American exceptionalism was our preexisting condition

[kpete]

Dan Zak/WaPo:

America is sick. Still sick. The fever spikes, abates, returns. The shortness of breath lingers. America is waiting in virtual bread lines, listening to bad jazz, on hold with the unemployment office. America is strewn with the glass shards of Starbucks windows, busted by protesters, and bullied by unidentifiable agents of the government. America, barefoot and in Brooks Brothers, is defending its marble palazzo with an AR-15 rifle. America is spray-painted with the faces of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, on bollards and plywood and mailboxes. America is trying to keep the kids occupied, and fed, and learning, and sociable without socializing. America is in the middle of a public health wildfire, an economic sinkhole and an earthquake over racial injustice — and the president of the United States is having to reiterate that he took a cognitive exam and correctly answered that, yes, the drawing of the large animal is, in fact, an elephant.

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2020/7/24/1963300/-Abbreviated-Pundit-Roundup-Pandemic-follies-from-Republicans-as-America-watches-aghast

[Laelth]

1. Beautiful writing.

Yep. We’re sick, but we’re not dead, and I can’t help but believe that we will rise from the ashes of our current malaise. How long that may take is anyone’s guess, but electing Joe Biden will speed up the process.

-Laelth

[C_U_L8R]

2. National narcissism.

It's a thing.

[sanatanadharma]

3. American exceptionalism is and in all-ways always has been magic-thinking and gulibility

From the first Europeans arriving here because they didn't want anyone telling them what to think, and they could not get along with their neighbors there, through the multitudes who came and moved west following promises that you could kick the earth with your boot and find gold in Ohio, rain follows the plow in Nebraska and there is 'gold in them thar hills'. What was true simply made the fantasies flourish further in the American fever for freedom. The protesting freedom to believe "I alone" know and can tell you what God wants becomes the conforming free-dumb of republican "do as I say, not as I do" fascism.

The history of America holds that fantasy trumps fact. This is the exceptional evil of America allowing native-American genocide, black slavery, and all the new and old-'isms' infecting our disaffected denizens.

Americans are exceptionally needy for every-more entertainment stimulation. Religious revivalism tent shaking, snake-oil medicine shows, moving-talking pictures, Disneylands and drugs. Americans take exception to thinking that changeable selfish-feelings don't count as equal to constant objective reality.

The American need to deny reality and seek escape into fantasy is repeated again and again in Levittowns, suburbs, segregation, secession, sex, sects and the modern sickness of alternative facts and denied reality.