http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmp...henation/12208

America has become a profoundly -- and tragically -- ahistoric country.
As such, the 273rd anniversary of the birth of George Washington will
pass this Tuesday with little note. Washington's legacy has been so
disregarded by its heirs that his birthday has been stirred into the
generic swill of "President's Day," an empty gesture that blunts the
memories of both the first chief executive and the sixteenth, Abraham
Lincoln, in order to avoid cluttering February with too many holidays or
too much history.



The memory of Washington has become an inconvenience for men who occupy
the high stations and his fellow founders occupied. George W. Bush, Dick
Cheney (news - web sites), Donald Rumsfeld, John Negroponte and their
ilk certainly do not want the work of remaking America in their own
image -- as a greedy, self-absorbed and frequently brutal empire --
interrupted by reflections upon the nobler nation that Washington and
his compatriots imagined.

Considering the ugly state to which the American experiment has
degenerated, however, it would make sense for the rest of us to renew
our affiliation with the first GW. Indeed, patriots need to call General
Washington back into the service of his country -- not merely as a
clarification of national memory but as a blunt challenge to the who
have usurped America's promise with their illegal invasions and
multinational misadventures.

It will not be the first time that the wrench of Washington's memory has
been tossed into the machinery of American empire.

When dissenters from the impulse toward American empire held their
annual gatherings in cities and towns across the United States in the
early years of the twentieth century, they would meet on the anniversary
of George Washington's birth. It was the accepted wisdom of the day
that, in addition to having been "the father of his country," Washington
was, as well, the father of the anti-imperialist movement. The first
president had given his ideological descendants ample evidence on which
to base their claim. His 1793 proclamation of American neutrality in
regards to European political and military conflicts explicitly rejected
international entanglements, with Washington later explaining that, "The
duty of holding a neutral conduct may be inferred, without anything
more, from the obligation which justice and humanity impose on every
nation, in cases in which it is free to act, to maintain inviolate the
relations of peace and amity towards other nations." But it was
Washington's Farewell Address, delivered in 1796 toward the end of his
second presidential term, that became a touchstone for ensuing
generations of anti-imperialists. Washington used his last great
statement to the nation he had shepherded through the struggle to loose
the grip of British colonial rule, "to warn against the mischiefs of
foreign intrigue, to guard against the impostures of pretended
patriotism." Washington saw great danger in any step that would
"entangle our peace and prosperity in the toils of European ambition,
rivalship, interest, humor or caprice" but it was not just alliances
with European states that worried him. The first president counseled
that it should be "our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliances
with any portion of the foreign world."

The commander of America's revolutionary armies did not want his country
to follow the European course of collecting colonies and establishing
spheres of influence that would need, ever, to be defended. He warned
that the new United States might "pay with a portion of its
independence" for involving itself in "projects of hostility instigated
by pride, ambition, and other sinister and pernicious motives." And he
asked a question that would echo across the ages as his presidential
successors moved the country further and further from its founding
principles: "Why quit our own to stand upon foreign ground?"

An American political leader who uttered those words today would be set
upon by the self-appointed guardians of false patriotism -- Bill
O'Reilly, Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter and a thousand imitators -- and
accused of undermining the "war on terrorism" that has become such a
convenient excuse for occupation Iraq (news - web sites) and the
development of imperialist instincts that owe more to King George than
to George Washington.

But there is nothing American about a career of empire.

In fact, the American impulse is the one that Washington expressed two
centuries ago.

The principles that Washington discussed in his Farewell Address were
not new concepts. They were, in fact, mainstream opinions shared by
many, though surely not all, of his countrymen. A measure of pragmatism
underpinned their broad acceptance. America was a new nation, rich in
resources but sparsely populated and militarily weak. A career of empire
seemed not just hypocritical for the former colony, but impractical. And
America was divided, not just over questions of foreign allegiance and
entanglement but with regards to her domestic course. New Englanders
were already objecting to the practice of human bondage in the southern
states and Jefferson, himself a slaveholder, acknowledged that he
trembled at the thought of the rough justice that awaited a nation that
countenanced the sin of slavery. While the Pennsylvania Quakers imagined
cooperation and comity with the indigenous owners of the ground on which
Europeans stood as newcomers, governors from Massachusetts in the north
to Georgia in the south plotted violent removals of American Indians
from their native lands. Washington well recognized that the United
States lacked the strength and unity to survive internal struggles over
alignment with particular colonial powers, let alone the conflicts and
costs associated with colonialisms of its own.

But there was more than enlightened self-interest in play when
Washington suggested that, "Our detached and distant situation invites
and enables us to pursue a different course." From the beginnings of
what would come to be referred to as "the American experiment," there
was a sense that this endeavor ought to be about something nobler than
the mere recreation of European excesses on the new ground of the
western Hemisphere. John Winthrop's notion that an American settler
might see his or her community "as a city on a hill," a model unto the
world for the moral ordering of affairs, echoed across religious, ethnic
and regional lines. Among a certain rebellious element, it came to be
accepted that Europe's potentates, with their subjects and colonies,
represented a corrupt old order that would be replaced only by a shot
heard round the world. The American revolutionaries promised that their
challenge to the British king and crown would in the words of their
tribune, Tom Paine, "begin the world again." The revolution, which the
Continental Congress pledged to fight neither "for glory or for
conquest," did, in fact, inspire more revolts against colonial
authorities. America's progression toward democracy -- slowed, as it
was, by the hypocrisy and intolerance of the founders -- would, as well,
provide a model for the systems that replaced the divine right of kings
with the consent of the governed. That requirement of consent should, by
its very nature, have rendered illegitimate any colonial or imperialist
impulse. And, it seemed, many of the founders read it that way. Fifty
years after independence was declared, it's author, Jefferson, would
renew the city-on-a-hill promise with a call to globalize the democratic
revolution: "May it be to the world, what I believe it will be (to some
parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all): the Signal of
arousing men to burst the chains, under which monkish ignorance and
superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the
blessings & security of self-government."

George Bush has throttled America's promise by mirroring the worst
excesses of King George. He has cast his lot with the colonialists who
believe in the spread of enlightenment at gunpoint. Patriots need to
mirror the best instincts of another George and pursue that "different
course" that the first president said was essential to the maintenance
of our independence and our ability to inspire by fear rather than force.