Superpatriotism (Michael Parenti)

Superpatriotism
Author	Michael Parenti
Publisher	City Lights Publishers
First published	2004-09
Type	Book

Superpatriotism is a book by political scientist Michael Parenti discussing Statesian nationalism and chauvinism, published in 2004.

Acknowledgements

Amanda Bellerby, Juliana Baker, Violetta Ettare, and Marisa Tregrossi rendered valuable assistance during the course of writing this book. Jenny Tayloe also gave much appreciated support. My thanks also to Nancy J. Peters and other staff members of City Lights Books for their efforts.

Dedicated to Robert E. Lane and Helen Lane

What Does it Mean to Love Our Country?

AS A GUEST ON RADIO TALK SHOWS, I HAVE criticised aspects of US foreign policy. On one such occasion, an irate listener called to ask me, "Don't you love your country?" Here was someone who saw fit to question my patriotism because I opposed certain policies put forth by US leaders. The caller was manifesting symptoms of what I call superpatriotism, the readiness to follow national leaders unquestioningly in their dealings with other countries, especially in confrontations involving military force.

Many people in various countries consider themselves patriotic in that they share common loyalties and national ideals. Generally, in uneventful times, they do not make all that much of such attachments. But during periods of special urgency or national crisis, their leaders take every opportunity to transform their perfunctory patriotism into superpatriotism.

In this country superpatriotism rests on the dubious assumption that the United States is endowed with superior virtue and has a unique history and special place in the world. For the American superpatriot, nationalistic pride, or "Americanism," is placed above every other public consideration. Whether or not superpatriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels, as Dr. Johnson might say, it is a highly emotive force used by political leaders and ordinary citizens to muffle discourse. I think that was what the caller was doing (whether he intended to or not) when asking me if I loved my country. In any case, I would answer his question with another one: What exactly does it mean to love one's country?

Do we love every street and lane, every hill and dale in America? There are so many sights and sites within the USA to which one might grow attached. Yet most of us have had direct exposure to relatively few parts of this nation's vast territory since we lack the time and money to make that meandering trip across its great continental expanse. And what of all the natural beauty in other countries throughout the world? Would I be less a patriot if I am forced to conclude that there are parts of Ireland and New Zealand that are even more beautiful than the lovely sights of our Pacific Northwest region? Would I be wanting in patriotism if I felt Paris to be more captivating than San Francisco? Or the Piazza Navona in Rome more endearing than the Rockefeller Center in New York?

Perhaps love of country means loving the American people. But even the most gregarious among us know only a tiny portion of the US populace, that vast aggregate of diverse ethnic, religious, and class groups. In any case, any number of superpatriots feel no love at all for certain of their compatriots whose lifestyles, beliefs, ethnicity, or lowly economic status they find repugnant.

It might be that we can love whole peoples in the abstract, feeling a common attachment because we are all Americans. But what actually is so particularly lovable about Americans, even in the abstract? Although many Americans are fine and likable, some are not admirable at all. Among the compatriots who fail to win my affection are ruthless profiteers, corporate swindlers, corrupt and self-serving leaders, bigots, sexists, violent criminals, and rabidly militaristic superpatriots.

Maybe our superpatriots love this country for its history. One would doubt it, since so much of US history is evidently unknown to them: the struggle for free speech that has continued from early colonial times down to this day; the fierce fights for collective bargaining and decent work conditions; the long campaigns to extend the franchise to all citizens including propertyless workers and women; the struggles to abolish slavery, end racial segregation, and extend civil rights, to establish free public education, public health services, environmental and consumer protections, and occupational safety, and to impose a progressive income tax and end wars of aggression, and other such issues of peace and social justice.

Here certainly is a history that can make one feel proud of one's country and love the valiant people who battled for political and economic democracy. But many superpatriots are wretchedly ignorant of this history, especially since so little of it is taught in the schools. How unfortunate, for it would add more substance to their love of country.

