We Are No Longer the Good Guys

From D-Day victors and Cold War sentinels to traitors and shakedown toughs, Americans fail themselves and the world.

c/o Atypical 60

America’s two-and-a-half-century image as a beacon of democracy and freedom has ended. We now join the ranks of the world’s thugocracies. We have shed the mantle of liberty and hope, the vaunted Land of Opportunity, to take on the stench of cynicism and hypocrisy, a gated community favoring the larcenous and racist. While those of us who retain our wits fervently hope that we Americans are going through a phase, like McCarthyism, that will soon burn itself out, the distinct possibility exists that we have reached the end stage of the American Experiment that our Founding Fathers strove so hard to create.

Four of my uncles fought in World War II; one stormed across France and Germany. Uncle “Junior’s” proudest achievement he told me shortly before his death was not killing the enemy, but being put in charge of a German village where he commandeered U.S. Army provisions and medications to feed and care for its destitute population. He blushed when he told me he became so popular that German parents lined up at his office to introduce him to their daughters, hoping to secure their future in America. My great Uncle Augie’s life was spared at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 only because he decided to attend onshore church services that morning.

On the other side of history’s ledger, a cousin captured in North Africa and interned at an Axis POW camp near our home, promptly immigrated here after the war and became a proud American citizen. As an exchange student in Austria, some of my most memorable encounters were with Wehrmacht veterans who also were interned at U.S. POW camps. To a man they said it was the best time of their lives and were astonished at how well they were treated by both their captors and ordinary Americans. The father of a close friend of ours was a U-boot seaman who spent years in Soviet captivity, among the one out of three who survived; he hightailed it to the U.S. as well to raise his family and live a productive life as an American.

My first Foreign Service assignment was at our consulate in Melbourne, Australia a few years following the fall of Saigon. I was deeply moved when folks of my parents’ generation, after finding out I was an American diplomat, expressed their profuse thanks for “saving us from the Japs” — decades after the war ended. Their children — my contemporaries — on the other hand, often hurled abuse at me and my colleagues, bitter as they were over Vietnam. When I returned for a visit years later, Americans were again warmly welcomed, past grievances forgotten.

I felt most welcome as an American, believe it or not, when serving in communist countries. While Cuban secret police harassed us, even slashing the tires of my car, average Cubans treated us almost as rock stars. Many had relatives in the U.S. The mother of a young man who was severely injured in his failed attempt to flee the island, and on whose welfare I was checking, wrapped me in a warm embrace and thanked America for simply paying attention to her boy. In the central market of the ancient royal capital of Luang Prabang at a time when Lao citizens were fleeing their closed-off Stalinist-ruled nation by the tens of thousands, at first I was scorned as a “Soviet.” When I produced my American passport, the mood changed instantly to admiration. Merchants and shoppers shook my hand, told me they tuned into Voice of America every evening and then toasted me and America with glasses of potent moonshine — at ten in the morning.

I can appreciate that this sounds schmaltzy or apocryphal, but it’s the absolute truth. I can relate other instances of ordinary Chinese confiding in me their contempt for their government and admiration of the U.S., Poles asking how they could “defect” to America, a North Korean whom we protected for a time in our Hanoi embassy, Vietnamese dissidents steeped in American literature and history and on and on.

Now, each day the headlines blare a new moral outrage, from abandoning our allies, to betraying beleaguered Ukraine and extorting its leader, to assaulting federal agencies with a wrecking ball, to blatant official corruption, to racist policies, to that most unforgivable crime of treason by our deranged commander in chief, who also makes repeated threats to attack Greenland, seize the Panama Canal and annex Canada. Today, a headline reads, “Trump to Revoke Legal Status for 240,000 Ukrainians as US Steps Up Deportations.” A new low is reached almost daily.

The Vichy Republicans enable all of this, more glaring proof of our moral collapse. Ike and Dutch Reagan are weeping in heaven. As we witnessed at Trump’s State of the Union harangue, the GOP congressional castrati displayed all the hollow fervor of brainwashed marionettes at a North Korean Supreme People’s Assembly rally for their “Supreme Leader.”

So, how did we go from “We shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty” to “You’re either going to make a deal or we’re out. And if we’re out, you’ll fight it out and I don’t think it’s going to be pretty”?

In my recent essays, “The Moral Collapse of the American People” and “A Coup for the Ages,” I place the blame squarely on my fellow Americans, who no longer take seriously what democracy is all about, preferring instead the bread and circuses of a con artist poseur and felon over serious policy and moral rectitude. Of course, we’ve allowed systemic flaws to fester, but the buck stops at the voting booth.

For those of a certain age, journalist Alistair Cooke was the kind avuncular figure who explained America to the world, but also to ourselves. His “Letter from America,” a quarter-hour oral essay broadcast weekly by the BBC from 1946 until shortly before his death at 95 in 2004, was embraced by millions. He immigrated to the United States from the U.K. in 1937, and became a U.S. citizen six days before the attack on Pearl Harbor. In the following decades, he acted as a bridge between the two countries, explaining each to the other’s people. A favorite quote of mine: “I am afraid there are still many Englishmen who think of an American as an Englishman somehow gone wrong.”

He had countless spot-on observations about America and Americans. But there are a couple that have particularly stuck in my mind: “America is a country in which I see the most persistent idealism and the blandest of cynicism, and the race is on between its vitality and its decadence,” and “Liberty is the luxury of self-discipline, that those nations historically who have failed to discipline themselves have had discipline imposed by others. Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder.”

Whereas we traditionally gave others, including our erstwhile enemies-in-arms, opportunities to forge a new life here, we now live increasingly under a rough discipline which has us evicting those whose compatriots are struggling against tyranny for national survival. For over eight decades, America fought dictators. Now it embraces them. Our Founding Fathers gave us the rule of law. Increasingly, we risk succumbing to the rule of the jungle.

The struggle is on between our idealism and cynicism, our vitality and decadence. We teeter on a precipice that very well could lead to our tumbling into fascism. If that happens, no one will be toasting Americans except our smirking conquerors.