The more I learn about the world that I live in, the more I am convinced that there is a deep disconnect between the real world and many of the people that I work with, go to church with, and consider my closest friends.  I become more concerned every day that the vast majority of people in our nation, left, right and in between, have become either blinded to the truth by partisanship, or have buried their head in the sand like ostriches.  This "blinding" didn't by any means start with the election of the current George Bush, nor is it confined to a particular political party.  It is far too easy to revert to partisan mud slinging, and catchy sound-bite "gotchas!" when the truth, as I see it, is far more complicated and beyond the petty differences of what passes for a two-party system in this country.  
          I'm speaking of the role of our nation in the world, our role as Christians in this nation, and how each of us has been taught a particular version of the history of our country.  Most of us have grown up unquestioningly believing the vast majority of this history, never stopping to think that it may have been fed through a prism, or a strainer; the same prism that all Great Nations have used throughout their own histories to justify their actions.  But ours is different; we're the Good Guys.  We're a kind, generous, compassionate people, a nation of immigrants, and a vast congregation of every other nation on earth. "The bastion of freedom." The idea is so ingrained in the American psyche, drilled into us from birth, that to think that anyone from almost anywhere else on this earth would not want what we have, or would not change places with most of us in a heartbeat, is beyond our comprehension. The entire "America-bashing" we hear of from overseas is chalked up to jealousy and envy, but I believe this is simplistic and arrogant.
          While there is no doubting that jealousy and envy of what we have exists, much in the same way that I envy the bigger house, or the higher salary of my neighbor, it is this idea that we are viewed as Good, or the Good Guys, by the rest of the people in the world, and they all want the thing or essence of what makes us Good–this is where our lack of intellectual curiosity and our national deficit in history have led us sadly down the wrong path.  Our view of what "they" want and what "they" really want is often quite different. Meic Pearse writes in the introduction to his book, Why the Rest Hates the West: "Westerners can no longer act on the bland assumption that their ideas about what constitutes common sense are universal or beyond examination." He also quotes the author Patricia Crone, "We all take the world in which we were born for granted and think of the human condition as ours.  This is a mistake.  The vast masses of human experience have been made under quite different conditions."
          I believe that it is entirely possible to be a nation of mostly good people, without necessarily being a good nation.  There's hardly a good nation on the face of the earth.  The idea that we are a Good Nation is one of the most deeply embedded concepts in our brain.  We have been fed the idea for so long, reinforced lately by anniversaries of pivotal moments of World War II and the resultant media barrage about "The Greatest Generation", that we still think we are the Good Guys.
          Amongst nations, these things do change.  Just think about who the Bad Guys were in World War II. Germany and Japan, former Bad Guys, are now Good Guys.  Italy switched from a Bad Guy to a good Guy during the war.  The Soviet Union was a Bad Guy until Germany attacked her and then she became a Good Guy until the end of the war when she not only became a Bad Guy, but became the Bad Guy.  Now, Russia is sort of a Good Guy, with the potential to be a Bad Guy at any moment. You could say the same thing about China, a Good Guy with major Bad Guy potential.  Look at Israel.  We as a nation would call them Good Guys, while 90% of the other nations on the planet would call them Bad Guys.  Israel is a good example of a nation full of people who are passionately convinced that they are the Good Guys, based on their actual history before 1948, and the version of history that has been fed to them after that.  The French? You tell me. 
          There is even an accepted phrase for this "Good Guy" feeling: American Exceptionalism.  American Exceptionalism also means that when we as a nation do something that the rest of the world thinks is illegal, immoral or short-sightedly dangerous, most Americans can’t wrap their brains around the fact that our country, which promotes ‘Freedom and Liberty and Democracy’, could be capable of such things.  The films of Hollywood have had as much to do as anything else with mythologizing the image of the United States as the Good Guys.

We are exceptional! We were the first Republic in a thousand years.  American ingenuity and hard work saved the world from being overrun by fascism and then communism.  We rescued Europe twice and helped Germany and Japan become thriving democracies.  We put a man on the moon! How do you define exceptional?
  
       The Chinese and Japanese have thought of themselves as exceptional for thousands of years.  The Romans had to have thought of themselves as exceptional.  The Jews certainly think of themselves as exceptional–they’re God’s "Chosen People."  The British thought they were the exceptional ones for over two hundred years.  The French think they’re exceptional yesterday, today, and tomorrow.  With the possible exception of the Jews (and that is certainly debatable in Israel’s case), all of these nations took the idea of their own exceptionalism too far and were ultimately done in by their own arrogance.
           I think we are an exceptional people, and an exceptional nation.  But this doesn’t mean that we have the right to impose our way of life, or our economic or political systems on other nations.  The more that we impose, the less attractive our ways become.  When this secular idea of exceptionalism is coupled with religious fervor, it becomes downright dangerous.  This would seem to me to be a very obvious idea, and yet to the Bush Administration and the people that voted for them twice, I get the feeling that they don't buy into this thought one bit.  
          It goes against every fiber of our national being to think of ourselves as anything but a Good Nation.  That is why one can present fact after fact of instances of American foreign policy not living up to its rhetoric, and these facts seem to bounce off the psyche of the American people.  It's similar to not wanting to know that your parents are capable of wrongdoing.  It took me long enough to figure out that my father wasn't always right about everything.  The last thing I would ever want to hear is that my mother or father committed a crime.  It is very similar to what might happen if you opened up a locked chest in your parent’s attic and found information that seemed to implicate them in all sorts of questionable activities.  There would be the temptation to lock the chest right back up and forget you ever saw what you saw.
          The war in Iraq was viewed initially by some Americans, and indeed, a minority of people around the world, as a humanitarian intervention, with the United States, one of the Good Guys, and Britain, another self-seen Good Guy, liberating the oppressed people of Iraq from the clutches of the murderous Baathist regime led by the brutal dictator Saddam Hussein. This position was not without merit; in fact, in its purest sense, it could have very well been the right position.  One could make the case that less lives will ultimately have been lost in the intervention than would have been lost had Saddam stayed in power, especially if you factor in that his two sons, murderers in their own right, were poised to carry on his brutal legacy for years to come.
          Unfortunately, our record of interventions over the past sixty years (and more in Latin America) has not been a good, or noble one.  With the Cold War as a backdrop, the record is clear that we supported many heinous dictators as long as they weren't communist.  Many people have a hard time forgetting that up until eighteen years ago, the United States supported Saddam Hussein and supplied him with some of the very chemicals and technology that we have accused him of possessing.  Our double standards have been long, and wide.   Since the end of the Cold War, we have imposed our version of globalization on the world, mainly through international institutions that we largely control, whether countries like it or not.  Add to this the circuitous route of obfuscation that the Bush administration took to arrive in Iraq, in which 'humanitarian intervention', if mentioned at all, was buried in the muck meant to bind Saddam Hussein, WMDs, and Osama bin-Laden together.  The White Horse that the Americans saw themselves riding into Iraq has taken on a dull, sickly, grayish hue.
          This is why there were millions of people demonstrating in the streets of cities all across the world, from across the political spectrum, to try and prevent the liberation of the people of Iraq by the overthrow of a fascist dictator who had murdered up to 300,000 of his own people.  The people of the world knew what kind of rotten fellow Saddam Hussein was.  We may still be the Good Guys in our own eyes, but this doesn't appear to be the perception of a majority of people around the world.