Also largely untaught is the darker side of our history. What is there to love about the extermination of Native American Indian nations, a bloodletting that extended over four centuries along with the grabbing of millions of acres of their lands? There is nothing lovable about the systemic kidnapping and enslaving of millions of Africans; the many lynchings and murders of the segregationist era; the latter-day assassinations of Black Panther Party members and other political dissidents; the stealing of half of Mexico (today's Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California, and a portion of Colorado); the grabbing of Hawaii, Guam, Puerto Rico, and Cuba; the blood-drenched conquest of the Philippines; and the military interventions and wars of aggression against scores of other countries.

Should we love our country for its culture? We Americans can boast of no Shakespeare, Goethe, Cervantes, or Dante, but we still can be proud of our playwrights and poets, our art and opera, our music and dance, our museums and symphony orchestras, our libraries and universities. Yet as far as I can tell, the superpatriots evince relatively little interest in these things. If anything, arts and education are being subjected to merciless budget cuts by those superpatriotic policymakers who prefer to pour our treasure into a gargantuan military budget. They would starve Athens for an ever stronger Sparta.

While we might embrace the good things in our culture, some other aspects are hard to celebrate: the mind abuse of most television and cinematic offerings; the omnipresent, soul-numbing commercialism; the urban and suburban blight and crime-ridden, drug-infested neighbourhoods; the proliferation of homeless beggars and shanty encampments; the toxic dumps, strip-mined wastelands, denuded forests, highway vehicular carnage, and widespread contamination of our rivers, bays, and groundwater; the astronomical homicide rates, hate crimes, and child abuse; the widespread emotional depression and spousal abuse; the enormous and still growing gap between the obscenely rich and desperately poor; the overweening rapacity of the giant corporations; the money-driven corruption of much of our public life, and other such dispiriting things.

Some superpatriots claim that they love America because of the freedom it gives us. Yet most of them seem to love freedom only in the abstract, for they cannot stand the dissidence and protests that are the actual practice of a free people. They have trouble tolerating criticisms directed against certain US policies and institutions. If anything, superpatriots show themselves ever ready to support greater political conformity and more repressive measures against heterodoxy.

We might question the quality of the freedom we are said to enjoy, for in truth we are not as free as we often suppose. To be out of step in one's political opinions is often to put one's career in jeopardy—even in a profession like teaching, which professes a dedication to academic freedom. The journalists who work for big media conglomerates and who claim to be untrammelled in their reportage overlook the fact that they are free to say what they like because their bosses like what they say. They rarely, if ever, stray beyond the respectable parametres of the dominant paradigm, and when they do so, it is at their own risk.

The major media in the United States are owned by giant corporations and influenced by rich corporate advertisers who seldom question the doing of the free-market profit system at home and abroad. The assumptions behind US foreign policy go largely unexamined in news analysis and commentary. Those who have critical views regarding corporate power and US global interventionism rarely get an opportunity to reach a mass audience.

Many of our superpatriots love this country because it is considered a land of opportunity, a place where people can succeed if they have the right stuff. But individual success usually comes by prevailing over others. And when it comes to the really big prizes in a competitive, money-driven society, almost all of us are losers or simply noncontestants. Room at the top is limited to a select few, mostly those who have been supremely advantaged in family income and social standing from early in life. Even if the US economy does reward the go-getters who sally forth with exceptional capacity and energy, is the quality of life to be measured by the ability of tireless careerists to excel over others? Even if it were easy to become a multimillionaire in America, what is so great about that? Why should one's ability to make large sums of money be reason to love one's country? What is so admirable about a patriotism based on the cash nexus? In any case, some Americans have trouble feeling patriotic about the rat race. They do not wish to spend their lives trying to get rich, trying to advantage themselves at the expense of others. They seek to do work that enhances the quality of life for the entire society. If then they are rewarded for their contributions, so much the better, but that is not their prime concern, nor do they feel that the rewards should be so astronomical and nontaxable.

Of course, economic opportunity is not exclusively about getting rich. In America, it is said, millions enjoy the opportunity to "get ahead," to live in comfort and prosperity, short of reaching a stratospheric income. But millions who have worked hard all their lives do not achieve a comfortable life. Upward mobility in the United States is no greater than in other industrial nations. Almost all Americans remain at the same economic level to which they were born. If anything, with the free-market rollback of recent decades, there has been much slippage. It is no longer to be taken for granted that Americans will live better than did their parents. In fact, most are not living as well. Life has become increasingly more stressful and difficult as growing numbers find themselves working harder and harder to stay afloat, with fewer benefits, insufficient income, more stress, and less job security.

