The "White Hats" delusion

Like many of you out there I have some Right Wing acquantances. While most won’t discuss politics, and others are wild and crazy "kill ’em all and let God sort ’em out" types, there is a third variety I find particularly fascinating and challenging. These are the WHITE HAT crowd.

We can call them Nationalists, patriots, "America Firsters",etc., but the bottom line is they fervently believe the USA stands for truth, justice, generosity and compassion.

America is a fine place in which to live, in many ways offering unique opportunities and much cultural diversity, but the old idea that we are the "Guys in the white hats" is anachronistic and patently false. We not only "are what we are", we are what we’ve recently BECOME, and that, my friends, is very sad indeed.

My "hat" friend was no doubt raised in a fine and patriotic family. He probably watched Hopalong Cassidy and Flash Gordon, ate Wheaties and was a Boy Scout. He, like me, thought ALL Americans were trustworthy, loyal, honest, brave....well, you know the drill.

As a kid I believed in those noble qualities which all Americans were said to possess in spades. I guess I, too, wondered if those "foreigners" across the pond in "Socialist" countries, aspired to greatness as we do here, and shared the same high minded qualities which were (I supposed) inherent to our very nature by virtue of birth. I can’t recall what I thought. But I do know there are many like my pal who doubt that any other country on earth can or should be respected as profoundly as the good old US of A.

He and I often argue at length the virtues of our country and especially those of our government and particularly those of the Bush Administration, which I so clearly despise and he so sincerely admires. Oh, he says he’s not a Bush fan, but when the fan is splattered he’s right there to wipe off the muck and defend what he calls the "High minded reasons" why Bush was elected...twice.

He is a total non-believer in vote rigging (despite my pointing out CIA involvement in just such actions many times overseas), and honestly believes that the American public voted for Bush because...are you sitting down?...Bush STANDS for the policies the American public support!

I tell him: Oh, do you mean outsourcing, illegal war-making and torture, ignoring the Kyoto treaty and Global Warming, trashing Roe vs. Wade, stopping stem cell research, drilling in wildlife areas, giving the rich tax breaks, pushing an "ownership" society, signing 75 "signing statements" to determine what law should mean, National wiretapping, (etc)?

Predictably, it falls on deaf ears. He is in a state of denial and still hears the distant trumpets of the Cavalry (to Bush Calvary) and expects the Indian savages to be routed any moment.

I know full wel I am beating a dead horse here. But I’ll go right on beating it.