Exceptionally Exceptional in its Exceptionalism?

Exceptionalism = The theory or belief that something, especially a nation, does not conform to a pattern or norm.(Free Dictionary).

Glenn Greenwald's piece in The UK's Guardian yesterday:
The premises and purposes of American exceptionalism ~ :That the US is objectively "the greatest country ever to exist", is as irrational as it is destructive, yet it maintains the status of orthodoxy, caused a few hackles to rise among the four long pages of commentary there. I didn't do a count but suspect that, on balance, more commenters were in agreement with Mr Greenwald's point of view than rabidly against it , but there were accusations of anti-Americanism slung around from an opposing faction.

I was happy to note that Mr Greenwald mentioned one of my American heroes, Prof. Cornel West:

Last week, the Princeton professor Cornel West denounced Presidents Nixon, Bush and Obama as "war criminals", saying that "they have killed innocent people in the name of the struggle for freedom, but they're suspending the law, very much like Wall Street criminals". West specifically cited Obama's covert drone wars and killing of innocent people, including children. What West was doing there was rather straightforward: applying the same legal and moral rules to US aggression has he applies to other countries and which the US applies to non-friendly, disobedient regimes.

In other words, West did exactly that which is most scorned and taboo in DC policy circles. And thus he had to be attacked, belittled and dismissed as irrelevant.

My own 2011 post on Prof. West is at Dr Cornel West Speaks Out.

As for the myth of American exceptionalism - is that a myth? I think it has always been more propaganda than anything else: salesmanship on a mega-scale, aimed both inward to its captive audience of citizens and outward to anyone on the rest of planet Earth who'd listen. Salesmen are to be avoided, people who accept their spiel without independent investigation into their products are, at best careless and asking for all they'll get; at worst wide open to a descent into bigotry and hypocrisy.

The bitter, of course, goes with the sweet. To be an American is, unquestionably, to be the noblest, grandest, the proudest mammal that ever hoofed the verdure of God's green footstool. Often, in the black abysm of the night, the thought that I am one awakens me with a blast of trumpets, and I am thrown into a cold sweat by contemplation of the fact. I shall cherish it on the scaffold; it will console me in Hell. But there is no perfection under Heaven, so even an American has his small blemishes, his scarcely discernible weaknesses, his minute traces of vice and depravity.
H.L. Mencken

In fact, all that happened, back in the day, is that the USA took over the baton of exceptionalism and title of "The Greatest" after Britain's empire disintegrated, and other European empires were doing, or had already done, the same. Britain, in its turn, had remembered lessons learned long ago, from its time as part of Rome's empire - and so it went, and so it will go.....who'll be next? China? India?

Commenter "riggbeck" aptly quoted Percy Bysshe Shelley adding that, "Empires come and go, and they all think they're exceptional. Shelley had it right".

Ozymandias

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away".


While reading that poem this scene sprang to mind (from Planet of the Apes)~~