Contrary to a popular myth, the USA has the smallest—not the largest—middle-income stratum of the industrial world. Average incomes are rising modestly but only because of more intensive workloads. (In the much-vaunted economic recovery of 2003-2004, investments, sales, and profits climbed, but wages remained flat.) US workers face one of the longest work years in the world. They average only about ten days a year paid vacation, compared to Western European workers who usually get thirty days. Even some Latin American countries mandate one month paid vacation.

America has not been a land of opportunity or economic betterment for the Native American Indians (except for a few casino owners) who have had their lands stolen and their populations sadly reduced by death and disease; nor for the industrial workers who still face life-threatening occupational hazards, or who see their jobs being exported to Third World sweatshops; nor for the farm labourers who currently put in long hours at stoop labour for subsistence wages; nor the millions of others who work at joyless dead-end occupations for poverty-level pay, or who manage to attain a higher education only to face a lack of employment opportunities while mired in hopeless debt from student loans.

In sum, it seems that the America our superpatriots claim to love is neither a geographical or demographic totality, nor a cultural heritage as such, nor really a land of such unlimited freedom and economic opportunity and prosperity. The superpatriot's America is a simplified ideological abstraction, an emotive symbol represented by other abstract symbols like the flag. It is the object of a faithlike devotion, unencumbered by honest history. For the superpatriot, those who do not share in this uncritical Americanism ought to go live in some other country.

America—Love It or Leave It

DURING THE LATE 1960S, GROWING NUMBERS of Americans took it to the streets to protest the war in Indochina with its savagely intensive US bombings of civilian populations in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. In response, supporters of the war were quick to attack the demonstrators, both verbally and sometimes even physically. Steeped in the belief that any war fought by the United States must ipso facto be a noble undertaking irrespective of the human costs, the superpatriots could only conclude that the antiwar protesters were little better than traitors who gave aid and comfort to the enemy. In this instance, our "enemies" were often impoverished Indo-chinese peasants fighting to liberate their countries from foreign control.

It was not long before the superpatriotic slogan "America—Love It or Leave It" began appearing on signs and bumper stickers, making its way into the pronouncements of hawkish politicians.

Opponents of the Vietnam War performed many worthy deeds. By galvanising great numbers of protesters they overthrew the sacrosanct notion that one could not oppose war while the country was actually at war. They contested the widely accepted idea that the United States played a primarily virtuous role in the world. They exposed the selfish material interests behind US overseas interventionism. And many of them began to question the whole elitist political system that produced such policies.

The antiwar movement also publicised the terrible aspects of the Indochina conflict: the villages destroyed and innocent people massacred; the children burnt with napalm; the groves, orchards, farms, jungles, wildlife, and peasants themselves poisoned with Agent Orange and other defoliants—information that was largely suppressed by news media and government officials through most of the war. Peace protesters encouraged tax resistance and civil disobedience. They blocked draft boards and induction centres, challenged military recruiters on college campuses, trashed recruitment booths, marched and even rioted in the streets, and generally acted as an insurgent restraint on the war leaders.

The movement reached into the US military itself, creating a climate of dissent that affected the performance of soldiers in Vietnam. During the latter years of the war, infantry squads and platoons sometimes refused to advance deeply into the jungle to make contact with the enemy, some 700 US servicemen deserted, and a few outright mutinies occurred, including at least one of company size. Officers were occasionally the targets of fragmentation grenades from their own men. At home, the peace movement assisted conscientious objectors and other draft resisters, and helped create a climate of opinion against the war.

The dissenters also demonstrated to the world and to the United States itself that there was another America, one that did not mindlessly fall into obedient lockstep once the flags were unfurled and the martial music sounded. So while some people cried, "America—love it or leave it," the protesters now responded, "America—change it or lose it."

