By Rabbi Ben Kamin
That Vladimir Putin, the president of Russia recently chided us Americans for feeling exceptional is one of the most gratuitous acts of grandstanding since their one-time premier, Nikita Khrushchev, announced “We will bury you.” Within a short time span of that pronouncement, the Soviets wrote Khrushchev out of their school books. If being exceptional has anything to do with chronic revisionism and long term cruelty, then Russia is producing great borscht.
Putin, who is a dictator in a suit, except when he wears his boxing trunks, has systematically downgraded the former Soviet Union into a nation of disheartened people, cosmically uneducated, ethnically embroiled, living in an illusion of international muscle. Reports abound of one countryside village to another disintegrating into alcoholism and despair. A few cronies at the top of the hollow Russian pyramid live well, like American champions. The rest of the oversized country is drowning in despair and vodka.
The United States is exceptional. The Syrian rebels (whoever they are) weren’t petitioning Zimbabwe or Colombia for air strikes to cripple their chemical-wielding government. The United States has, for two hundred and thirty-seven years, remained the most eminent example of the ingathering of exiles in modern history. We rescue folks. In painful categories ranging from labor rights to civil rights, this country has always been able to ultimately repair itself. This is exceptional.
It was America that Great Britain passionately courted, after the Brits and the Canadians bravely held off the Nazis for two desperate years—Winston Churchill positively knew that the free world could not be saved without the United States stepping in.
He also knew that the Russians had originally signed a nonaggression pact with Hitler.
Meanwhile, what is sobering now is that we have allowed blowhards like Putin and murderers like Assad to co-opt our brand of exceptional leadership and nobility. It is exactly because we have always been such an inspiration for liberty, such a blueprint for moral stewardship, such a paragon of “might for right,” that it’s painful to see and hear dictators and thugs suddenly appropriate, even mock, our historic role as the world’s beacon.
At this difficult moment, forbidding interlopers have been handled control of our vanguard exceptionalism. Let us pray that this sad turn of events will prove to be the exception. As President Kennedy said, we should never fear to negotiate, but we should never negotiate out of fear.
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Rabbi Kamin is a freelance writer based in Encinitas. He may be contacted at ben.kamin@sdjewishworld.com