America,all fur coat and no panties.

In My Humble Opinion
101

Lust4Life - I’m listening, I didn’t hear your question as confrontational and rude, just curious.

And I’ve been to England, I spent about 10 days there in 2003. I spent 6 weeks traveling Europe in 1985.

Just as Europe is varied, the U.S. is a hodgepodge. Small towns and large cities are vastly different. The coasts have their own culture, and Florida and Nevada are where people who want to run away tend to gather.

We ARE big on “self-reliance” in the U.S., i.e., “it’s your job to provide for yourself and if you haven’t succeeded it’s because you’re a fuck-up”. The current economy may dent that belief system a bit - we’ll be better off if it does. Because we’ve forgotten how much LUCK and good will factor into success and failure. And Americans don’t tend to admit that we’re all connected.

London and Chicago have some similarities, in size and action – my friends have been robbed in both places. Just the other day, my sister’s bicycle was stolen in broad daylight on a street in downtown Chicago - she had it locked properly and everything.

When my friend’s purse was stolen in London, I went with her to the local hospital to get replacement meds. It was a nasty place, to my eyes - dirty, ugly, antiquated. Took several hours, but they didn’t charge us a dime.

The purse-snatching took place at a restaurant, and they couldn’t be bothered to call the police. The staff directed us to the local police station, which was a 1/2 mile walk. We stood in a lobby and made the report. None of the police staff cared in the least that my friend had just lost everything, we only spoke to a receptionist.

My friends from England who live here, in central Indiana, are stunned that you can call the police for simple help. Like if you’ve accidentally locked your child in your car. They’re amazed that you can buy property with grass, some lawn, some space.

When I traveled Europe in 1985, none of the places we stayed would let ME do the checking-in. It had to be my male friend. They wanted HIS signature.

We have some terrible cities. I’ve been to forgotten towns in Pennsylvania that look like something you’d see on the news from some war-torn nation. Decay and filth and chaos.

But I saw open sewers with drunks laying in them, in Paris. I saw a homeless guy in Amsterdam who was on his knees vomiting in the train station and then eating it, at the urging of onlookers. The air in Munich was so dirty I could taste it. Everybody ate at these long tables, together. Shared bathrooms that were tiny closets. Creaky old buildings with no light. The old folks in Salzburg rented out parts of the homes to tourists in summer, and then shut them off entirely in winter, too expensive to heat.

Our lack of past must seem strange to Europeans and Brits – we don’t have 400-yr-old buildings. It’s a blessing, opening us to possibility. And perhaps a curse in that we lack a sense of history, a grounding.

Backwards in some ways, forwards in others.

102

Man, you haven’t been to AMERICA. You’ve been to the coasts. The farthest inland you’ve been is…Vegas?

As fessie points out, you’ve been to a lot of places where people run away to. You don’t run away to Iowa to be homeless, you go to San Francisco. If you’re super poor you don’t go to a suburb, you go to the city where you can get a free meal and a bus pass.

I’m no flag-waving patriot myself, but I do know my American geography. I feel like I’ve been to more of “America” by living in and traveling through Ohio than you have by visiting key places on the coast.

103

It loosk pretty bad until you start to break the numbers;

Of the middle class portion of uninsured, a large part of them are transient. IE, they are between jobs, and choose to go uninsured until their next job. Another way to look at it, is the average length of time someone is uninsured is only a few months. Although at any given time, 17 million might be uninsured, its not the same people over and over.

104

You can’t really say that because country A reacted to a different situation differently, country B couldn’t have reacted to a different situation differently. I mean, it’s not even a false equivalency. It’s not an equivalency at all.

105

But you can say that we play the national anthem a lot because of the Cold War? Sure, makes perfect sense.

106

You don’t think fighting a war of ideals for over 40 years against an enemy on the other side of the world that most people have never seen requires people to be pumped up with a lot of patriotism/jingoism/national pride/whatever you want to call it? That doesn’t make sense to you at all?

107

Well, if it does, why don’t/didn’t the British and the French display the same sort of jingoism?

108

Because they’re different countries filled with different people who had different circumstances? Because they’re older empires whose people are sick of it? Maybe they do a bit, but express it in different ways? I see a lot of Union Jacks, and the French are well known for their national pride. There are a lot of possible answers other than, “the cold war had nothing to do with it.”

