"Are Japanese just more honest about lying?" (Nicolas Gattig asks in his April 24 Foreign Agenda column). Perhaps. Tatemae [pretense] was vitally necessary in the Edo Period, when a lowly peasant could face the wrath of a proud katana-wielding samurai for simply frowning at him in contempt. In this feudalistic cultural context, if I were a rice-planting serf (smile baby, smile), I'd be sharpening my tatemae skills like nobody's business.
But hey, what about those Manifest Destiny clowns in 19th-century America? Talk about the Big Lie. What of the antebellum South's biblical defense of its "peculiar institution": body- and soul-crushing African-American slavery, along with the myth of white man's inherent superiority? It took a trip through the Ozarks of southern Missouri to remind myself that there ain't nothin' inherently superior about any racial group.
When it comes to the Big Lie, America is in a league of its own. Who accepts this nonsense that the U.S. Constitution was about "justice for all" when the tobacco and cotton plantation-owning Founding Fathers were framing that document of the so-called "Enlightenment"?