American Masochists Malign Our Nation.

• Author: Kreyche, Gerald F.
• Position: US history of tolerance and heroism should be valued - Brief Article - Column

CALL THEM revisionists or deconstructionists, but recognize them for what they are--American masochists. Hating themselves and the U.S., they are pan of the current malaise of political correctness.

Revisionists are the new flag-burners for whom patriotism is a dirty word. Guilt-ridden and breast-beaters, they are like those who join Alcoholics Anonymous. Drunks dwelling on past sins, they proclaim to all who will listen just how bad a nation we are.

The women among them are what talk show host Rush Limbaugh calls the feminazis. They complain of glass ceilings and patriarchy, as though all of them are wearing chadors and walking behind their menfolk. The masochists judge events of our past in terms of present values. For them, America can do no right.

Perhaps Pres. Clinton was influenced by them on a recent trip to Africa when he apologized for past slavery in the U.S. What he failed to mention is that we fought the Civil War and paid a terrible price to end that cancer. He didn't bother to acknowledge that, at some time, nearly every nation, including African ones, indulged in slavery. Even American Indians were slave holders and slave traders.

We are excoriated by bleeding hearts for permitting capital punishment. Most states that execute murderers do so with a painless lethal injection. However, no one berates the Apaches of a century ago for torturing and then killing innocent victims. One commonly creel way was to tie a person upside down to a wagon wheel with his head suspended a foot above a fire, which made his brain explode.

The new breed of western "historian" is typical of these American masochists, such as Patricia Limerick of the University of Colorado at Boulder, a MacArthur Fellow. In Legacy of Conquest, she berates the miners and early western entrepreneurs for their ecological sins. The Frederick Jackson Turner thesis that the West shaped Americans as much as Americans shaped the West and thus developed a brand new culture, different from its European counterpart, is rejected out of hand. She writes: "We're beginning to see the American West as not a distinct and innocent region--but pan of a much bigger picture of European conquest. And the West has more in common with South Africa and Australia than we'd like to admit."

In a debate with Stephen Andrews, author of the best-seller, Undaunted Courage (an up-to-date account of the Lewis and Clark expedition), Limerick argued that we should forget about eulogizing heroes and...