Australia isn't like the US - political commentator, Australia

It's one of those articles/raves that everyone else is afraid to say least it offends our close ally the US. Can't say I agree with it all, but many legitimate points are raised. However blunt the language is. Many in Australia would agree wholeheartedly with everything he says.

Commentator Micheal Pascoe, usually involved in only financial commentary, has come out of the woodwork politically after the latest US gun massacre. He pulls no punches. I'd encourage everyone to read the whole thing just out of interest if nothing else. I mean if this is the sort of commentary going on about the US by it's closest of allies, WTF must other people in other lands be thinking? Drones anyone?

Dystopian view 

The dystopian viewpoint is a significant theme in American literature, the assumption that the country is a disaster away from rape and pillage, from turning into plundering carnivores. Having never made peace with its past, which pretty much was one of rape and pillage, it hasn't escaped it. 

From The Road to Hunger Games, the effect is numbing. The National Geographic Channel features a show called Doomsday Preppers, a how-to guide for armed and dangerous "survivalists" building redoubts on the assumption that everyone else is armed and dangerous and out to get them. It is a nation that is collectively paranoid. 

It doesn't seem to help to have a large body of religious fanaticism – it doesn't help anywhere, whatever the particular brand of religion. There's little difference between the violently fundamentalist Christian, Muslim, Hindu or Jew. 

There's an American brand that hasn't evolved far from justifying slavery. It carries a fundamentalist certainty that is in equal parts both ignorant and frightening. The concept of American exceptionalism – that God has a chosen mission for the USA – is a dangerous adjunct. 

It's all fodder for the deranged fanatics of the American gun lobby, with a bible in one hand and an assault rifle in the other. It's fuel for the paranoid interpretation of a line in the constitution that is a blatant anachronism. 

We have our share of deranged individuals, but we try not to empower them. We don't promote violence for good or bad and increasingly decry the bad. Read more

Personally I think the article is a bit Australia-centric. I certainly don't think we deserve a pat on the back for inflicting two years of Tony Abbott onto ourselves and the world, or for the asylum nightmare we've created offshore for desperate refugees. Perhaps a pat for getting rid of Abbott in his first term, maybe. Just the fact that he was elected shows how incredibly stupid and gullible some Australians can be. 

That said, what is it about the US that they think they're chosen by god? "God bless America" bla. Why do they think they're so special? Some christians over there believe because they've followed the "Judeo-christian-ethic" (whatever that is) and have found favour with god for doing so. Hence the US's military and economic might all directly linked to obediance to some godly ethic. 

Such is the stupidity of how the US exceptionalism idea is interpreted in modern times by religious fanatics. But what does that say about the rest of the world? That we're not godly and therefore weak? WTF has christianity got to do with warfare anyway? Unless we want to go back to the days of the crusades.

Ironically the US finds itself in it's present predicament not because of deserting some weird ethic, but from it's own arrogance that believes that it's people are more special than any other people on the planet. 

With the gun violence there, they won't listen to the Australian experience of gun control and the zero mass killings here because of said control since the inception of them. They believe that because ther're special they know better, and the gun lobby actually says more guns will fix the problem. The same with their dysfunctional and expensive health care system. They won't listen or follow other countries because they think they know best, being those special exceptional Americans and all. It goes on and on, education, social policy, they just won't listen and label it "Communist".

In the end they've shot themselves in the foot. Arrogantly believing in their own special-ness they fail to take on ideas and policies from other countries that demonstrably work better than theirs. Instead they cling to a notion of "capitalism" religiously, the end result they find themselves where they are now; slaves to the corporations, puppet politicians, and such a huge societal divide between the rich and poor that it's starting to affect social cohesion itself.

Australia has it's problems yes, some of them deep problems. But the US has gone from a light on a hill to an example of how not to be.