“This is not who we are.” So said Oklahoma University’s president, David Boren, after fraternity members were filmed chanting racist epithets on a coach. The leadership of the fraternity in question, Sigma Alpha Epsilon, released a statement that said, among other things: “This is absolutely not who we are.”

Both assertions echo President Obama’s reaction to the CIA torture report published late last year: “This is not who we are.” Chicago’s mayor, Rahm Emanuel, said exactly the same thing in 2013 while apologising for years of systematic torture of suspects by the city’s police: that may have been who we were, he seemed to be saying, but that’s not who we are. Recent reports that the Chicago police department operates its own CIA-style black site suggest it’s not all in the past.

Obama liked to use this construction even before he became president. In a 2007 speech on Iraq he said: “A war to disarm a dictator has become an open-ended occupation of a foreign country. This is not America. This is not who we are.”

I can see this is a catchy way to encapsulate outrage, to address the gap between American ideals and American realities. But used over and over again, in response to depressingly similar situations, it begins to sound merely self-exculpatory, if not completely delusional. It’s like handing over your CV at a job interview and saying: “This is not who I am, by the way.”

As an American living abroad, I sometimes find it convenient to distance myself from injustices that happened while I was minding my own business on another continent. But it’s hard not to look at these incidents – and many others besides – without being forced to acknowledge: this is sort of who we are.

Dumb and dumber

Speaking on television about Hillary Clinton’s extensive use of her personal email account while she was secretary of state (if you don’t understand why this scandal isn’t boring, I am not the person to help you), a Republican senator and potential presidential candidate, Lindsey Graham, admitted to a much tighter email regime: “I’ve never sent one,” he said, with evident pride. Graham has since been accused of being a technophobe, but that term doesn’t quite do justice to his refusal to send emails. The very first email (the first one transmitted over a network, and the first with an @ in it) was sent in 1971, the year of decimalisation. The current STMP standard was launched in 1982. Lyndsey Graham isn’t 107; he’s 59.

There can be no doubt that Graham knows what an email is – he manages to be a fierce critic of Clinton’s electronic housekeeping. So why hasn’t he, ever?

“I’ve tried not to have a system where I can just say the first dumb thing that comes to my mind,” he told Bloomberg. “I’ve always been concerned. I can get texts. And I call you back, if I want.”

Basically, he operates on drug dealer protocols. It’s odd that someone who thinks Clinton is hiding something by releasing 55,000 pages of emails – and to be fair to him, he’s not alone – also thinks there’s an inherent transparency in not generating any kind of record in the first place.

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It’s odder still that someone so fearful of saying “the first dumb thing that comes to my mind” actually has his own Twitter account. Senator Graham’s username is “@GrahamBlog” – which suggests he didn’t quite know what he was getting into when he signed up – but his Twitter feed is both active and lively. “President Obama is the ‘Equivocator in Chief’ at a time when we need a Commander in Chief”, runs a not-atypical offering. So you can’t say he’s entirely out of touch. If you need to reach the senator in a hurry, just send him a tweet, and he’ll call you right back.

@IAmTimDowling