The Great American Propaganda Machine (GAPM) is maintained not just by the news/information media but also by the entertainment industry and the K-12 school system. It is now an all-pervasive and self-sustaining part of our culture. The GAPM perpetuates a national self-delusion increasingly detached from reality. If America were a person, the prescription would be a potent anti-psychotic.

The very heart of the self-delusion seems to revolve around the concept of American exceptionalism. This, in turn, has is roots in the revolutionary origins of the nation. On 1776 July 4 the union of the 13 American colonies into a democratic republic was an exceptional event in world history. But when in 1862 Abraham Lincoln proclaimed America to be "the last, best hope of earth" one has to question what he was talking about.

By 1862 the Enlightment ideas that had been embodied in the new American republic had caught up to the rest of the world. The British Empire had abolished the slave trade in 1807 and slave ownership in 1834. In 1862 America was playing catch-up to its once reactionary parent. Just five years later Britain's remaining colonies in North America peacefully united to form another enduring democracy on this continent. In 1862 the only thing exceptional about America was the sheer magnitude of the carnage it was inflicting upon itself.

The Industrial Revolution gave birth to the world's first global superpower, Great Britain. Our northern neighbor stretches from the Atlantic to the Pacific only by virtue of the British technology that went into Canada's transcontinental railroad completed in 1885. By the end of Queen Victoria's reign in 1901 it was Great Britain, not the United States, that bestrode the world like a colossus.

It took two calamities to bring Great Britain to her knees, two catastrophic wars conveniently designated with the indices one and two. By the end of World War II, the torch of global hegemony had passed from Great Britain to the United States. The passing of this torch also marked the birth of the Great American Propaganda Machine (GAPM).

To illustrate the GAPM in action, consider the standard American version of World War II in Europe. In the account of New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, America didn't hesitate to stand up to Hitler and we crushed his armies following our invasion of Normandy. This borders on pure fiction. Two years passed between Hitler's invasion of Poland that ignited the war in 1939 and America's forced entry into the war by Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. Shortly after that attack, it was Germany who declared war on America, not the other way around.

Another three years passed before five allied armies converged on the Normandy beaches, two of which were American. By the time of the Normandy invasion in June 1944, Germany had effectively lost the war. In early 1943 the German 6th Army was annihilated by the Soviet Red Army at Stalingrad. In the summer of 1943, the Red Army broke through the German defensive line at the Battle of Kursk, the largest tank battle in history. That battle initiated the rout of the German forces that sealed the fate of Hitler's Third Reich.

By the time that two American, two British, and one Canadian army had landed at Normandy on the Western Front, the Russians on the Eastern Front were pushing the Germans back deep into Poland. The Germans threw almost everything they had at the advancing Russians. In the climactic Battle of Berlin the Russians killed half a million Germans in one of the bloodiest battles of the war. German loses in that final battle exceeded American loses in all of World War II.

While the Battle of Berlin was raging, the allies on the Western Front were advancing through German-occupied territory virtually unopposed. After Normandy, there was only one memorable battle on the Western Front, a desperate German counter-offensive that only pushed a bulge into the allied line. If casualties are any indication, then it is fair to say that Hitler was defeated by the Soviet Union on the Eastern Front and that the Allied Western Front was a sideshow. <link>

This, of course, is not the account of the war in Europe that has entered American popular culture. Franklin Roosevelt is still being blamed for ceding Eastern Europe to Stalin at Yalta as if the Battles of Stalingrad, Kursk, and Berlin had been fought and won by Leprechauns. More on this later.

Wars naturally give rise to propaganda and the victors get to write the history books. What is unique about World War II is that the end of the war marked the beginning of a peacetime propaganda offensive, the GAPM, that has never stopped. America, victorious over Japan and Germany, was now the "most powerful nation on earth", its president the self-appointed "leader of the free world" in possession of the most fearsome weapons of mass destruction ever devised and with a demonstrated willingness to use them.

While America was basking in its new status as a global superpower, the Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe provoked a "Red Scare" that evolved into the Cold War. This kicked the GAPM into high gear. Ideological differences assumed a Manichean dimension with God-fearing America pitted in a life-or-death moral struggle with godless communism. The motto of our nation was changed from "E Pluribus Unum" to "In God We Trust". The words "under God" were added to the Pledge of Allegiance. Lincoln's expression "last, best hope for earth" was interpreted to mean that America had a divine mission not just to defend but to propagate American values with missionary zeal.

This propaganda offensive achieved Orwellian proportions on 1947 September 18 when the Department of War was renamed the Department of Defense. Now America could wield its fearsome military machine with impunity if done in the cause of righteousness. The righteousness part came easily. America's growing material prosperity was testament enough to God's blessing of America. The only fly in the ointment was that America itself was riven by a bitter partisan dispute over the causes and remedies for inequality, a dispute that ironically, and in different contexts, had originally given rise to communist and fascist ideologies in Europe.

The time was exactly ripe for the rise of a demagogue who would ruthlessly exploit the GAPM in partisan attacks against fellow Americans. Joseph McCarthy now makes his entrance from the right and occupies center stage. McCarthy was one of those who blamed Roosevelt for being "soft" on communism at Yalta. Note well the tactic that was developed here by McCarthy. First the GAPM is used to present a narrative that is distorted out of any resemblance to reality. Then the narrator wraps himself in the flag and uses his distorted narrative as a cudgel to bash his Democratic opponent as being an unpatriotic traitor. This tactic was perfected by Joseph McCarthy and has remained in the Republican box of dirty tactics ever since.

The exploitation of the GAPM as a partisan weapon is so successful that leftist critics of American politics and policy like Noam Chomsky and Rev. Jeremiah Wright, to name just two, can be completely shut out of the mainstream political discussion. Meanwhile, there isn't an idea too outrageous for wingnuts like Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter to express as long as their ravings are wrapped in the flag. The flag itself, once a revered symbol of the nation, has become just another partisan weapon, desecrated by those who literally wear their "patriotism" on their lapel.

So is there a remedy for this toxic mess that threatens our democracy? Yes there is. The remedy is called leadership. Barack Obama's life experiences have given him a uniquely broad perspective on America. Well, unique among the field of presidential aspirants that we saw in January. Obama's perspective is broad enough that he can clearly see the GAPM for what it is and the threat it poses. If Obama is serious about bringing conservatives and liberals together to address the causes and remedies for inequality, then the distorting filter of the GAPM has got to go.

The great American physicist Richard Feynman put it succinctly: "Nature will not be fooled." As an engineer and a problem-solver, I would phrase it this way: To solve a problem you have to understand the problem. The GAPM, not being reality-based, is an obstacle to understanding. Because it has come to pervade and distort every aspect of our culture, especially our perception of who we are as a people, the GAPM can be a huge obstacle to understanding.

As I have been critical of the presumption of Lincoln's "last, best hope for earth" characterization of America, I will conclude with another passage from that same State of the Union address: "The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country."