by Evert Cilliers aka Adam Ash
Well, he's wrong. We ARE exceptional. Here are the ways in which we are more exceptional than any other nation on earth:
1. We like to kill people. Especially helpless women and children. Since the end of WW2, we've slaughtered more folks in more wars than any other nation on earth. Not by the hundreds. Not by the thousands. But by the millions. No nation comes close to America when it comes to mass murder. No other nation is more evil than we are. And then we call our troops heroes, when they're nothing but hired killers.
2. Our former leaders — George W Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld et al — can't leave the country to travel overseas because they will get arrested as war criminals. How's that for exceptional?
3. We don't just specialize in killing foreigners. We like killing ourselves as well. Americans kill more Americans than any other nation on earth kill each other. It's like a continuation of the Civil War.
4. We are more cruel to animals than any other nation on earth. On our factory farms, we raise cattle and hogs and chickens so caged in, they can't move. Unlike an advanced country like Sweden, where they have laws protecting animal rights, we are the world's biggest sadists in our treatment of animals. (BTW, if you want to find some nations that are truly exceptional in a good sense, look no further than the Nordic nations of Sweden, Denmark, Norway, and Finland: they have the most generous and robust social welfare safety nets, with high taxes, yet they are the most economically competitive nations on earth, with successful world-wide brands like Ikea, Lego, Volvo, Nokia, Absolut Vodka, etc. The tiny nation of Denmark leads the world in wind power technology, generating 20% of its energy from wind. And these three countries spend proportionately more on foreign aid and helping other nations than any other. When it comes to exceptionalism, America is at least a century behind Scandinavia.)
5. With 5% of the world's population, we have 25% of the world's prisoners — more than Russia proportionately had under Communism, or South Africa under apartheid. We also spy on our citizens more than any other country. We're a complete police state. Witness our police suppression of the Black Panthers and the Occupy Wall Street movement.
6. Our government routinely ignores what the American people want them to do for us. We wanted a public option in our health care; the gorvernment ignored us. We wanted full employment; the government ignored us, even though they could start a public works program to fix up our crumbling infrastructure, and pay people for working instead of paying them unemployment insurance for not working. We wanted the crooks on Wall Street prosecuted; our government ignored us. We're not a democracy, we're a plutocracy.
7. We spend twice as much money as other industrialized nations on healthcare with worse outcomes. That's because we've left (outside of Medicare and Medicaid) our healthcare to private industry. In other words, we look upon people being sick as a great profit opportunity. No other nation is as immoral as us in this regard.
8. Our government is totally dysfunctional. We have a House of Congress that passes the repeal of Obamacare more than 40 times, and has done nothing much else. Our government refuses to govern. The GOP rules the House even though Republicans got 1.4 million fewer votes than Democrats over all. With gerrymandering, our government doesn't even represent us.
9. We spend more on weapons of mass destruction than any other nation on earth, yet we have the gall to lecture others. We export more arms than any other nation. We make more money off killing people than any nation on earth. Why do we need such an big army? Why do we need more than 800 military bases overseas? No other nation is as paranoid as we are.
10. We have less social mobility than any other industrialized nation on earth. We have more income inequality than any other industrialized nation on earth. We have more poor people proportionately than any industrialized nation on earth (46 million at last count), even though we are the richest country.
In short, we are the most heartless, sadistic, paranoid and psychopathic nation on earth. Sure, we're exceptional. Exceptionally fucked up.