"In the end, what was America really all about?" asks Morris Berman in his 2012 book, Why America Failed: The Roots of Imperial Decline. He concludes that the founding idea of America was: the hustle. Since its colonial days and escalating after the War of Independence, US America has billed itself and has built itself as the place where the role of a good, "patriotic" US American citizen is to make a buck and "get ahead" and if you need to bullshit, swindle, and chisel people along the way and if you need to sell them things that are bad for their health, bad for their community, bad for their land base and bad for their soul… well then, so be it. In fact, that just means you were more ruthless and clever than the other guy – laudable characteristics in US America. This is what passes for values in mainstream US American culture, according to Berman.
Agreed. And I would add that it is bewildering, strange to be born into this culture that defines itself by its commerce. We stagger about, seeking always to adjust to this artificial landscape. But we cannot.
Bury the daily blows in a shot of heroin, immerse them in whiskey, douse them with sugar, deep fry them, try to sleep them off, "work them to the bone" -- work them to oblivion, throw money at them, package them up and tie a bow around them, stick a fork in them - they're done.
There is no adjusting to them without sacrificing too much of what you hold dear as a human, as a mammal, as an organism pulsing with the blood-life force, billions of years after the universe condensed into a point of immeasurable primal energy and finally exploded, sending its ideas, its love, its stories across the constantly unfolding heaven-ocean - the periodic table of elements tumbling into the black, coalescing, forming landscapes bubbling forth with question marks that formed into bacteria, pulsing cells, life forms, we among them and we remember all of it.
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