This much we know: America needs its demons. We need our enemies, our menacing and dark-eyed nemesis, that foreign and terrifying thing we do not understand and against which we must rally and wail, push and pule, fight and destroy.
This is, as the legend goes, how we define ourselves, how we give our tribe and its happily flawed capitalist/Christian system meaning, purpose and a reason to kill anyone who dares to disagree. Too young as a country to know ourselves at any depth, too mal-educated to have any real and lasting confidence, we just lash and burn, too afraid to shut up and hear the quiet roar of our own grand irrelevance. Same as it ever was? Like you even have to ask.
Communists. Arabs. The Japanese. Blacks. Native Americans. Hippies. Gays. "Gooks." Immigrants. Chinamen. The poor. Women. Teenagers. Vegans. Science. What's the problem with this nation? What's really eating at our soul and threatening our honest love of an angry God, apple pie and giant homoerotic firearms? It ain't us. It's them. They're trying to mess with our heads, steal our freedom, impregnate our virgins, poison the water supply. Damn them to hell, and where's my shotgun?
It's in this fine American tradition that we devolve yet another notch, as we can't help but notice, on this recently passed anniversary of 9/11, yet another wretched legacy of the Dark Days of Bush, another scar, another sickness, another sociocultural STD left to us during our nation's bleakest period in modern history, a hateful little nodule of moral cancer known as rampant anti-Muslim sentiment. ...
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