The Rot That Counts

There’s a never-ending stream of articles about problems with American culture. “There’s rot at the heart of this culture!” people keep proclaiming. “There’s too much violence! Too many guns! Too few guns! Too little religion! Too much religion! Something is wrong with us!”

Yet those same people go into fits when I say that there’s something deeply wrong with the Russian culture. They seem to accept the idea that a culture can go in a wrong direction but only if this culture is American.

I’m especially grateful to the individuals who keep posting smug graphics about gun violence in the US and Europe. The gun violence in Europe completely excludes the gun violence that Russians have been inflicting on Ukraine for 8 years. But hey, I recently saw a graphic where World War II was neatly edited out of gun violence stats to demonstrate that even in the 1940s there was more violence in the US than in Europe. There’s no doubt in my mind that the creators of this graph are the kind of people who see imaginary Nazis under every bed. But it’s politically expedient to excise Nazi violence from the record, so why not?