Blame America

With the recent, awful news of the beheading of Paul Johnson, many of the "anit-war" crowd are renewing, with fervor, their "It's all America's fault" pitch. They yell and holler that if American's hadn't humiliated prisoners at Abu Ghraib, then these beheadings wouldn't happen. If you remember, it didn't take long after Sept. 11 for various left-wing intellectuals to start positing that America had brought the attacks on itself.

This "blame America" mentality seems unpatriotic to me. Sure, America has made mistakes. There are foreign policy decisions with which I disagree. However, to say that the killing 3,000 civilians is justified because of those decisions is a bit tough for me to noodle out. To think that an appropriate retaliation for forcing a man to wear underwear on his head is to saw the head of someone else seems a bit, shall we say, "over the top." I was bullied in Jr. High and I am sure that killing the people who bullied me would have been frowned upon. No one really blames the jocks who bullied Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold for the killing of the 12 students at Columbine...they blame the shooters.

However, when one questions the "blame America" crowd about their patriotism, they become defensive and wonder how a person could think such a thing. Maybe I'm just not nuanced enough to understand the difference between their relentless complaining about America from out-and-out anti-Americanism. Their defense is that "true" patriotism consists in acknowledging your own country's faults and exhorting it to improve.

Well, maybe. Certainly there's nothing unpatriotic about criticizing your government or its policies. And since love of country is a matter of the heart, it's presumptuous to question anyone's patriotism. But imagine a man who treats his wife the way the these people treat America: constantly belittling her, pointing out her faults and never showing her any kindness. He may love her, but most people would agree he has a twisted way of expressing it.