American Exceptionalism: Alibi of a Nation

Tuesday, 11 June 2013 09:10
By Mike Lofgren, Truthout | Op-Ed

Whenever a public figure bloviates about American Exceptionalism and the country's purported heavenly mission, one is reminded of the quip attributed to Bismarck: that divine providence looks after drunkards, fools and the United States of America. Accordingly, one is always on the lookout for anyone willing to debunk America's collective personality cult. It was therefore with hopeful expectation that I perused Patrick Smith's Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century. This hope was not fulfilled. While the author makes many valid points, the book suffers from an incomplete understanding of history, and, more irritatingly, with a prose style as leaden and sententious as the architecture of Washington, D.C.'s World War II Memorial, which he describes as a metaphor for American myth-making about the past (the relevant excerpt is online here).