'Ugly Americans: What Is Wrong With Us?'

There is something seriously wrong with Americans. Something that was inherent in theEuropeans who first came and were able to live and breed here. Those first colonists had to be made of steel,they had to be hard and emotionless or they wouldn't have made it through the first winter. Hell, the onesthat weren't solid didn't make it past the first winter.

Americans love war. No, it goes beyond that; we love violence and explosions and big fucking guns, and we loveto watch other people suffer in pain and misery. Deprived of our own struggle for survival, we find comfort inwatching the desperation of others. Anywhere you look in our culture you see it: violent lyrics in music,action movies and TV shows with explosions and gun fights every five minutes, the ever present war dramas anddocumentaries, video games, professional wrestling and sports, kidnapped children and murdered parents and athousand desperate faces vying for time on the network news.

We don't get any happier than when there is a real war to gawk at. Who isn't glued tothe TV in this country any time our military machine goes to work (when the corporate media deems it worthy toshow) against some impoverished country? We can't get enough of smart bombs and carpet bombs and cluster bombsand bunker buster bombs. I bet your pulse is up just reading this.

We love it so much that in our oafish gape we don't even bother to ask ourselvesimportant questions. Questions like: "Why are we really bombing these people?" and "Isn't therea better way to settle disputes than this?" or how about "When will we go too far, if we have notalready?" Not only do we fail to ask these important questions, but we also make up the most absurdarguments to justify killing people.

Take the conversation I had today with my brother-in-law in which he gave me thesezingers: "Saddam has weapons of mass destruction, Saddam is trying to build weapons of mass destruction,Saddam won't let weapons inspectors in, and Saddam is a danger to the United States." I won't go into myresponses; I'm sure you've all heard the arguments before. I argued with him for half an hour on this subject,and when I proved all his arguments to be faulty, he still maintained that we needed to bomb Saddam.

The same thing happened over and over again when we were bombing Afghanistan, nomatter how well I argue, no matter what I say, people just will not open their eyes and see the truth that isslapping them in the face. They just don't want to admit that the only reason they support any war is becausethey just like to watch people getting bombed for no good reason.

I think the real problem here may be that Americans don't have the proper facilitiesto distinguish between fiction and reality anymore. We don't understand that those are real people being tornto pieces by our daisy cutters. Those are real people suffering under the wheel of our military machine. We'vebeen conditioned to disassociate ourselves. Programmed not to care.

Movies and television have brainwashed us into believing that our government'sintentions in the world are utterly and irrefutably noble; that we're the good guys and they're the bad guysand that everything is black and white, good and evil, us and them. The world does not work like this. Ourgovernment's intentions are anything but noble; they fight (or rather, they make us fight) for power, moneyand influence, nothing more, nothing less.

History proves this. But we don't believe it. Not our government! Not my electedofficials! We can't accept that our government is the terrorist force in the world because then we wouldn'thave any reason to cheer on the troops. We'd have no reason to hoop and holler when we see the smart bombsfall on the evening news. We'd have no reason to enjoy other people's misery. We will not face that reality.Well, maybe some of us do. After all, you can never get the whole population to agree on any one thing, somaybe some of us can get past this ingrained inability to believe our government incapable of foul play.

Maybe some of us won't look at other people's hardship as entertainment. Maybe someof us can feel. Maybe…

[C. Bryan Lavigne is a starvingartist and political activist who may or may not be completely insane. He lives in the United States. Thisarticle first appeared in YellowTimes.org]