'America—love it or leave it" is a variation of an older saying that enjoyed currency for more than a century: "My country—right or wrong," a bald proclamation to support the United States government in its conflicts with other governments regardless of the moral issues involved. It is hard to say which posture is more insufferable: the "right-or-wrong" mentality that supports any US action including ones that are arguably wrong, or the "love-it-or-leave-it" mindset that refuses to see anything wrong.

Having witnessed what is done in the name of Americanism, some protesters during the Vietnam era attacked the patriotic symbols of our country. Some burnt American flags, thereby convincing more conventional Americans that they were either maniacs or traitors. The war resisters mistakenly put the blame on an entity called America, sometimes writing it as "Amerika," intended to give the word a more Germanic Nazi-like tone, or "Amerikkka" with three k's, the initials of the Ku Klux Klan, treating the word itself as a kind of curse. Thus, the protesters mistakenly made America the issue, blaming the nation itself for what was being perpetrated in its name by US leaders.

In so doing, they played directly into the hands of leaders who opportunistically sought to treat their own war policy as a manifestation a true Americanism. America was transformed into an entity that had a living moral existence of its own—supremely virtuous for the flag-wavers, and primarily evil for the flag burners.

"America" was made an issue in another way at about that same time. Many Latin Americans and some Canadians, along with some US peace advocates themselves, were—and still are—opposed to applying the terms "America" and "Americans" to the United States and its citizens. They argue that "America" refers to the entire Western Hemisphere and is not to be appropriated by one particular country in the Americas. In fact, people in other Western Hemispheric countries call themselves Brazilians, Chileans, Hondurans, Mexicans, Canadians, and so on. They do not identify themselves nationally as Americans. They just do not want US citizens to do so.

One might wonder why the appellation "America" should be coveted by anyone anyone at all. It derives from explorer Amerigo Vespucci, who happened to be a despicable slaver and plunderer, every bit as ruthless as Columbus. (In this book I apply the terms "America" and "American" to the United States and its citizens because that is the unavoidable nationalistic idiom I am addressing.)

To this day, US political leaders continue to wrap themselves in the flag, branding all opposition to their policies as attacks against the nation itself. In the 1992 electoral campaign, the older Bush responded to Bill Clinton's criticisms of the economic recession as follows: "My opponent says America is a nation in decline.... Well, don't let anyone tell you that America is second-rate, especially someone running for president." Thus, he misrepresented criticisms of his administration's faltering economic policies as an attack on America itself.

This reminds us that America would have been made the issue by the superpatriots even if no flags had been burnt, and even if nobody had thought to spell it "Amerikkka." "America—love it or leave it" is too inviting a slogan for those who have no desire to subject existing policies to rational scrutiny. By crying "love it or leave it," they can claim a monopoly on patriotism, and denigrate the dissenters for not loving their country.

This continues to be the case. Opponents of US foreign policy are still accused of blaming or hating America. Once again, the protesters are made the issue instead of the policies they are protesting.

In response, we must repeatedly point out that those who criticise the particular policies, leaders, or social conditions of their country do not thereby manifest a deficient loyalty. If the test of patriotism comes only by reflexively falling into lockstep behind the leader whenever the flag is waved, then what we have is a formula for dictatorship, not democracy.

We critics of US policy are not directing our protests against that entity known as America but against particular US leaders who, we feel, do not represent the interests of the American people or any other people, but who advance the goals of a privileged coterie. We are not being anti-American when we criticise the president's policies, no more than we are being "anti-Middletown" and lacking in community spirit if we oppose the policies pursued by the mayor of Middletown, or whatever community. Quite the contrary, our opposition arises out of concern for what is being done to—and in the name of—our country or community.

By the same token we are not being anti-Semitic if we criticise the Israeli government for the incursions and settlements in the occupied territories and for mistreatment of Palestinians. Some of the most outspoken critics of Israeli policy are themselves Israelis in Israel or Jewish-Americans in the United States who—contrary to the facile psychologists charge made against them—are not "self-hating Jews." In fact, most happen to be rightly proud of their Jewish heritage. Likewise, we are not showing hatred for Mexico, Italy, Poland, China, or any nation, nationality, or ethnic group if we denounce the particular policies of the Mexican, Italian, Polish, or Chinese governments.

