Great video...
Labeled as "The most honest three minutes in television history", in a couple of similar YouTube postings...
And a wake-up call for anybody that takes this American Exceptionalism business TOO seriously...
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But America is, indeed, exceptional, in a great many postive ways, historically, and at present, and as far into the future as one can foresee...
America is rooted in revolution and egalitarianism and self-reliance, and those roots and their attendant traditions and political philosophy are what facilitate or enable and sustain that Exceptionalism...
We sometimes stray - sometimes, quite far, and for long periods of time, from those roots, but, so far, we've always managed to find the Reset Button and to apply the necessary Patches and Updates to our society, as these manifest and unfold...
I also find it highly encouraging that we have both the courage and the desire to examine ourselves from time to time in a political and cultural context, and to criticize ourselves (including the marvelous wake-up-call -caliber critique we see in that video clip), and to work to fix what's wrong...
Because we are less 'collective-ized' and less regimented than some of our peer societies and cultures around the planet, we tend to be less forward-looking and more knee-jerk reactive than some, but there is also much to be said for Living-in-the-Now, rather than always Looking-to-the-Future, and yet, we do the latter well enough, in most respects, to give a good account of ourselves in that area of human planning and endeavor, as well, without making ourselves slaves to the future... that, too, is 'exceptional', and does us credit.
There are a number of things on the macro-level, in our interactions with the rest of the world, that we should probably not be doing, or doing differently, and we, too, can be selfish, or stupid, or savage, just like any other people on the face of the planet, but that is far from the truth about us overall, or in the main, despite what foreigners and despite what the self-denigrating, self-flagellating hair-shirt types amongst us would have us believe.
One of the inconvenient things about being Top Dog is that all the poodles and ankle-biters and yip-yip dogs keep snarling and snapping at your heels, and pissing and moaning and whining about how bad you are, because they can never be Top Dog themselves, or because they want to be, or because they once were, and have run out of steam, and now evince a faux superiority that would disintegrate in a millisecond if they ever got the chance to play Top Dog again themselves.
Americans are, indeed, an exceptional people, and mostly that in a positive sense.
No sense pretending otherwise... when you're good, you know it, and, so long as you don't get too cocky or obnoxious about it, there isn't anything wrong with that, either.
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