"So live your life that the fear of death can never enter your heart. Trouble no one about their religion; respect others in their view, and demand that they respect yours. Love your life, perfect your life, beautify all things in your life. Seek to make your life long and its purpose in the service of your people. Prepare a noble death song for the day when you go over the great divide. Always give a word or a sign of salute when meeting or passing a friend, even a stranger, when in a lonely place. Show respect to all people and grovel to none. When you arise in the morning give thanks for the food and for the joy of living. If you see no reason for giving thanks, the fault lies only in yourself. Abuse no one and no thing, for abuse turns the wise ones to fools and robs the spirit of its vision. When it comes your time to die, be not like those whose hearts are filled with the fear of death, so that when their time comes they weep and pray for a little more time to live their lives over again in a different way. Sing your death song and die like a hero going home."

"city on a hill,"

"inspirational notion"

"deep in the American psyche,"

"the distinctive spirit of American individualism and enterprise"

"the distortions of the American idea," "the abuse of reality."

"reality itself": the "idea"

"city on a hill"

"ordained by God."

"Come over and help us."

"the idea of America,"

"shining city on the hill,"

"humanitarian intervention,"

"humanitarian intervention"

"the utter extirpation of all the Indians in most populous parts of the Union" by means "more destructive to the Indian natives than the conduct of the conquerors of Mexico and Peru."

"that hapless race of native Americans, which we are exterminating with such merciless and perfidious cruelty... among the heinous sins of this nation, for which I believe God will one day bring [it] to judgement."

"merciless and perfidious cruelty"

"the West was won."

"idea."

"individualism and enterprise,"

"of conquest, colonization, and territorial expansion unequaled by any people in the 19th century."

—Chief Tecumseh, Shawnee Nation, quoted in Lee Sulzman, "Shawnee History" 1768-1813"The American idea is revealed in the country's birth as aanthat residesand bydemonstrated in the Western expansion. Journalist Geoffrey Hodgson, (author of) error, it seems, is that he is keeping toLet us then turn toof America from its earliest days.The inspirational phrasewas coined by John Winthrop in 1630, borrowing from the Gospels, and outlining the glorious future of a new nationOne year earlier his Massachusetts Bay Colony created its Great Seal. It depicted an Indian with a scroll coming out of his mouth. On that scroll are the wordsThe British colonists were thus pictured as benevolent humanists, responding to the pleas of the miserable natives to be rescued from their bitter pagan fate.The Great Seal is, in fact, a graphic representation offrom its birth. It should be exhumed from the depths of the psyche and displayed on the walls of every classroom. It should certainly appear in the background of all of the Kim Il-Sung-style worship of that savage murderer and torturer Ronald Reagan, who blissfully described himself as the leader of awhile orchestrating some of the more ghastly crimes of his years in office, notoriously in Central America but elsewhere as well.The Great Seal was an early proclamation ofto use the currently fashionable phrase. As has commonly been the case since, theled to a catastrophe for the alleged beneficiaries. The first Secretary of War, General Henry Knox, describedLong after his own significant contributions to the process were past, John Quincy Adams deplored the fate ofThecontinued untilInstead of God's judgment, the heinous sins today bring only praise for the fulfillment of the AmericanThe conquest and settling of the West indeed showed thatso praised by journalist Roger Cohen. Settler-colonialist enterprises, the cruelest form of imperialism, commonly do. The results were hailed by the respected and influential Senator Henry Cabot Lodge in 1898. Calling for intervention in Cuba, Lodge lauded our record-Noam Chomsky (Excerpt: "Why We Can't See The Trees Or The Forest - The Torture Memos and Historical Amnesia," TomDispatch.com, 5.19.2009. Image: The 1st Great Seal of the Massachusetts Bay Colony , 1631 ) .