The expression "love it or leave it" means love America as it is. Its national institutions and foreign policy are to be treated as above criticism. Those who see some serious problems in US society are deemed unappreciative of the American Way of Life. But the American way is to criticise and debate openly, not to accept unthinkingly the doings of government officials of this or any other country.

The superpatriots tell us that in many countries people do not have the right to criticise their governments. Presumably, we should show gratitude for our freedom to dissent by refraining from dissenting; and if we speak freely and critically, we are proving ourselves ungrateful and therefore unworthy of the right to speak. It seems we "abuse" our rights by simply using them. To repeat, the only thing to match the superpatriots' celebration of our freedom in the abstract is their intolerance toward anyone who actually puts that freedom into practice.

Some superpatriots think that we must not criticise the wonderful country that has given us so much. In fact, we were not given anything, certainly not by those who have ruled over our society. The American people, including all the immigrant groups and minorities, have had to fight long and hard for whatever rights they now enjoy. As the son of a poor Italian-American working-class family, I was able to go to school in the first half of the last century only because generations of people before me struggled against the privileged plutocracy for the right of free public education.

So with every other good thing we have been "given." Why should we feel indebted to the ruling moneyed interests for "giving" us the good life, when in fact they furiously resisted every democratic and egalitarian gain that the American people have won over two centuries of struggle, every advance in labour relations, popular electoral participation, public education, environmental and consumer protections, retirement benefits, human services, and other worthwhile measures. Like the good reactionaries they are, the plutocrats continue to oppose most of these things. And in recent decades they have enjoyed increasing success in bringing us back to the old days of Big Money and small democracy.

Getting back to the "love it or leave it" issue, many Americans would be surprised to learn that every year there are substantial numbers of people who permanently leave the United States. Public focus has always been on the waves of immigration to our shores, with little attention given to the outgoing tide. Emigration is a phenomenon that is rarely publicly recognised or even officially recorded—almost as if it were an embarrassment or, worse, a downright un-American phenomenon unworthy of attention.

Despite the deficiencies in data, enough reliable information is available to determine that during much of the twentieth century the United States gained some 30 million newcomers from abroad and lost about 10 million to emigration. Currently more than 150,000 people depart every year. About two-thirds of them are former immigrants who chose to go home or to another country. The remainder are US citizens. Some 300,000 US citizens permanently left the United States in the 1960s, a relatively prosperous decade. And this does not count the others who might have wished to depart but who lacked the wherewithal to do so.

About a third of the US citizens who emigrate each year settle in Canada or Mexico. The next most popular destinations are the United Kingdom and Germany, with Belgium, the Netherlands, Sweden, Norway, and Hong Kong receiving large flows in proportion to their size. Considerable numbers also take up permanent residence in Japan and Australia. Americans emigrate usually for the same reasons that cause people of other nations to leave their homelands: better job opportunities abroad, unhappiness with the quality of life at home, a wish to escape troubled circumstances, attraction to the culture and lifestyle of some other country, a desire to unite with family, and marriage to a foreign national.

In sum, every year tens of thousands of US citizens reveal that they are not swept up in any mystique about the unsurpassable greatness of life in America. Since they don't love it, they leave it. Or they may love it but, for whatever reason, they find some other place more promising. Such data contradict the chauvinistic notion that everyone wants to move to America but no one wants to leave.

"The Importance of Being "Number One"

SUPERPATRIOTS PROUDLY PROCLAIM THAT the United States is "Number One." US presidents are especially afflicted by this numero uno syndrome. In the late 1960s President Richard Nixon said: "America is still Number One" (the "still" bespeaking an anxiety about some possible slippage). In the 1988 election campaign, Democratic presidential candidate Michael Dukakis asserted that "we have to make America Number One again." Throughout the 1980s President Ronald Reagan averred that America was both "Number One" and "standing tall—unlike those other nations that slouch or are rather short. In the 1992 campaign, Republican presidential incumbent George Bush reassured us that America is "Number One" and not "second rate." And years later his son, President George W. Bush, declared that "America is the greatest country in the world," which is just another way of saying we are Number One.

