The Idea of America

The United States of America may be a rogue state, dedicated to war and destruction, and run by control freaks who want to boss every inch of the planet, yet running parallel to this reality is the myth of America, the Land of the Free, the land of immigrants, the land of unrestrained energy.
These days the United States is hollowing out. Only two per cent of the population are left to work the land. The days of the family farm are all but gone.
The days of the great manufacturing industries are over too. More than thirty percent of the manufacturing jobs have gone in the last ten years alone.
The illusion of economic activity can only be maintained by an ever more frantic monetarization of  human activity, and endless government stimulus.
Government increases, debt increases, but real wealth decreases.
America cannot compete for resources with the emerging powers through trade alone. Its one remaining great manufacturing industry is the weapons industry.
So America has become a security state. It is attempting to occupy the Middle East and attempting to occupy Africa, in the hope that the threat of violence will persuade local elites to send business its way.
American bases dot the globe ready to wreak havoc on those who step out of line.
Indeed, America has become so obsessed with security that it appears to be invading itself. It has the highest prison population on earth.
Yet the idea of America remains.
Throughout the world America still stands for freedom and liberty and opportunity. It is the land of the common person.
America has long been the hope of peasants the world over.
In the Old World, in Latin America too, ruling groups controlled the land and the government, but not so in the United States.
In the eighteenth century the United States was born, the only popular, democratic, free country in the world, totally unencumbered by a ruling aristocracy.
In the nineteenth century millions of peasants went to America to escape persecution and taxation back home and the hunger caused by brutal landowners and their governments who reduced good people to destitution. In America the oppressed peasantry of Europe produced the most dynamic and richest society the Earth has ever known.
In America the common man could sit at the top table and eat his fill.
In the twentieth century America defeated the dictatorships of Germany and Russia so that nowadays, for all its defects, Anglo Saxon democracy is the measure of government the world over.
And the people of the United States gave us jazz and rock’n’roll too!
The music of freedom, the music of hope.
The reality of the United States, a country in lock down, with millions in prison, the world bully, may be far from ideal, but the idea of America lives on.