One of my professors recently vindicated the East for their hatred of the West, and justified their hatreds for the class. I understand that. I think the actions of radical Islamists are abominable and stupid, but I understand why they hate us. But I want to point out that there is another side of the story. Perhaps we are the Great Satan, as they call us in the East (or at least as some people say they call us. I personally have never heard myself called the Great Satan.) But if we are the Great Satan, we are Milton’s Satan, not the Southern Baptist Satan. We do not lambast the olde tymes of our ancestors without a certain sense of nostalgia, of yearning for what we have lost in gaining our modernity. This is why photoshopped images of colorful upside-down wheelbarrows connect with us in a very unique and sappy way.
We become adults who just want to be children, and we have children who never have a chance to be a child because their parents have never grown up. We fly across the planet leaving behind trails of carbon emissions and Coke bottles. We look to the always-positive future and we count it as a loss if we have zero economic growth. We are perhaps Satan in our nightclubs, our stripclubs, our country clubs. We are perhaps Satan in our golf-carts and our SUV’s and our tanks, but we are the Satan who never saw himself becoming who he is. We are the man in the machine, and we have lost control of the wheel. We may be screaming about our manifest destiny, and God Bless America's like our predecessors said their Ave Maria's, but if you catch us in a moment when we think we're by ourselves, you will probably hear us muttering, “Myself am Hell.”
