The secular states of modern Europe do not understand the fundamentalism of the American electorate. It is not what they had experienced from this country in the past. In fact, we now resemble those nations less than we do our putative enemies.
Where else do we find fundamentalist zeal, a rage at secularity, religious intolerance, fear of and hatred for modernity? Not in France or Britain or Germany or Italy or Spain. We find it in the Muslim world, in Al Qaeda, in Saddam Hussein's Sunni loyalists. Americans wonder that the rest of the world thinks us so dangerous, so single-minded, so impervious to international appeals. They fear jihad, no matter whose zeal is being expressed.
It is often observed that enemies come to resemble each other. We torture the torturers, we call our God better than theirs - as one American general put it, in words that the president has not repudiated.
I find it peculiar that I grew to sentience in the fifties, the dark ages of racial intolerance, less-than-equal civil rights, back-alley D&C's, and gay-bashing. The Nation came a long way for the better since then and that was a good thing. Now it seems we are to head back to those ignorant times. So my declining years as well will be spent in an ignorant, fearful, and intolerant society. Life as a bell curve of truth. Pitiful.
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