But it is hard to get away from the fact that a lot of the best things in the world have come from the US for at least the last fifty years.
[WS:] The grass is always greener on the other side of the pond, huh?
I think you can find a list of good things that come from almost every place in the world, including the UK :) (The Beatles, Pink Floyd, Monty Python, to name a few). The trick, however, is to balance it with the negatives - and the latter, I am afraid, as as abundant, if not worse, as the list of positives that you list. A few examples: reintriduction of slavery to the modern world, support of fascist dictators across the globe, undermining socialism across the globe, antiquated anti-democratic electoral system (British relic, I suppose :), exporting wars across the globe as nobody else has thus far, the promotioon of wasteful and unsustainable lifestyle, the colonizatization of everyday life by capitalism and market mentality, idiotic television to name a few.
As I see it, Amerika is a Potemkin village on cocaine - nice papier mache facade and articially induced hype that cover up a really nasty and depressing reality that is rarely seen from the outside. Wojtek
--------------------------------------------------------------- "When a candidate for public office faces the voters he does not face men of sense; he faces a mob of men whose chief distinguishing mark is the fact that they are quite incapable of weighing ideas, or even of comprehending any save the most elemental — men whose whole thinking is done in terms of emotion, and whose dominant emotion is dread of what they cannot understand. So confronted, the candidate must either bark with the pack or be lost. [...] All the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre — the man who can most adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum. The Presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men." - HL Mencken ----------------------------------------------------------------