Tucker Carlson Claims That the United States is the Only Major Country Not to Have Fallen to the Tyranny...of the Metric System

I remember reading something that one of my favorite authors, Kurt Vonnegut, once wrote. Vonnegut, of course, was a veteran of World War II, but he was taken by the Germans as a prison of war. He was in Dresden when it got firebombed by the allies in February of 1945, a theme that he returned to in his most famous book, as well as in other writings and interviews occasionally.

One thing that he said about that war was that it did a disservice for Americans, who were provided, according to him, with legitimately evil tyrants. Hitler is the most famous criminal madman, of course. But there was also Mussolini and Tojo. There was the rampant aggression of three nations invading numerous other nations in Europe, in Africa, and in Asia. There were outrageous crimes against humanity that these nations, led by their evil tyrants, were responsible for. And this gave Americans an overly simplified idea that the world at large was filled with such evil tyrants, and that the role of the United States was to defend civilization as we know it against all of these threats.

This gave too many Americans a skewed and clearly self-serving, self-congratulatory version of history, and their own role in it. As my 8th grade history teacher once told the class, we Americans are "the good guys...in the white hats." He kind of outlined an imaginary cowboy hat as he said this. At the time, this was still largely completely accepted by most Americans.

Indeed, we Americans looked like heroes in World War II, and rightly honor the sacrifices of veterans who bravely stormed the beaches in Normandy, and who then drove the Germans eastward back to the Reich and, ultimately, helped to defeat Hitler and the Nazis, and we feel proud of how people there opened their arms to American troops as liberators. We could say the same with the war in the Pacific against the Japanese, as well.

But this has been clouded over time. The Korean War was not quite as cut and dry, and the Vietnam War was indeed very different. Many questioned what we were even doing there, and there were times, such as with My Lai and the constant napalm attacks and relentless bombings, all of which helped to contribute to three million Vietnamese casualties, when we even appeared like the bad guys. The same could be said with the invasion and subsequent war against Saddam Hussein's Iraq. We were promised that Saddam had a huge arsenal of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD's), but they did not find them. And Abu Graib and other horrors again painted Americans in a negative light. Those who wanted war had argued that American troops would be greeted with open arms by locals, but that did not happen. The Vietnam and Iraq wars went badly.

Yet, some Americans refuse to give up the ghost of viewing the world as filled with bad guys which we Americans must bravely fight against in order to keep the world free, and to remain the beacon of hope for the entire rest of the world. The only problem is that more and more of the rest of the world is coming to the view that the United States itself is beginning to resemble the status of a rogue nation. 

Then, of course, we elect Donald Trump, who is probably the one man who most should have been prevented from reaching high office. Worse still, he has been proven to have engaged in criminal conduct, yet tens of millions of supporters - including FOX News, of course - still lend their unconditional support to this clown.

FOX News believes in what that old history teacher of mine suggested, that we Americans are "the good guys...in the white hates."

And they have some well-known pundits who try to wax poetic so that their supporters can still believe in this highly sanitized, and frankly intellectually dishonest, view of themselves. Tucker Carlson is one of those well-paid guys who advances the arguments of Trump and FOX News. And he recently praised the American effort to continue fighting against the tyranny spreading around the world in the form of...the metric system.

Seriously. You cannot make this stuff up.

Here is what Carlson said, specifically:

TUCKER CARLSON (HOST): Almost every nation on Earth has fallen under the yoke of tyranny -- the metric system. From Beijing to Buenos Aires, from Lusaka to London, the people of the world have been forced to measure their environment in millimeters and kilograms. The United States is the only major country that has resisted, but we have no reason to be ashamed for using feet and pounds.  ... 

JAMES PANERO: I am joining you tonight as an anti-metrite. I'm taking a stand against the metric system -- the original system of global revolution and new world orders.  

CARLSON: God bless you, and that's exactly what it is. Esperanto died, but the metric system continues, this weird, utopian, inelegant creepy system that we alone have resisted.

Wow.

How embarrassing. The "good guys in the white hats," indeed. 

Here is a well-known conservative pundit, proclaiming that we Americans are fighting the good fight against the system of measurements best appreciated by scientists and most of the rest of the world, much like we also stand a,lone in defying the consensus of the scientific community, and still officially not believing in climate change, and especially not in the role of human activity in accelerating it. 

Increasingly, we are standing alone in our fight against science and progress, more generally.

With legions of brainwashed Trump supporters never questioning any of this, we can see how the rest of the world is viewing Americans in an ever more skeptical light.

Frankly, deservedly so...at least collectively. 

This is the link to this story, from which I obtained all of the quotes used above:

Tucker Carlson: "Almost every nation on Earth has fallen under the yoke of tyranny -- the metric system" Carlson: "Esperanto died, but the metric system continues, this weird, utopian, inelegant creepy system that we alone have resisted"  Video ››› June 5, 2019 10:13 PM EDT ››› MEDIA MATTERS STAFF

https://www.mediamatters.org/video/2019/06/05/tucker-carlson-almost-every-nation-earth-has-fallen-under-yoke-tyranny-metric-system/223874?fbclid=IwAR2iY67VCHITMLFV34tnldbAqAxHymCr0Gawg7fLcVjRBT6nbb77WnDAUTU