For two centuries now, there has existed the idea of a vast, cyclopean land across the sea, a place where numerous independent States, both large and small, stand proudly cheek by jowl in the form of a specially galvanised political arrangement designed to confer opportunity and happiness on all who live there. People the world over dream of relocating to the endless highways, deserts, mountains and ocean paradises of this near-mythic continent, where ticker-tape parades and stars and stripes merge with unrestricted opulence in a fairytale medium of solid joy. The place, of course, is America.
America has long been touted as the land of dreams, a place where people can go to live in glamorous luxuriance, a movie come to life. The inhabitants of the planet have been systematically bombarded for decades by the American media with images and notions of America’s superiority over every other country in the world. Pictures and songs, glorifying life inside those forbidding walls, have haunted people from Sao Paolo to Tibet on a daily basis, and the world’s poor has made a pilgrimage to the doorstep of this great country in an attempt to effect entry and grab a piece of the good life for themselves.
The media bombardment is not a one-way thing. Americans themselves are also subjected to the same treatment, their daily lives filled with proclamations of their nation’s uniqueness in the world, supposedly the only truly free country. As a backdrop, television footage of global trouble spots, foreign countries torn by internal and external warfare, are beamed to the populace to reinforce the belief that America is the only peaceable nation on earth. The grisly footage, with its token shots of children covered in flies, or consuming dirty food on piles of rubble, are often discussed by retired military men or middle-aged neo-conservatives (who apparently detest all foreigners) with the tone of Roman Emperors, strong and immoveable in their marble palaces, far from the primitive squalor and conflict that rages everywhere outside America’s precious borders. Men such as Rush Limbaugh hold forth on talk-radio shows, declaring regions such as Great Britain to be “spineless” and “a socialist economic failure”, while millions tune in and agree sagely. Most of these financial experts work round the clock. They take a single yearly vacation in a woodland cabin less than three hundred miles from where they were born and raised, and never for more than one week at a time, as anything more would raise the suspicions of their peers; laziness and self-indulgence are taboo realms, unless of course that includes having (preferably brown-skinned) people actively perform menial tasks for them, or spending hours riding through the woods on a quad-bike or snowmobile. Faux slavery and playing with Tonka toys will never go out of style in America. In fact, anything that involves exploiting other people (especially other races) or wasting non-renewable resources is considered an extremely desirable way to spend one’s time. There is a reason for this.
There are two groups with whom it is customary to associate the founding of the American nation, two separate philosophies, and two sites of initial purchase on the vast flank of the Eastern seaboard of then unknown America. These are the Pilgrims and the Puritans, and it is commonly believed that they are one and the same. They almost are. England in the 1500’s was a turbulent place, especially when Bloody Mary took the throne, and proceeded to decimate the Protestant population in an attempt to return England to her beloved Catholicism. When Mary died and her Protestant sister, Elizabeth, took the throne, the Protestants retuned from their hiding places in Continental Europe, and attempted to reconstruct an England based on fundamental purification of non-religious elements. Elizabeth recognised this Bible-bashing nonsense for the non-starter it truly was, and proposed a commonsense approach which incorporated the concept of reason above all else, including Scripture.
A group which continued to believe in the purification of England’s spiritual beliefs at this point broke off, and became known, not surprisingly, as “Puritans”. The Puritans were derided by the more realistic remainder of the population, and in an atmosphere of conflict the Puritans experienced an intra-group debate which resulted in them being split once more. The products of this latest bifurcation became known as the Pilgrims, and it was they who insisted that England would never bend to their will. The Pilgrims were centred in East Anglia, a region of England long noted for hostility towards outsiders and belief in outdated superstitions. They relocated to Holland, and in time were the ones who made the legendary voyage on the Mayflower, in 1620, landing at Plymouth, Massachusetts. They took their hideous catalogue of unworkable contradictions with them, a mish-mash of dysfunctional hypocrisy that somehow found people willing to commit to its hateful, ignorant agenda.
The Puritans followed soon after, establishing a colony in Massachusetts Bay. Both these groups toiled beneath the unfortunate illusion that salvation could be found through Christ and Christ alone, as represented in Scripture. This ludicrous belief system was to persist until the present moment, literally as you read these words. Jesus loves America, apparently. And America takes cash.
When those first pilgrims made that perilous crossing on the Mayflower, and found themselves in a “howling wilderness”, they were driven by an idea far more powerful than religious freedom alone; they were in it for the money.
The continent of North America at that time was suspected to contain untold natural treasures, gigantic trees of unknown biological lineage and vast seams of precious minerals, all of which could be removed and shipped back to Britain or France for the benefit of those sovereign nations, and to the massive financial gain of the pilgrims themselves. The early writings of those who first settled in Massachusetts compose much flowery reference to God and the virtues of hard work, but embedded in these texts penned in those excited, exploratory days lies the evidence that a cash reward was the actual incentive, the psychological fuel that enabled these people to want to be there in the first place.
Finding themselves surrounded by Indians and horrendous weather, the pilgrims quickly developed an intensely selfish survivalist philosophy. Doing things “by the book” was the only way, as anything else could mean total extinction. That they had the complete domination of their natural environment as their ultimate aim was never lost on them or their descendants, and slowly but surely did they obtain purchase on this new land, bringing it into line with God’s Plan.
A phenomenon known as the Myth of Superabundance emerged very early on, basically a grand kind of wishful thinking that believed in an infinite supply of natural resources with which the earth intended to furnish the pilgrims and the puritans, as a reward for what they imagined was their bravery and God-given right to own the land upon which they depended for survival.
The eventual exposure of the Myth of Superabundance for the nonsense it actually was elicited no more than a whine from America’s more perceptive inhabitants, as by then the idea of exploiting Nature for all she was worth had almost become a religion in itself. A man was not a man if he had one iota of empathy in his bones, be it towards other men or to the trees, animals and Natives all around him. It was a code.
It is currently fashionable among American liberals of non-English descent to blame Britain for the rape of nature, and the consequent ups-and-downs of the American Plan, and indeed it was the King of England who initially stood to gain the most from this project. But as independence came to pass, and the gnashing teeth of the puritan machine continued to chomp their way across the continent, it becomes very obvious that the pathological decline in mental health now belonged solely to Americans. That’s “belonged” as in they owned the copyright. The rest of the world hadn’t the taste, the money or the verve to depict it as well. Watch a movie made by any nation other than America and the inferiority is obvious. America does violence, disaster, sexy, etc, better than anyone. And Hollywood is a beautiful thing.
Europeans had long been accustomed to the notion that space was hard to come by, that Kings and Queens ruled the roost, and all the large forests and attendant ecosystems had been destroyed hundreds of years previous. They understood that only by exploring other lands could they continue to function as powers, by bringing home the raw materials necessary to maintain their proto-industrial economies and cultures. Americans, on the other hand, found themselves in a most novel position; they enjoyed the experience of exploring brand-new environments as did stone-age hunters millennia ago, while simultaneously having the very latest implements at their disposal with which to dominate and tame those environments. This strange combination of novelty and technology led directly to the now notorious tendency of Americans to assault the natural world with the heavy-handed abandon of a spoilt brat who doesn’t know his own strength.
Having said all that, I love it here, and wouldn’t give it up for the world. The reason? There is good weather in summer, and more than enough rebels to satisfy the need for a riot. That’s right; somewhere among those East Anglian freaks there were some good eggs, and it is my life mission to rave it up with them. Cheers!