None of these leaders ever explain what is so important about being Number One or the greatest, nor what actually is entailed in occupying the top slot. What specific traits qualify us for that position? What exactly are we Number One in? Is it population? No, certainly China walks away with all the awards in that category, followed by India. Geographic size? Russia and Canada have more real estate than does the USA.

Are we Number One in cultural heritage? That might depend on how we define "culture." Taken in the usual sense of arts, crafts, architecture, music, law, mythology, philosophy, literature, and learning, the age-old civilisations of India, Egypt, Iran, Syria, China, Korea, Japan, Greece, Italy, Mexico, Peru, and others too numerous to mention can each lay claim to a cultural heritage that is vastly older and richer than what has developed in North America since the seventeenth-century European settlements. In fact, the European settlers systematically destroyed the resourceful and equitable age-old cultures of the indigenous North American people.

Africa comes down to us as a forbidding "dark continent" of barbarism, but it too is the home of an ancient cultural heritage, rich in art, architecture, music, literature, and mythology. African art has been a source of inspiration and even the object of blatant plagiarism for many famous Western sculptors and painters.

Regarding cultural heritage, consider Iraq. That beleaguered country, attacked and occupied by US forces, is regularly depicted in the US press as in need of our guidance and uplift; we will teach the Iraqis how to govern and care for themselves. Perhaps we should recall that the Iraqis invented writing, founded the first school of astronomy, and developed modern mathematics, using a kind of Pythagorean theorem 1,700 years before Pythagoras. Beginning around A.D. 800, they founded universities that imported teachers from throughout the civilised world to teach medicine, mathematics, philosophy, theology, literature, and poetry (at a time when Christian Europe had long suppressed serious study of such subjects). For thousands of years, the Iraqis wrote some of the greatest poetry, history, and sagas in the world, and fashioned some of the most imposing stone, metal, and clay artworks. With the Code of Hammurabi, they brought forth the first legal system that protected the weak, the widowed, and the orphaned. Twelve thousand years ago, they invented irrigated farming, and became so proficient at it that in the 1990s, despite sanctions imposed by the West, they still managed to produce all the food they needed.

And in the present century, though depicted in the US press as tribal and backward and in need of our enlightened guidance, the Iraqis continued to be a highly capable and well-trained people with noted achievements in science, engineering, literature, and the arts—not to mention their resourcefulness in waging an armed resistance against powerful US occupation forces.

Culture aside, is America Number One in finance? The major banks in the world are now Japanese, I am told. And some American top financiers are too busy plundering pension funds and small investors to set any admirable world standards in banking.

We used to be Number One in steel production and other heavy industries. But our superpatriotic corporate leaders have taken to exporting US industries to cheaper overseas labour markets so they can rake in higher profits.

Is the United States tops in trade? We Americans are supposed to be the world's best salesmen, but in fact most of the world seems to be outselling us, as is evident from the immense trade deficits that the USA runs up annually. Anyone who has brought durable-use consumer goods in recent years cannot help noticing how many of them seem to be made in the sweatshops of China, Indonesia, Taiwan, or some other Third World nation.

Perhaps this country is Number One in cuisine? Certainly the USA has produced some fine cooking schools and chefs, along with a variety of natural food delights and other gastronomic innovations. But then one thinks of China, France, India, Italy, Greece, Ethiopia, Japan, and any number of other nations whose national cuisines are cause for salivating. In sheer market penetration, however, the United States, with its McDonald's and other fast-food chains burgeoning overseas, is unsurpassed in corrupting the tastebuds of millions of people around the world. But that really is nothing to be proud of. And when the superpatriots talk about being Number One, I think they have something more momentous in mind than nouvelle cuisine or greasy, salty, chemical-ridden, genetically engineered hamburgers.

What then is the United States Number One in? As best I can tell, it comes down to two things: wealth and military might. Let us consider these in turn. Wealth does not reside in a society as an undifferentiated aggregate. It is possessed by particular individuals and their corporate organisations and financial institutions. In the United States the vast majority of us are not rich. A tiny fraction of one percent own a lion's share of the wealth. There is a modestly sized middle class that manages to do well enough but knows no certain economic security. Then, there is a large lower-middle to low-income population, some 80 percent of our population, who live with chronic money concerns and little or no net financial assets. And below them, are millions of extremely poor who endure severe deprivation at the very bottom of the pile.

