> It is interesting to observe that similar opinions are shared by many
> European visitors and traveled US-ers. The untraveled ones, otoh,
> firmly believe they live in the greatest country on Earth, and everyone
> else envies their particle board suburban shacks and gas-guzzling cars.
As a moderately well-traveled (outside the US) US-er, I have a moderate view, between heaven and hell: the US is not that bad, and not that good, either. (Sorry for the unexciting, pastel-colored opinion.)
> What makes this country hell is not the living standards which, albeit
> lower than those in Western Europe, are still incomparably higher than
> those in the developing world - but the tremendous amount of waste -
> from piles of junk mail, to wasted energy, time, and resources, to
> wasted opportunities. Indeed, this country has the resources to make
> this world a better place to live, but instead its main exports are war,
> pollution and intellectual putrefaction.
I don't have any great quarrel with that list of problems (and I could add some others) -- they are certainly things we have to work on. BTW, what problems do European countries have? Or are they perfect?
> Nobody holds it against a handicapped person when he runs poorly in a
> race, but it is utterly disappointing when an Olympic champion barely
> out-runs a man in a wheel chair.
There I think you have hit the basic reason so many Europeans have this "US is hell" attitude: many Europeans have had completely unrealistic dreams about America (the fabled land of gold to the west) since soon after Columbus bumped into it, and they feel tremendous disillusionment when they realize that after all it is just another piece of Planet Earth (i.e., neither heaven nor hell). I don't see the country as an "Olympic champion" drastically underperforming. I think it's just another country, full of just another bunch of human beings, with the usual normal distribution of intelligence and talents, trying to do their best. They are certainly struggling with an exploitative capitalist system which they haven't yet been able to overthrow. (Oh, I just remembered -- Europeans couldn't accomplish that feat, either.)
Jon Johanning // jjohanning at igc.org ________________________________ How good bad music and bad reasons sound when we march against an enemy. -- Nietzsche