Why I Hate The USA: The Early Years

I've decided to make this the default image for posts where I spend a lot of time complaining. Consider yourself warned.

Okay, let's get this out of the way. The main reason I hate America is because I am a hateful person. I am filled with hate and it has to go somewhere. I'd hate any country that I lived in and frankly, it wouldn't take much effort to come up with a fairly convincing list of grievances against any nation on the planet.

I am a US citizen. My family's been here from the start of colonization, and the odds are good I've got Native American blood. This is where I'm from. Don't assume that my hatred of the US means that I'm in favor of anything else. You may as well think I'm a duck as think I'm a Marxist.

That said, there's something... special about the US. Special in the short-bus sense of the word.

Here's the bit of news that set me off a few minutes ago. We have members of the Supreme Court speaking out in support of the execution of the innocent.

Let's be serious -- if Scalia was a tapeworm-riddled hunk of dogshit, all the other tapeworm-ridden hunks of dogshit would justifiably regard him with moral loathing. Fuck you, Scalia. The Constitution does not specifically forbid cracking a dog's skull open with a hatchet and fucking the cleft in its brain. That doesn't mean you have any grounds for defending the act.

Oh, yeah -- the Holy Sacred Glowing Constitution. There are three kinds of people who venerate the Constitution. People who are members of the privileged classes. People who identify with and support the privileged classes...

... and people who haven't read the fucking thing. If you actually sit down and read the Federalist Papers and the Constitution (the original Constitution, pre-Bill of Rights), it's pretty clear that the purpose behind the so-called Revolution (more on that real soon) was to establish a social structure similar to that of England, with the noble class deriving authority from wealth rather than heritage.

(Of course, wealth is inherited, which is how we get our USAnian dynasties.)

The type of democratic egalitarianism we are taught to think of as American (and I use the term American ironically, with full knowledge of the fact that there are other fucking nations in the fucking Americas) is in no way directly supported by the Constitution.

Rather, it is a set of principles primarily intended to keep the rich rich and to make it easy for them to get richer. The Bill of Rights definitely puts a different complexion on things, but if you look at the history, there was a lot of resistance to the very notion of those rights. The Constitution can be called on to support worthy causes but in order to bring it to bear you have to beat it like a government mule.

If you disagree with me, then give me your arguments based on the texts in question. Not on opinion or emotion or appeals to patriotism. If it ain't on the page, then fuck your outrage.

And as for the American Revolution. As I mentioned above, America is not the name of our nation. We're the United States of America. And as for Revolution, go look the fucking word up in the dictionary. A revolution changes the central government. The American Revolution was actually the US Rebellion. Which would be a great name for an aircraft carrier, don't you think?

Look, the Declaration of Independence and the Preamble to the Constitution are two of the most gloriously inspirational passages of prose the world has ever seen. But they don't really tell us anything about the actual rebellion in question. I mean, what would have happened if the rebellion hadn't occurred? Aw, look at poor Canada, Australia, New Zealand, groaning under the brutal yoke of British imperialism -- all with better health and educational options for the average citizen than the US offers. Fuck the American Revolution.

There was never more than 1/3 popular support for the war. It resulted in drastically increased taxes for the citizens. And most telling of all, within the first few years after the rebellion there were two populist revolts against the federal government, Shay's Rebellion and the Whiskey Rebellion.

King Washington put one down through use of a secret society, the Brotherhood of Cincinnatus. (Doesn't that sound like a crazed conspiracy theory? Again, look it up or shut up.)

In response to the other, he personally led an army as big as the one he fielded against the British in order to extract usurious taxes from a bunch of subsistence farmers. The fact that Washington owned a lot of land in the area that appreciated in value after he put down the Whiskey Rebellion might have had something to do with the enthusiasm of his response...

Oh, my golly gosh. This post is already running long and I haven't even gotten past Washington's administration. I'll let it go for now, but lemme say this.

It may seem as if I've got a bug up my butt about the origins of my country. Well, lemme tell you this.

That ain't nothin'. I'm really pissed about the current state of the nation.