As noted in chapter one, there are Western European social democracies that have a more equitable standard of living and superior benefits and public services than are found in the United States. In that sense, they are, if not richer than we, certainly freer from poverty and want. To celebrate our national wealth, then, one might first consider how it is distributed and used. To talk about our wealth is like talking about our oil in Texas or the Middle East. We the people do not own US oil reserves at home and abroad. The world's oil supply is controlled by a few giant cartels, owned by a relatively small number of obscenely rich individuals. As with oil, so with our wealth in general: a select coterie at the very top of the economic ladder control more of it than all the rest of us combined. We just produce it with our hard work. They pocket it.

Wealth aside, consider the other thing that the United States is Number One in: military might. We need to question why being Number One in kill capacity is such a great accomplishment. In 1992, the first President Bush said, "We must be a military superpower." The celebration of military prowess as a sign of national greatness is predicated on the questionable assumption that such power is for laudatory purposes only.

President Reagan once exclaimed, "We love America because America is the greatest." This view implies that if America were not so great (read strong), we would not find it so lovable. Our love seems predicated on the country's being bigger and more powerful than other nations. What then of peoples who inhabit these lesser lands that cannot claim such "greatness"? For instance, can citizens of Luxembourg love their country? Luxembourg can never aspire to be Number One. In fact, it must be about Number 138, not that far ahead of Liechtenstein in the greatness of its military might. Do people from Luxembourg walk about shamefaced because they rank so low? Do they try to pass themselves off as French or German? When asked if they love their country, do they mumble: "What is there to love? A few border police, no navy, no real air force."

While political leaders boast about US military strength, they say nothing about its costs: the distorted technology, material waste, ecological devastation, enormous debt and high taxes, and the neglect of social needs and infrastructure—not to mention the terrible consequences that other countries must endure when finding themselves on the receiving end of this superpower's military might.

The United States is Number One in certain other things that are rarely if ever mentioned by our leaders. Compared to other industrial nations, we are Number One in homicides and death by firearms. The US murder rate among young males is twenty times higher than in Western European and forty times that of Japan. We are Number One in per capita prison population and in financial bailouts, trade imbalances, and budget deficits.

This wealthiest of all nations has a public debt that is the largest in the world. We also have schools that are falling apart, public hospitals that are closing down, and all sorts of essential public services that are being cut back for lack of funds. So alongside the highly concentrated private wealth there exists a growing public poverty. We are tops among the Western industrial nations and the number of people lacking medical insurance. The USA is also Number One in family farms that are going broke, genetically modified foods, the factory-farm use of pesticides and herbicides, and the amounts of antibiotics and hormones injected into livestock.

The United States is Number One in managers per employees. A country like Japan, supposedly encumbered with traditional hierarchy, has less than one-third the number of managers per employees. In other words, while the leaders of US industry complain about bloated government bureaucracies, they themselves populate top-heavy bloated corporate bureaucracies.

The USA is also Number One among industrial nations in income inequality and executive salaries. The number of multimillionaires has increased by over 80 percent in the last two decades. We also have the largest number of newly minted billionaires. Average remuneration for chief executive officers (CEOs) of corporations is anywhere from two to six times higher than CEOs abroad. A Fortune magazine survey of a hundred of the nation's largest corporations found that the typical CEO enjoyed a 14 percent rise in income in 2002, bringing his or her total yearly pay to an average of more than $13 million, irrespective of whatever scandals or slumps the company underwent. Meanwhile, stock options for these top tycoons continued to expand, in some instances to astronomical levels. Thus the former chairman of Tenet Healthcare, the nation's second largest hospital chain, pulled in stock options worth $111 million in 2002. At the same time, in many of these companies, employees were laid off or endured wage freezes, cutbacks in benefits, or disappearing pension funds.

In sum, before bragging in the abstract about how America is the greatest, the superpatriots ought to attend to the unsettling specifics. Number One indeed, but at what price?