A Foreigner asked me: “So what is America really like these days?”
So I answered him. I said:
“As I see it …
… these days …
- America is like a spoiled rich kid who commits many crimes, wrecks many lives, but never spends a day in jail because of family connections.
- America is like a Soviet state except that people drive big cars and there are really good programs on tv.
- America is like a guy afraid of losing it.
- America is like someone who believes that they can become truly good and that others can become truly evil.
- America is like an adherent of a fundamentalist sect, terrified of looking at the truth less his whole world view come crashing down forever.
- America is like those penguins in “March of the Penguins” – isolated, determined, ridiculous, and programmed to repeat the same absurdity year after year. Some people find this not ridiculous, but very beautiful.
- America is like Germany in 1934.
- America is not like Germany; America is like Rome in A.D. 65.
- America is like Cronus, certain he has swallowed all the children.
- America is like a man who has cheated on his spouse and now watches her every move, certain that she is plotting an affair.
- America is a cocaine addict in the middle stages of his disease – his drug is still working for him, he is productive, he is popular, he is unable to see the catastrophe two steps ahead.
- America is like The Sims, but only a handful of people get to be players.
- America is like an abused streetcat who has finally found a good home, and grows fatter and fatter and meaner and meaner and before long runs the whole house.
- America is like the stomach of the world, distributing nourishment to all the other parts, but only if it is served first.
- America is like a depressed graduate student in his last year who, burnt out and exhausted, stops caring whether he gets the degree or not.
- America is like an attractive married woman who greets the neighbors with a smile when they tell her that they heard screams and should they call the police?
- America is like Howard Hughes.
- America is like Gloria Swanson in “Sunset Blvd.”
- America is like Enron, but only in the ways that it is exactly like Enron.
- America is like Jesus in the desert – but refusing God’s help.
- America is like Oz’s wizard.
- America is like Mordor.
- America is like a 13 year old who still pretends there is a Santa Claus, and whose parents keep pretending with him.
- America is like a 35 year old supermodel.
- America is like a man who doesn’t believe he is able to quit.
- America is like a man who still believes he is in the lifeboat years after he has been rescued.
- America is precisely like the description it gives of its Enemies.”
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