John Chuckman
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The Monroe Doctrine.
An unwarranted idea from a second-rate American president, the country's fifth, a man who was a lifetime slaveholder, one, by the way, who also advocated the export of freed slaves to some hellhole in Africa.
Imagine the idea of sending people, who had finally managed to earn their freedom in one way or another, people whose families may have resided in America for more than a century, off to places they’d never seen just because you regarded them as undesirable residents?
The man and his ideas are hardly things on which to base foreign affairs nearly two centuries later.
But it really does say something about contemporary America that a high official would speak of Monroe in public with pride and arrogance, almost as though the Doctrine were a kind of secular scripture.
America just becomes more dangerously absurd with each passing week.
