Written by Dale Johnson   

Verse 4: The Myth of American Exceptionalism
God gave AmeriKa a Destiny, a Miraculous Instrumentality,
An Ordained Providence, a manifest for destined EXCEPTIONALISM!
Early Puritans set the scriptured tone, God´s grace did not apply to the heathen inhabitants.
Early on the doctrine of Calvinist self-denial evolved to preaching the Gospel of Wealth.
Throughout American history Christian eschatology equated to cultural chauvinism.
Plantation owners enslaved Africans, and the legacy of racism is still today an active ingredient of oppression.
Latter-day Robber Barons usurped land, established dynasties of unearned wealth extracted from the labor of poor immigrants.
Shot them down when they struck for a living wage and decency.
And today´s financiers steal the accumulated wealth of generations,
And with the multinationals and drone makers establish world dominion,
Facilitated by their Plutocratic State of National Insecurity.
Land grabs pushed the frontier ever westward, genociding the native population.
Is there a greater crime in history than the slaughter of seventy million buffalo that fed and clothed Native Americans?
What malnutrition and disease did not kill the Army took care of.
All the usurpers of wealth and power visioned a fortune to be made.
God gave them all purposeful design to exploit opportunity
Under the guise of EXCEPTIONALISM.
Nationalism morphed to universality, glorified history as paradise to be.
Righteousness glimmered out all Dark Motive,
Guiding their Manifest Destiny, their White Man´s Burden.
Their Rugged Individualism made them into the Surviving Fit.
Lacking labor to exploit and frontiers to conquer,
A flood of immigrants were allowed under the guise of the American Dream.
Each wave denigrated with racist epitats.
Immigrant kids to weave the cotton sweated by Nigger slaves.
The Dumb Swedes to homestead the frontier, ethnically cleansed of inconvenient Redskins.
The Chinks and Micks imported to lay the iron rails over the vast, rich expanses.
The Pollacks and Dagos to turn the wrenches of the industrial centers
And stoke the fires of Baron Carnegie´s steel mills.
The Micks in urban slums, eventually given badges and clubs to bash the heads of agitators,
While the business-oriented state passed laws and unleased force
To deal with those who denied American Exceptionalism and sought social justice--
The populists, anarchists and wobblies, socialists, communists, and labor unions.
After grabbing Texas and California from Mexico,
The Spics came to harvest the fruits and vegetables,
Living precariously in labor camps and urban slums.
Today brown people have shelter—
In prisons and deportation internment camps.
Black youth locked up for carrying a joint and shot down in the streets.
Black and Brown Scapegoats for the white population with threatened privileges.
These days warred-upon Arab peoples are Terrorists.
Innocent youth, who can´t see a good future, are sent off to far lands to kill Terrorists
And be killed by villagers resisting the Grand Satan´s military might.
Just as innocent youth were sent to Vietnam to kill Gooks,
There to die to protect empire from the new Genghis Khan, the scourge of yellow Asian hordes turned red.

The Myth of Exceptionalism is culturally enforced .
More Upsidedownness--
Veterans Day commemorates fallen heros,
The cannon fodder of American youth who have few options except the military,
Forgotten entirely are the millions of foreign victims killed in self-defense,
Cremated with napalm, blown apart by missiles.
Forgotten are the lynched Black men,
The labor militants killed by police, the National Guard, and the Army.
Exceptionalism is enforced in schools by the Pledge of Allegiance,
In Baseball´s seventh inning stretch standing for America the Beautiful,
Ethnocentrism begins with competitive sports rooting for my home town,
And ends with My Country deserves unconditional respect and love.
Rules don’t apply, we Americans are a force for good, no matter what.
It is Us and Them, We and They, White Christians and Brown Muslims, Civilization and its Discontents.
All these clichés are not trivial when the Pledge to the Flag and all it stands for
Is transmuted into the equivalent of Seig Heil to the Swastika,
When the conditioning step is to unconditional My Country Right or Wrong,
When it is almost always wrong.
Complicity by otherwise decent people in crimes against humanity is cloaked In the thought hegemony imposed.
The Myth of Exceptionalism!
Truly AmeriKa is exceptional,
Comparable perhaps only to the rapacious crimes of the British Empire
Or the evils of European fascism.