Alligator Alcatraz: American history from the dark side

I don’t mean that we are trapped in an inflexible pattern of endlessly repeating historical cycles, as in the more esoteric propositions of Vico and Nietzsche. (“Time is a flat circle,” as some lowlife says in the first season of “True Detective,” moments before getting murdered by cops.) But too many of us, including a large proportion of liberals who ought to know better, are indeed trapped in the delusional one-way narrative of progress known as American exceptionalism, leading us to announce in horrified tones, with every new outrage of the Trump administration, that this is “not who we are.” more