Shelby Steele on White Victimhood and US Guilt-Tripping

The Wall Street Journal puts the question right up front just as the Iranian jerk-offs threaten to attack Israel if the US "does evil."

Get it? If the Iranians attack Israel, it will be the US's fault---I can feel the cringing in liberal spine cavities [where a notochord formerly dwelt] as they anticipate those words that hurt them far more than 9/11 seemed to have done.

Shelby Steele points out that despite an American economic growth pace [not noted in the MSM] of emerging-economy size [4.8% GDP in 1st Q 2006], the MSM and their foreign allies have America wrong-footed in every department, wailing dissatisfaction and whining endlessly and committing communications fraud with "a day without immigrants" [Oops, the MSM forgot the 'illegal' word].

He has the good humor to note the following:

Anti-Americanism, whether in Europe or on the American left, works by the mechanism of white guilt. It stigmatizes America with all the imperialistic and racist ugliness of the white Western past so that America becomes a kind of straw man, a construct of Western sin. (The Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo prisons were the focus of such stigmatization campaigns.) Once the stigma is in place, one need only be anti-American in order to be "good," in order to have an automatic moral legitimacy and power in relation to America. (People as seemingly disparate as President Jacques Chirac and the Rev. Al Sharpton are devoted pursuers of the moral high ground to be had in anti-Americanism.) This formula is the most dependable source of power for today's international left. Virtue and power by mere anti-Americanism. And it is all the more appealing since, unlike real virtues, it requires no sacrifice or effort--only outrage at every slight echo of the imperialist past.

Chirac and Sharpton, both as fraudulent and dishonest as Tawana Brawley, whose lies lifted Sharpton to inexplicable MSM stardom, are the two perfect showcases for the cast of mountebanks and snake-oil peddlars infesting the groves of academe and think-tanks that foster American self-doubt and Pavlovian international disdain for the US.

However, in a crunch, there are countries and entire regions whose peoples see through the rubbish peddled by political opinion-makers at home and abroad. Foreign Policy magazine has an article noting that Afghanistan, for instance, loves the US. And if the French do not, exactly who needs the approbation of a country whose students' greatest ambition is to become a "petite fonctionnaire" in the country's vast bureaucratic labyrinths?

The US MSM tries to cripple Bush with "death by a thousand cuts" and there may be a future where whoever is US President will face crippling investigations and drawn-out affairs over absolutely nugatory petty crimes or oversights.

The lawyers are taking over the US, and anyone in business knows that the best way to avoid a successful closing of a deal is to allow lawyers in the negotiations beforehand. Their quibbles and nitpicking will predictably smudge up the works and raise scarecrows at every opportunity. Vision and a mission are needed to make a successful merger and a successful policy.

It just may well be that the US is becoming what De Gaulle long ago called France: "ungovernable." If the people whose vision and mission REALLY built America, [not the serial risible claims of certain egregious minorities], the white European REAL IMMIGRANTS can summon up some sense of their own self-worth and translate it into political power, the situation so ably outlined by Shelby Steele might be overcome.