NEW YORK - I try to explain when doing broadcasts about the United States for international media that this great city is physically in America but it's not really part of the United States.
New York is cosmopolitan, educated, outward-looking and liberal -- unlike much of the rest of inward-looking America, which considers the Big Apple a den of moral depravity and political vice.
In return, New Yorkers (I'm one), look down on the rest of America (San Francisco and the Pacific Northwest excepted) as "flyover country" populated by rednecks, hicks, and holy rollers. Crude stereotypes, of course, but there's some substance to these nasty views.
While serving in the US Army during the Vietnam era, I quickly learned to keep my mouth shut about being a Manhattanite after a sergeant asked me where I hailed from and then yelled out, "hey, we got one of those rich shits from New York." I got pummeled by my brothers in arms from Arkansas and Alabama.
The last debates by Republican presidential candidates disturbingly reinforced the party's lack of interest in or knowledge of the outside world.
Leading candidates Mitt Romney, pizza mogul Herman Cain, and Texas tough guy Rick Perry barely mentioned world affairs, except to heap threats on the wicked Iranians.
The same malevolent Persians now stand accused of plotting to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to Washington by using Mexican drug cartel hitmen organized by a lame-brained used car salesman that strongly suggests the concocters of this melodrama need some new scriptwriters.
When the Republican candidates did mention the outside world, it was to proclaim their undying loyalty to Israel, or to bluster, as Romney did, "the 21st century must be an American century." But no mention of where the money would come from to keep the world in the American Raj.
It takes lots of hard cash to run a world imperium. Right now, Washington has to borrow 40 cents of every dollar it spends from China and Japan.
One wishes the candidates had leveled with Americans and talked about the urgent need for a war tax to pay for America's foreign military operations.
Romney announced a slate of foreign affairs advisors drawn from the ranks of the Bush administrations wildest Islamophobic neoconservatives and far right-wingers. The same crowd that brought us Afghanistan, Guantanamo, and Iraq, and now beats the war drums over Iran.
There was hardly any mention of the endless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that are bleeding America's economy, or growing US military involvement in Yemen and sub-Saharan Africa, as witnessed by President Barack Obama's announcement last Friday that 100 US special forces where being sent to obscure places in Central Africa.
Aside from macho chest-pounding over American greatness, some of the leading candidates made monkeys of themselves when talking about the outside world.
As a lifelong moderate Republican, I cringed with embarrassment.
Former senator Rick Santorum, a darling of the religious far right, thought exiled ex-Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf was still in power in Islamabad. Michele Bachmann stumbled around all those strange foreign names and seemed to be talking in tongues.
Herman Cain laughed off his own ignorance of foreign policy, making fun of the name "Uzbekistan." Swaggering Texas governor Perry confused India and Pakistan, both nuclear powers. Such stunning ignorance provoked shudders of dismay abroad, but at home no one seemed to care.
Ignorance has become a sort of badge of honor among many heartland Republicans, as witnessed by the popularity of the patron saint of lower IQ Americans, Sarah Palin.
Knowledge, education, being well read and, God forbid, speaking any foreign language except Mexican Spanish or Hebrew, are only for leftists, gays, and degenerate New York fops. Poor John Kerry never lived down being branded by Republicans as looking "French."
Only two candidates showed a firm grasp of world affairs: Rep. Ron Paul and former US ambassador to China, Jon Huntsman. Paul is the most honest politician in Washington. He calls for an end to America's foreign wars, eliminating the Federal Reserve bank, lowering America's foreign profile and rebuilding the run-down United States.
Because of these heresies, Dr. Paul, who is hugely popular among the young and independents, is systematically ignored or scorned by establishment media, even during TV debates.
Jon Huntsman's Mormon faith is demeaned by many Protestants as a "cult." Romney is also a Mormon, a Church Elder and former missionary. Both are unpopular with right-wing Christian Protestants. Cain is a Baptist minister.
Both Paul and Huntsman are far too moderate for Republican party core voters, 44% of whom are believed to be born-again Evangelicals.
As author Kevin Phillips has documented, Republicans have become a theological party of the Christian white far right in America's heartland. These militant Bible Belt born-again fundamentalists are ardent Zionists and backers of America's military-security establishment. One recalls the fateful prediction of Sinclair Lewis,
"When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying the cross."
Interestingly, today's small town/rural/born-again Republicans closely resemble and hail from the same roots as America's Prohibitionist anti-drinking movement of the 1920's. Both today's religious right and the Prohibitionists were determined, Taliban-style, to punish sinful city dwellers.
Of course, no one gets to be president by telling voters the hard facts they prefer not to hear. Synthetic, flag-waving patriotism still sells big in America's heartland and rural south. More important, America's political tradition, electoral system and political-media establishment will ensure that no candidate who strays from the party line is ever elected.
Still, looking at the latest crop of Republican candidates is pretty dismal.
America's next president, the world's most important leader, may believe that Earth was created only 10,000 years ago, as the Bible says. Who rejects evolution and believes in Adam and Eve, and Noah's Ark. Who may believe, as do millions of Evangelicals, that Christ will return once all Jews are gathered into recreated Biblical Israel and then earth and its non-born again inhabitants will be destroyed by fire sent by God.
I pray New York City will be somehow saved.
copyright Eric S. Margolis 2011
Follow Eric Margolis on Twitter: www.twitter.com/@ericmargolis
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I couldn't agree with you more, except that I would like to add that I live in a small/rural town in Texas, and although I am surrounded by ignorant people who vote "straight republican", I don't think the situation would be any better if I were in New York. Then I would just be surrounded by a bunch of ignorant people who vote "straight democrat".
If someone could just figure out how to slip in some educational information on how politics and the government work into segments of American Idol and Dancing With the Stars, then maybe we could stop the rapid progression of ignorance. I'm not going to hold my breath though.