Reply #182: I think Kurt Vonnegut put it best. [View All]

[tom_paine]

His theory was that, in playing a major (in terms of machinery...THE MAJOR) role in defeating Hitler and the Nazis, collectively we were feeling VERY virtuous.

This feeling of national virtuousness, for one of the very few times in Human History, was well-deserved, and it was NOT nationalistic self-righteousness, which is another matter.

Vonnegut maintains that we kept this feeling of national virtuous has stayed with us ever since, long after it stopped being deserved by virtue of what we did to places like Guatemala, Chile, Iraq and Iran in the 50s and 60s, but that collectively this now UN-deserved sense of national virtuousness had allowed us to be more deepy in denial about how little that FEELING of virtuousness now little matches our ACTIONS.