by Evert Cilliers aka Adam Ash
I would blame three things: Disney, Forest Gump and Fox News.
What did Disney do? He made sentimentality a good and virtuous thing.
What did Forest Gump do? That movie, which won the Oscar for best picture, made stupidity a good and virtuous thing.
What did Fox News do? They made craziness good and virtuous.
Take Disney first.
Before Disney, fairy tales were cruel and filled with horror. After all, in the real Cinderella story, the stepsisters actually hacked at their feet, cut them smaller, blood flowing, so they could fit their feet into Cinderella's shoe.
After Disney, fairy tales became cloyingly sweet and sentimental. And this sentimentality towards fairy tales spilled over into everything. We even get sentimental about our troops, for example.
What do our troops do? They kill people. They are trained to kill people. They are trained murderers. But our politicians, whenever they want to appear patriotic, put their hands on their hearts and blab on about what heroes our troops are.
Heroes? Guys who go to foreign lands to kill people? Guys who, because Bush and Cheney told them, went to Iraq and murdered over half-a-million Iraqis, many of them women and children, for no good reason at all? Just because our President ordered them to do so? These are heroes? Give me a break. They are deluded mass murderers — virtuous pawns deluded by our terrible leaders.
This is the sort of sentimentality that leads folks to get so patriotic about America that they call us the exceptional nation.
Exceptional for what?