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Originally Posted by Catwoman

intolerably slick

Cat, this section bapped the lightbulb in my head on, and especially those words. It's a lovely insight, well said.

There is a deep cultural problem here, but the thing is, it's not really American so much as it is industrial/globalization related.

A hundred and fifty years ago, you bought a pen. It was a fountain pen, and it was individually crafted from its component parts by another human being, probably working alone. It cost 100 hours of your salary to buy this pen, but the pen was a beautiful thing.

Yesterday, you bought a pen. It cost you 5 minutes of your salary to buy this pen. It is much better and longer lasting than the pen of 150 years ago. The ink doesn't need to be bought separately. The ink writes on ten times as many surfaces as the pen of 150 years ago. It will last you for a year, after which you'll use another 5 minutes of salary to buy one exactly like it.

And that's the problem: it'll be exactly like it. It's still a pen, better in almost every single way... except one: mass-created by machine, not carefully created by an artisan, this pen has no soul. It's an empty shell of a pen, and now the meaning of what a pen really is, changes in ways we might not like.

Today's pen, better in every way... except that it has no soul. It is intolerably slick. And when we use it, we lose a little soul ourselves. But the fact that it's better in every other way means that its acceptance, its purchase, its use is inevitably going to take over.

And as a side effect, the working classes will have pens of their own.

I apologise for the lack of euphemism but American foreign policy is trigger-happy, always has been.

I've heard Winston Churchhill was happy in a way to see the Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor. It's said that he believed that was the point at which the US would really get serious about Germany. Until then the US had stayed out of it. Not really our battle.

And I do think this is reflected in the gun laws (or lack thereof).

I was kinda waiting for the point where the Switzerland fans would come up against any other Europeans in the house.

The thing is, America is incredibly insecure.

For your marvelous insights, here is the only place I see you slip. Americans are not insecure whatsoever. We are absolutely convinced that we are the biggest, baddest motherfuckers on the planet. The thing that pisses us off the most is that you forget it. If you knock down our tallest fucking tower, the only thing you'll find ten years later is that we've built a bigger, badder fucking tower to replace it, and we don't really care if you think we're whipping out our big dicks or flipping you the bird.

From outside our culture I'm sure much of that is appalling. From inside it, I know I am often appalled. But it does not come from insecurity.

The fact is, America is at once the strongest and most vulnerable country in the world. By this merit, it is no surprise its inhabitants are perpetually fearful - scared that their strength may one day be taken away from them, and then all they'll have left is the fear. It's when this fear translates into bloodshed and brutality that a negative perception of America is understandably cultivated.

It's the strongest, therefore it has further to fall. But it's really only vulnerable to fear. Take 9/11 as an example. What happens if you obliterate ten blocks of infrastructure in the financial district of the most important city in the country? Well the financial folks have always planned for massive failure, and many of the worst-hit were up and running the next day with backup networks in other parts of the country. But the financial effect of people not traveling, not hiring, not buying, etc. because of fear was pretty bad.

The truth is, the world has much more to fear from the fall of America than from its continued strength. For example, the US is responsible for the security of most of the world's major sealanes where oil is shipped. The entire world benefits. That's military overstretch.

The other truth is, as the strongest, we automatically become the target. We automatically become the scapegoat. I for one hate the notion of the US being the world's police force. But we have a very different responsibility if we are targets and/or scapegoats.

edited to add final paragraph sorry