The title of this blog is meant to be nasty and provocative, yes, but also descriptive. I spent a lot of time thinking over how to explain my home country to non-Americans in extended, detailed ways. I land on this: the USA is primarily a real estate investment project that is on-going, and much of its culture is driven by invention and experimentation, rather than consistent moral values or geographically defined social norms.
Nomenclature first: when I traveled in South America I introduced myself as an 'American' until I was sharply corrected by an Ecuadorian who said she was also an American; I was an North American and US American specifically. I don't remember if I disagreed at first, but I know I ceded the point by the end of the conversation. The US is only one part of the greater American continents with plenty of similarities to its neighbors, particularly its unfinished, revolting nature.
Revolting being a pun, you see. Drive through the mainland of the US and you'll see a lot to bore you. You'll be inundated with two concepts US Americans wield constantly but poorly, like a 12 year old masturbator: revolution and freedom.
Briefly, revolution means to US Americans faster and easier ways of doing the same thing they did before. iPhones are thus a revolution, as is cable television. Laceless shoes were a revolution to US Americans. So were sitcoms without laugh tracks. US American culture, which is to say pop culture as this is the only culture of the USA, is drowning in shouts of revolution. These revolutions happen in consumer commodities, not political processes or economic policies. Those are unchanged.
Secondly and briefly, freedom means to US Americans the invitation to indulgence and inconsistent responsibility both publicly and privately. It is freedom to overeat mediocre food and to complain about other people's values. It is freedom to express or denounce prejudices as though they were individual choices and not systemic leans of large-scale culture. It is freedom to look as you want in public, drive as you want, and tell the story of the world as though it were the story of yourself.
Speaking with non-Americans who visit, they characterize the culture as being on holiday. They are thrilled at the sudden lack of rules; shocked by the absence of clear signals and norms; titillated or disgusted by the frequent public vulgarities in language and imagery; they see in the USA dystopic thrilling futures built not on republicanism or civic engagement, but Las Vegas. US America invites large labor forces to toil for the elite in a culture-wide game of gambling. You might get rich, right?
This is frankly thrilling to outsiders, and having left the country over ten years ago, I am starting to feel as they do. It is basically fun to be in the USA, because it feels that nobody cares what happens. This version of liberty is akin to driving a motorcycle without a helmet, but at a sociocultural level: one might be okay, so long as one is conscious of their surroundings.
I felt a similar neoliberal nihilism visiting Frankfurt, Germany, but I felt the culture lacked the Las Vegas mythos to cover the ugliness of what happens when people stop caring for one another. Besides that, I understand Germany to have a robust social support system, genuinely old city infrastructures and patterns, and a sincere understanding of environmental matters. US America lacks all of these, for any one of them might slow down the religious impulse of citizens there to colonize themselves every generation.
Every US American generation is subjected to public clinical trials of new technologies: new drugs, new screens, new cars, new schools, new city planning. The country is an unfinished experiment not really in democracy, but in bare market economics. I say 'bare' in place of 'free', because the feeling of working at poverty levels, paying low taxes for nothing, and watching most of the wealth earned and burnt on reality television is better described as a naked, vulgar market not pretending to be anything but profit-mad. To be poor and working in US America is to be virtually economically naked. As with real nudity in public, there's a dark thrill to this. And it produces that essential ingredient to all invented rags-to-riches stories: we started from the bottom, and now we're on top! We were naked, now we wear polyester!
The culture of US America is pop culture
The pop culture of US America is its greatest achievement. It will almost certainly outlast the economics of US America, as these are mostly a failure when measured at a society-wide level. Most US Americans remain working-poor after two centuries of political development as a voting body, and most politicians and business elites are becoming more and not less like one another, mutating and reverting back into what was understood in the 1800s as a landed gentry with no real ideas. It would be a great privilege to glimpse the year 2100 in the USA, to see whether the hard work and real economy of the country can withstand the dysfunction at the top that long. And if the freakish super-rich of the 2020s get their wishes, maybe they'll still be alive, abusing people as heads in jars or as cybernetic refrigerator people.
Pop culture, everyone knows, is charming because it is empty like sugar. If there is anything underneath the veneer, the audience is asked too much and their short patience wears thin. I cannot listen to entire albums; who has the time? I don't care if there's a 'message'. Since US Americans decided that the 'personal was political', and 'all art is literal', they have got to work attaching messages to everything they say and do. This is steroids and drugs in place of healthy eating and walking: a highly processed substitute for basic human needs. The need here being, of course, the need for art, for soulful musings, for escape into real imagination that is not tied to the heavy stone tablets of price tags and adverts.
US American culture with advertising is a quiet place. The freeways exist to frame billboards; the sports exist to stage sponsors; the television exists to deliver ads. Everything mysteriously fun and thrilling about US America, and everything dark and edgy, can be explained by understanding that the culture exists to serve the economy, not the other way around. The USA is a real estate investment project; it's primary value is land; much of the country is functionally uninhabited. They are still working on raising the population, developing the countryside, and filling in those cracks, and advertising does the heavy lifting in mobilizing sociocultural norms and expectations towards these projects.
