Reader Paul Edwards, on today’s Mamdani/Platner piece:
Are you a card-carrying Exceptionalist, Matt, that you believe this Capitalist whorehouse of a country to be the most benign system for its citizens? Do you really believe the vitriol you pour on Marxism and its tenets and how terrible its effects have been in the world, never mind that it has never once been implemented anywhere. Do you believe America has been a great force for good in the world? If so, where?
Let’s see: defeating the Nazis and Imperial Japan, accepting more refugees from Nazi Germany than any other country, inventing polio vaccine, chemotherapy, the Internet, nuclear power, cars, airplanes, movies, radio, electric light, frozen food, the phonograph, both the telephone and cell phones, rock n’ roll, jazz, and hip-hop, TV, the transistor, the pill, basketball and volleyball, Star Trek and Star Wars, 425 Nobel laureates, free speech, free press, and freedom of religion, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Moby-Dick, The Invisible Man, and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, the Panama Canal, trans-oceanic communication, the poems of Frost, Poe, MacLeish, and Emily Dickinson, personal computers, the assembly line, landing on the moon, and rebuilding Europe, off the top of my head. I also like Mounds bars, Cheerios, and football, but what do I know?
I get it, you read Howard Zinn once, but if we did “what has America done for the world, besides X?” for real, the remaining Monty Python members would die of old age before it ended. Are people really this crazy?
Ah, the timeless "real Communism has never been tried" argument. Evergreen.
I know it’s trite, but with the invention of affordable travel, I would simply leave if I thought the country I was living in was a great evil! What people say, tells you less than what they do.