Well, let's see. America is always considered the perfect embodiment of materialistic culture. Americans are known world-over as being. . . well, just too, too materialistic.
But, Americans hate material. First, they surround themselves with a mass-manufactured environment of mostly petroleum byproducts for which every item implicitly expresses contempt for surface, touch, texture, color, etc. They turn grain into white cardboard, fruit into sugar paste, the coffee bean into an instantaneously disappointing cup of black flavorlessness, and the pleasure of cooking around the material warmth of the hearth in general into a lackluster refueling of tasteless microwaved gruel. They pave the earth, bulldoze her forests. Oh, I forgot, you know all this.
Then, having accumulated all this rot, they throw it away to make room for more. Has ever any society thrown away as much of what it supposedly valued above all else: the material?
Indeed, wouldn't you agree that the greatest absorbtion and fascination of the American mind is with MONEY. It is money that drives men's souls (oops, women's too). And what is money but an abstraction, indeed an ideal. How can we not conclude that American's are the greatest idealists that ever trod the earth?
Quincy