Every US American is impelled to purchase property, particularly if it will put them into debt. Stupid and byzantine debt instruments are invented and reinvented to get working people in on the investment ladders, the bottom rungs helping to push the ladder ever higher for the real winners at the top. In cycles when the bottom falls out, the top rungs suffer a couple drops, then stabilize, while the bottom rungs drown or burn in ruin. Luckily, the houses and roads still get built. There are big, near-empty neighborhoods at the end of near-new, colorless roads. You can use AirBnb to stay at one of these; I have. It is not the end of civilization, more like a stasis where culture does not die but rather was stillborn. The US American suburbs are the heart of is stillborn culture: a place ostensibly made for humans where none can be seen. The purpose of the suburbs is invisibility of humanity and centralization of material goods - cars, houses, lawns, and so on. You are meant not to see others' bodies but their technical assemblages
Weird US American bodies
Speaking of bodies, I now without fail experience 'body culture shock' when I arrive at a US American airport. I got it most painfully in a food court area when I saw 3 military people squatting around a table. There is something strange going on with US American bodies; I've seen it in my own family and close contacts still living there. The bodies are not growing noticeably fatter in one area. The fat is rather like an entire bodily layer. The people are more whale-like, but remember that whales are incredibly strong animals. Beluga whales, more than manatees, would be the spirit animal of these Army people I saw. I would not want to get into a physical conflict with them. They were frightening in the plain way that the biggest kid on the schoolyard can be frightening. Not menacing or malevolent but, like whales, their size was somewhat awe-inspiring and one knows, at a glance, that there would be no sense in physical confrontation (would one even want to attack a whale).
Becoming whales, US Americans have gotten weird about their bodies. This is understandable. Looking at the US Americans I know from childhood, I am always surprised at how much they've changed into whale body-types. There may be something really positive in this. It does not seem to matter much what a person's original body type was; if they live in US America, they gradually become whale-like. I'll say again that what I mean by this is a certain heavy muscularity in the body, a thickness all-around that is not like a pot belly or large legs, but rather an entire padding-like skin layer. Watch some American football sometime -- it is these bodies I am seeing more and more in coffee shops, shopping malls, and so on. Had I lived in the USA for the past ten years, I've no doubt I myself would be transforming into a whale-man. It must be something in the water.
Unfinished business
These thoughts are not really done; on-going as always. Revolution means to Americans faster ways to do the same thing, and freedom means a pleasurable mix of accepted hedonism and irresponsibility. The only culture of the USA is its brilliant, sparkling pop culture, and this serves the economy by delivering mystified consumers to every 'new' product, which is merely a glammed up version of old products (think cars, wristwatches, handbags - little has changed in these products in 100 years). This is exciting, breezy, 'holiday' culture to people from other countries.
Japanese culture is believed, by many of its members, to be approximately 1000 years old. That is to say, people in Japan can with straight faces draw lines from contemporary practices all the way back to the the year 1000 (or earlier, perhaps). There's nothing empirical about this, but cultures are imagined and their values psychosomatic. If people believe they share a common value, they will do and think as though they do. If you don't believe me, take out some paper money from your pocket and rip it up; it's value is made up anyway, right?
US Americans can trace their culture back approximately 250 years. This is approximately one-fourth the age of Japanese culture. If we could use anthropomorphize the abstract idea of Japanese and US American cultures, as so many political cartoons have done, we would be missing a key point if we made them approximately the same age. Rather, Japanese culture could be something like 60 years old, whereas US America could be one-fourth this, or 15 years old. Play out the imaginary and funny things can be found.
Japanese culture at 60 would be wise and still energetic; hypocritical and forgettable, perhaps amnesiac about its own past (as so many seniors fudge or invent the details of their biographies). It would be idiosyncratically stubborn, insisting on some facts or practices while not giving a damn about others. It would have a very hard time actively supporting the young; its body frail and used up, its worldview fossilized and hardened, its brain like a sea sponge long taken out of the ocean.
Let's not be too cruel, though; a 60 year old has lived through a lot and has wisdom one cannot get from anything else but life. 60 years is enough to see multiple wars at multiple distances, love deeply and cheaply, and start and end several life-changing relationships. Its enough time to see politics transform into different versions of itself, and technology create more problems than solutions, or invent problems for itself to solve.
US American culture would not have any of the benefits Japanese culture would, as a 15 year old has not much to teach, say, or do with a 60 year old besides, if they are lucky, learn to listen and observe the choices of one much older.
At 15, US American culture is pubescent. It's body is changing (into a whale), and it is unsure of its friends and enemies. Where does it belong? It is still in school, in the sense that it has not graduated, as other cultures have, through a series of real political upheaval, civil dispute, violence, and reinvention. It has enough past to be embarrassed about but not enough time since to have distanced, reflected, learned. It's mostly interested in sex and death, like all smart 15 year olds. It wants to a conquer a world that cannot be understood. All it can really do is conquer (understand) itself. That will take time. Possibly another 100 years, when US America is 350 years old culturally, and has perhaps burned itself to the ground and rebuilt itself.
This is happening, will happen, is about to happen. Who knows? I guess I want to say one positive thing to end: I feel privileged to be alive at a time when my own home country is moving through puberty. Like it is with teenagers, there's a satisfaction in watching someone's potential fall from the heavens we put it in when they're a baby (remember when the US American Revolution, the real and only one, inspired other nations worldwide?) into a more realistic, practical, workable spot on the ground (the USA was never going to be 'the greatest country in the world'; the hyperbole is meaningless because countries are abstract and 'greatness' intensely contextually subjective; my bedroom is the greatest country in the world, because it's my favorite place, etc.). Having failed to be the child prodigy or metaphysical prophet many were hoping for, the USA can focus instead on being a real, normal country with real, normal limits and problems.
It isn't a bad thing to be empty, if the alternative is being full of junk.