Jim Wright explains why there’s nothing exceptional about American Exceptionalism.

This is part and parcel of The Big Lie we Americans tell ourselves. That one about our vaunted exceptionalism. Heh, heh, exceptionalism. Riiiiight. Exceptionalism isn’t even a real word, but then that’s par for the course. Tell me, America, what’s so damned exceptional about fearing the police? About living in fear of authority? What’s exceptional about armed troops in the streets? About armored vehicles and automatic weapons on the corners, in the playgrounds, guarding the schools and the store and the police stations? About blockades and showing your papers? What’s exceptional about being shot down without trial or due process? What exactly is exceptional about dead kids in the street? What’s exceptional about tear gas and rubber bullets - or lead ones for that matter? But then what’s so exceptional about an armed population? About citizens who solve their differences with pistols and assault weapons? What’s exceptional about racism and inequality and disparity and naked hate? What’s exceptional about crime and riot? What’s exceptional about the arrest and detainment of journalists and reporters? What’s exceptional about political division that verges on civil war? These things are all too common around the world.

Come now, tell me, America.

Compare the images from Ferguson, Missouri to Gaza, to Moscow, to Tiananmen Square, to Brazil, to any of a hundred supposedly inferior Third World places we see on our TVs every single day and tell me again about our great American exceptionalism.

If you want to be exceptional, America, then you have to be the exception. Q.E.D.

The events of Ferguson, Missouri over the last week are the norm in America.

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