015 Peter Free

 

20 June 2015

 

 

Super power, feeble mind?

 

If twisted-souled Dylann Roof — who murdered 9 people at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston — had been from abroad, the United States would be willing to slaughter tens of thousands in proactive revenge.

 

Instead, we are going to sweep his Rise of the New Confederacy action into the national closet, just as we always do when the Second Amendment and/or racial hatred is involved.

 

 

From Germany, where I am for three years — ironically helping project American power abroad — American society looks maniacally nuts

 

Perhaps it takes living among reasonably sane people to fully recognize the scope of my homeland’s national off-balancedness.

 

In Germany, I can go out and not have to worry about some human dreg blasting me with bullets.

 

Even if “black” over here, one does not have to be anxious about bigoted police lead-filling us for no reason.

 

The behavioral gap between Western Europe and the United States, with regard to violence, approaches that between civilization and barbarism.

 

 

Perspective

 

We Americans have long enjoyed pointing to German genocide and limitless oppression during the Holocaust, apparently forgetting that we indulged (and continue to indulge) the less well organized same thing, during our centuries of war on Native and African Americans.

 

The cultural difference is that it is difficult to find a German, who does not admit and deeply regret his and her nation’s Twentieth Century fall into hellish behavior. Not so in the United States, where denial and hypocritical self-righteousness flavor almost everything we do.

 

 

The moral? — Living amid insanity, perhaps we lapse into its cultural equivalent

 

In metaphorical terms, there is something almost consciously Hell-bound that defines my homeland’s persistent refusal to recognize that a society based on repetitively killing people is immoral in every meaningful sense.

 

Meanwhile, a Confederate battle flag flies above South Carolina. That’s symbolically equivalent to pronouncing the whole state intentionally outside Jesus’ admonitory realm.

 

Honest patriotism rejects moral blindness and fixes problems. But that, too, is an area where we characteristically substitute histrionic pseudo-patriotism for the real thing.