With America leading the charge, Western civilization has engineered a hegemony that has rapidly overtaken the globe, politically, economically, and culturally.  This has unleashed a domination of values that, unlike hegemonies of the past, is lightning fast, wide ranging, and spreading insidiously, enabled by those very technologies it has created and which it seeks to market to the world.  All the while America has touted its singularity and its greatness, its manifest destiny, offering refuge – nay salvation – to all who would learn how to partake of its many benefits, comforts and ideologies.  But, is there trouble in paradise?

Let’s begin with American-style democracy.  Having been forcibly ‘peddled’ around the globe, pushed into the most unlikeliest of places, including the Middle East, Eastern Europe and elsewhere, such democratization has provided, ironically, yet greater credence to groups we consider well, how should I say this, non-democratic’ – elements like Hamas and Hezbollah; and  we have supported questionable leaders who are anything but a ‘paragon of democracy’, leaders like Saakashvilli in Georgia and Yushchenko in Ukraine.  Oh, but how democracy is a wonderful tool for propagandists!

Capitalism as well has taken wing and exported itself to the farthest reaches of the globe, creating an economic and financial hegemony unparalleled in history, with a preponderance of American cultural artifacts popping up in the oddest of places to prove it.   Our cultural seeds have been cast wide upon the waters for all of posterity.  It is amazing, however, how the boldest efforts of democratic capitalism have run up against its own worst instincts.   It is as if the underbelly of the beast has been laid bare, and it does not look all that attractive from this new vantage point. 

Another interesting wrinkle in our current predicament: as specialization in every profession increases at exponential rates with the advance of scientific and technological knowledge, we are finding in the healthcare realm alone that we have run into a shortage of primary care physicians here in ‘the land of the free and the home of the brave’.  Why this dilemma?  Because in the greatest, richest and most advanced (read: specialized) country in the world, doctors want to be specialists as well, in order to benefit from the additional prestige and money that goes along with that specialization.  Otherwise they just appear to be another part of the expanding, or is it shrinking, proletariat. 

And as the great moral fiber of our country seems now to be proliferating cases of schoolyard bullying, mass murder and extreme cases of domestic and random homicide on our streets, we ask why. Yet we never want to acknowledge that our own society, our culture and our politics have advanced bullying and aggressiveness as the keys to success in both business and international affairs.  And, lately we have even resorted to the worst kind of bullying behavior, including torture and the murder of innocents (Iraq) at every turn… just look at our performance on the world stage over the past several decades.

Finally, Lou Dobbs and other minor pundits, engaged in their own bullying techniques, began whining on TV four years ago about how most middle class Americans (the ‘proles’) were being cut out of the American Dream, loudly demanding that home ownership and access to other middle class perks be made more easily available to the common citizen.  Now we find that this whining and bullying reached the financial markets and federal regulators and has helped precipitate a housing bubble and crash the likes of which has never been seen before, and a financial crisis of global proportions as Americans one-and-all reached out for the golden rings passed out by lenders who were only too pleased to give in to the bullying and look the other way as they collected their ill-gotten revenues, spinning them out into credit default swaps.  Indeed, the bullying began with the pundits and talk show hosts, and trickled down to the legislators, regulators, mortgage brokers and banks, one bullying the next until the poor populace was well housed and fed.  Now the chickens have come home to roost; and we are looking for the bullies to punish…but they are US.

Perhaps Obama can change our ways, lower our expectations about lifestyle, transform our self-perception and our perception of the natural world, reduce our dependency on oil, provide universal healthcare to all Americans… well these are some interesting daydreams.  But, just maybe it is not the problem of American exceptionalism per se. 

Perhaps American exceptionalism itself is rooted in a much broader challenge, rooted somewhere at the beginnings of Western civilization, along the alluvial banks of the Fertile Crescent, at the intersection of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in, of all places, Iraq.  I say it again, have the chickens come home to roost?  Would not that be poetic justice!  Is our hegemony, tracing its own manifest destiny back, just the culmination of an historical process that began millennia ago, a process that perhaps cannot be undone by simple political maneuvering or other commercial trickery… like getting the people to just go out and spend more money or vote.