Mr. Bigword Strikes Again: American Exceptionalism Explained

Well, so much for Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. I know that I, for one, will sleep much more soundly at night knowing that our country is being defended in part by persons better suited to decorating interiors or styling hair or running Websites featuring catty gossip about movie and other stars, persons likely to undermine morale in their foxholes and Humvees and what have you by whining about having been denied the chance to moisturize thoroughly that morning, or pouting if someone wants to listen to Slayer or Slipknot rather than Lady Gaga. So much for our remaining a beacon of moral clarity in this regard, as we now join non-exceptional countries in allowing deviates into our military. Another blow to American exceptionalism!

It’s a tricky thing, American exceptionalism. On the one hand, our believing we shouldn’t have to play by the same rules as everyone else — that we are God’s favorite nation — irks many others; as George W. Bush pointed out, for instance, Islamic extremists hate us for our God-given freedom. On the other hand, we give other countries a standard to which to aspire, and you can’t convince me that isn’t valuable. The liberals and so-called progressives will tell you that our sense of what they dismissively term “entitlement” embitters other countries, in much the same way the beauty and grace of the hottest girl in high school will embitter not only other, less hot, girls, but also stammering, pustule-covered boys who would no more be able to speak to her than to the late Eleanor Roosevelt, even while their hormones are screaming at them to get busy. To those liberals and so-called progressives, I say, “Whatever.” If God didn’t love us most, he wouldn’t have made us the richest and purest of heart and best-looking!

I suspect that having been the pre-eminent hotty at Wasilla High School uniquely qualifies Gov. Sarah Palin to protect American exceptionalism. Last Friday, as you know, she submitted to an interview with Good Morning America’s Robin Roberts, even though the lack of a comma in the program’s title is known to bother Sarah, who’s something of a stickler for faultless grammar and lucid syntax. A lot of liberals and so-called progressives are whining about Roberts having handled Sarah with kid gloves; indeed, there are those who have wondered, with the utmost crassness, if Roberts having crawled up Sarah’s rectum over the course of the interview is going to cause the presumptive candidate eliminative problems at a time when American can least afford her suffering them. A contributor to Salon.com went so far as to assert that Sarah responded to Roberts’ hard-hitting questions with “free-associative demagoguery in a singsongy tone.” Mr. Bigword strikes again; how the liberals and so-called progressives must love that. To them, I say, “Get a life!”

Driving home from the gymnasium yesterday afternoon on the Hamilton Fish Bridge, I passed a big SUV with Palin in 2012 and I Love Jesus bumper stickers, and all of the early afternoon’s despair melted away like lemon drops; it felt like the Christmas season finally beginning in earnest. I smiled at the driver, a burly, ursine caribou hunter type in a bushy beard and baseball cap, but he was apparently entranced with whatever the Christian rock station was playing at that moment (my own car radio is tuned to the Christian hip hop station), and it occurred to me that if I didn’t turn back to the road ahead, Sarah might be denied my vote in 2012.

I feel strongly that she’s going to win in a landslide with or without me, but I think it’s human nature to imagine oneself key to the success of persons or ventures to which he actually matters not at all. As a boy in a Los Angeles beach community, I fretted that if I didn’t listen attentively to their game on the radio, the Dodgers would lose. This may sound foolish or even delusional, but when I became a substance-abusing college student whose infinitely greater interest was in rock and roll, the team went into a frightful decline. For the sake of the country I love, I must not and cannot make the same mistake with Sarah.