Chuckie Watch 88: Chuckie's in almost-Heaven, except for all these here bad people around

Yep, Chuckie says Amurica is the best dang place in the whole world.  Probably in the whole material universe: A Better Place 02/11/05.  (Sorry, Chuckie's Web site has some wires - or at least links  - crossed, so I have to link to the queasy-making white-on-blue version instead of the more legible print version.)

But with all our shortcomings, all our flaws and all our faults, the United States of America is the most benevolent, the most progressive and the most compassionate nation on the face of God’s earth.

It is the envy of the planet, the only superpower, the overwhelming choice of immigrants and the pride and joy of those of us who love her.

I don’t claim to be a world traveler but I have visited over twenty countries in different parts of the world and I have never found one that can touch my America.

However there is a far better place than America. It’s called Heaven and when I leave the U.S.A. that’s where I want to go.

For some reason, this reminds me of a song that Nina Hagen wrote with Dee Dee Ramone, which I first heard in a tribute that Nina H did for the 1920s expressionist dance pioneer Anita Berber.  The chorus says:

Sometimes I feel like screaming
Sometimes you just can't win
Sometimes I feel like I was born
To die in your arms in Berlin

I guess the free-association connection here is that this kind of doofus "America the Beautiful" airhead-nationalist posturing is really a lot of hot air.  And the reality is that patriotism and the "sense of place" which gets so much emphasis among Southern writers are, at the same time, more simple and more complicated than Chuckie's blowhard-white-guy ramblings and rantings make them out to be.

And it's just mindless jingoism for Americans to be bragging that we are better than all them there foreigners and heathens and lesser peoples because the US is "the most benevolent, the most progressive and the most compassionate nation on the face of God’s earth."  Aside from the pomposity of it all, the problems with this kind of nonsense are too painfully obvious.  Are we the most benevolent country, when our regular foreign aid is far lower relative to the size of our economy than that of most nations when a comparable level of development?  (And a huge portion of what we do provide goes to Israel and Egypt in pursuit of fairly direct and immediate strategic goals.) 

Are we the most progressive nation in the world, with our death penalty, our money-dominated electoral process and "Florida-2000" style voting problems?  Is it really "the most compassionate nation on the face of God’s earth" that has set up systematic torture in a gulag of prisons from Abu Ghuraib to Guantanamo to Afghanistan?

Of course, the Oxycontin crowd doesn't give a [expletive deleted] about that stuff.  They're just repeating their jingo clichees.  And blasting their country constantly for the things they don't like.

And Chuckie is doing plenty of the latter, as those of us who follow his ranting faithfully know well.  In this particular rant, Chuckie finds plenty he don't like about "his" America, "the envy of the planet" and yadda, yadda.

For instance, Chuckie don't like: lying (Democratic) politicians; special (Democratic or labor) interests; "greedy business executives" (who get caught and embarass their Republican friends); Democratic judges; Political Correctness (as opposed to the Patriotic Correctness of Chuckie Thought); criminals and violent people (unless the violent people are dismembering and killing Evil Injuns or other people Chuckie don't like); (Democratic) lawyers; wimmin who git abortions; foreigners; separation of (the Christian) church and state; racism (i.e., how come these here blacks are so prejudiced against us white folks?); cities; national debt (Chuckie must have missed the part about borrowing a bizillion dollars to reduce Social Security benefits); and people who criticize Bush the Magnificent ("our nation is divided to the point of polarization").

And Chuckie says:

The judicial system routinely turns convicted child molesters back out on the street to practice their depravity on the helpless.

Uh, no, Chuckie, it doesn't.  And if your concern about this issue were more than an excuse to indulge your own violent fantasies, you would be aware of that.  The problem in that area is not judicial laxness, but catching perpetrators in the first place.  The last time I heard, the arrest rate for the most serious class of this type of crime, cases in which children are kidnapped and eventually murdered, was about 5%.  That means that only five out of every 100 cases result in an arrest.

But to get that arrest rate up to something closer to 95% or higher, it would require the proper type of police staffing, training and communications.  Speedy response immediately after the kidnapping is critical, both to catching the perps and saving their victims.  The courts can't act on the cases at all unless the police can first solve them.  People who only think about politics as a way to indulge their own angry fantasies or to promote a vigilante mentality just don't get too excited about expanded police training classes or upgrades to computer systems at police stations.

In Chuckie Watch 89, we'll take a look at people who Chuckie really don't like.