Have you ever watched “Iron Chef America”?  In each episode, a top chef is selected to compete against an “Iron Chef”, a culinary master who is drawn from the show’s stable of regulars.  The two chefs, ferrous and non, are given a secret ingredient – the last episode I saw featured seaweed – and one hour to prepare a set of dishes based on the theme ingredient.  A panel of judges tastes all the dishes and then evaluates the chefs on the taste, originality, and presentation of their products.

The winner is usually the Iron Chef of the day, but not always.  Whichever chef loses a particular contest, the result must be bitter.  The loser is among the premier masters of his or her craft, someone whose cuisine is revered by thousands.  Yet on this occasion, the master fell short.

It’s the same for anyone gifted in a particular field.  The 100^th best golfer in the world – whoever that is – was the best golfer in their town, their county, maybe their state.  Yet that 100^th best golfer is probably never going to win the Masters or the US Open.  He or she is going to fall short when it comes to the biggest stage.

Many fine musicians don’t get recording contracts.  Brilliant writers can’t get published.  Superb athletes at every level find that they fall short of what it takes to move to the next level.

The higher one’s goals, the greater the chance for failure. Those who strive for excellence and perfection must accept that disappointment is the most likely outcome.

That brings me to the ruckus over the US athlete who turned her back on the American flag as she stood on the medal stand at the US Olympic trials.  The athlete (I didn’t retain her name, sorry) had placed third in the hammer throw.

She does not consider the United States worthy of her respect and turned her back to underscore her contempt.  The United States wants to be, tries to be, the best country in the world and to be thought of that way.  On this occasion, like the challenger to an Iron Chef, we came up short.

Despite the back-turning, there is a decent case to be made that the U.S is worthy of the respect of its citizens, even those who believe the country has let them down.

This was the first nation to be founded on the idea of human equality, that each person is the equal of every other person in their natural rights, the rights that are discoverable by unassisted reason, and that do not derive from the accidents of history or birth.  At its founding, the nation gave to all of humanity the free gift of the finest statement ever penned in support of that proposition.

But there was a flaw present at the moment when the document declaring those principles was published on July 4, 1776.  The gentleman who penned those words did not live up to the principles he announced.  It is a violation of natural law to govern another person without that person’s consent.  Yet, Mr. Jefferson and many of the signers of the Declaration took advantage of the provisions of enacted law to contravene natural law.

That posture was an unacceptable compromise with principle.  But surely a valid principle remains valid despite the inconsistencies and compromises of the person who frames it.  The country was founded on the enduring and unalterable truth that all persons are equal in their natural rights, among which, as Lincoln said, is the right to eat with one’s own hands the bread that those hands have earned.  Would it be unreasonable to give the country credit for declaring the principle, even though it did not live up to it?  After all, in 1776, no one else had ever declared equality as a political principle and no one else was even trying to.

Surely the country gets some small credit for taking the action in 1807 to banish the slave trade.  The only other country to do so was Great Britain, more or less simultaneously with the American action.

In 1820, the nation’s legislators, knowing that slavery was wrong but without a clear means to abolish it, reached a compromise to keep slavery out of the Louisiana Territory north of 36º30’ (apart from the newly admitted State of Missouri).  Perhaps that is worth some credit.

Still not good enough, I suppose.  Later, after taking territory in the southwest from Mexico, the country generated a new political party aimed at preventing the spread of slavery into any new areas.  In 1860, it elected a president determined to limit an institution that he described unequivocally as wrong.

On January 1, 1863 that president issued a proclamation ending slavery in areas then in rebellion against the United States.  Does the country get credit for that?

Still not good enough.  By December 1865, after a war that cost more American lives than any other in its history, the nation amended its constitution to abolish the institution of slavery forever.  We weren’t the first nation to do that, true, but it does demonstrate devotion to those basic principles of equality on which the country was founded.

After the Civil War, the nation further amended its constitution to ensure that formerly enslaved people would be citizens of the United States and that all persons subject to the jurisdiction of the nation would have rights of due process and equal protection of the laws.

That athletic back turned to the flag tells me that this was not good enough, either.

Now, it has to be admitted that after the passage of the post-Civil War Amendments in the late 1860s, the nation endured a long period of backsliding in the effort to actualize its mission statement of securing the equal natural rights of its citizens.  Thirty years after the abolition of slavery, the old South and a number of its neighbors adopted a system of state-imposed racial segregation, blessed by seven of the eight US Supreme Court justices who ruled on its constitutionality, that endured into the 1960s.

Might that athletic back be tempted to turn part way back toward the flag by the progress that the country made in the 1950s and 1960s, when a series of Supreme Court decisions combined with federal legislation securing civil rights and voting rights put the nation on the road back toward achieving the mission of equality?

As a young person when the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act became law, I was thrilled to witness the nation taking powerful and unmistakable steps to restore its promise and to live up to Mr. Jefferson’s words better than he did.  It was only a few years later than I was disappointed when the sterling principle of equality was replaced by racial and ethnic preferences.  And it was not only the federal government that abandoned individual equality in favor of group preferences.  State and local governments followed, as did private and public colleges and universities, and private employers.  Over the course of decades, I have been appalled to witness a system of  preferences evolve into one that overtly acknowledges the goal of distributing spoils on the basis of race.  The advocates of Critical Race Theory and the 1619 Project are not subtle on this point (or on anything else) and have the benefit of considerable cultural, political, and institutional tailwinds.

In contrast, what appalls me should have thrilled the woman with the hammer.  I think we should get credit for devotion to the principle of equal natural rights, but we can’t get as much as a wink of approval for it from her.  If, as appears to me, the country’s elites have abandoned the belief in equal natural rights in favor of group rights and a racial spoils system, shouldn’t that get at least one thumb up from Ms. Hammer?

Neither is good enough.  Like the 100^th best golfer or a chef who comes in second on Iron Chef America, this may be a case where we have to accept that we have come up short, even though we have done about as well as we could be expected to do.

I doubt that I will watch much, if any, of this year’s Olympic Games.  The fake internationalist idealism in service to greed and corruption is irritating.  The saccharine personal profiles that dominate the TV coverage have little appeal.  However, if I learn that the back-turning hammer-throwing celebrity athlete makes it to the podium, I will be happy for her, although I accept that the sentiment will not be reciprocated.

What I would like to know is, if the United States isn’t good enough, if a person thinks that its flag is worthy of a gesture of contempt, who is the Iron Chef?  Which is the nation on whose flag Ms. Hammer would not turn her back, and for whose support she would feel gratitude, were she a citizen of that country?