109

You just implied that it’s required.

110

Was it the word “probably” that gave you that impression?

111

Because the Warsaw Pact was “next door”, not almost halfway around the world, making its threat very tangible. Consider jingoism as a public relations campaign against a threat that was not as tangible for most Americans.

112

This isn’t far from the truth.

America is, in most places, so big and spread out that you pretty much have to do a lot of driving. Hence the big cars and the cheap gasoline. Which leads to more sprawl and more driving.

Food is cheap here compared to much of the rest of the world. That’s partly because we have so much wide open space for farming or ranching. Gasoline used to be cheap, too; now it’s only cheaper than elsewhere (like in the UK).

Throughout most of human history, if you got sick you’d be in major trouble. It’s only thanks to recent (i.e. in the past century or so) advances in medicine that this is no longer true (and there are some kinds of sick that are still major trouble no matter how good your insurance). The U.S.'s main problem in this area compared to other countries is, I believe, that it just happened that health care is tied to health insurance, which is tied to one’s employer. Which is a problem for those who don’t have good, permenant, full-time jobs.

How so? I suspect it’s almost meaningless to talk about the crime rate of the U.S. as a whole, because it varies depending on where you are.

Definitely true in this economic climate. Not as much during more prosperous times.

Not from my perspective.

I’m sure that there are countries with a higher standard of living than the U.S.A. There may be some tradeoff in terms of freedom, diversity, or opportunity.

Quoted for truth.

113

Not that post- your most recent one.

That’s a better argument, but many prominent and influential Americans appear to have believed in the threat themselves. Consider how easily Joe McCarthy managed to scare Congress into doing more or less whatever he wanted.

114

I’m from McCarthy’s home state, and know a lot about his career. What do you mean by “McCarthy managed to scare Congress into doing more or less what he wanted”? Can you name any legislation that McCarthy authored or controlled its passage? Any major Senate floor vote that McCarthy masterminded?

Actually, McCarthy’s continual blustering more often than not blew up in his face. After his famous speech claiming that the State Department was “infested with communists”, the Senate formed the Tydings Committee to investigate the allegations. As Wikipedia says,

McCarthy later went on to support Tydings’ opponent in his Congressional election campaign, and accused Tydings of “protecting Communists” and “shielding traitors.” A Senate subcommittee later investigated this election and referred to it as “a despicable, back-street type of campaign,” as well as recommending that the use of defamatory literature in a campaign be made grounds for expulsion from the Senate.

And then there were the disastrous Army-McCarthy hearings in 1954. In January 1954, when the hearings started, 50% of those polled had a positive opinion of McCarthy. In June, that number had fallen to 34%. In the same polls, those with a negative opinion of McCarthy increased from 29% to 45%. In December 1954, the Senate voted to “condemn” McCarthy, only the fifth time in its history the Senate had done so.

115

Fur and panty problems are a thing of the past. See, the panties wouldn’t fit over all the fur, but eventually shaving became more widely popular.

God Bless America.

116

And it doesn’t hold up. If one lived in Europe during the post WWII years, and the majority of Americans one met or heard of in the media were (a) Eisenhower Administration diplomats, (b) military personnel posted to the bases in Germany, or (c) tourists, who in those days tended to be rich and conservative leaning, well, then you might well get that impression. I know you’re not anywhere near old enough to have lived through the postwar years, but I think that period set the tone for later generations in terms of how America is regarded by the UK and Europe.

117

Cisco was referring specifically to how often we play the national anthem (ie., way more than other countries).

118

You didn’t mention (d), by far the most common way Europeans knew of Americans: through American motion pictures and television shows.

119

No kidding. Funny story - when I first moved here, my 11th grade American History class was given a pop quiz on the first day of school to see how much we knew already.

I got the highest score, based almost entirely on stuff I learned from watching The Simpsons (ie., “who shot Lincoln? Bart Simpson with a Nerf gun dressed as John Wilkes Booth, right?”). And the kicker is this was an honors class.

I’ll take your word for it on McCarthy. I was under the impression that he was responsible for the creation of the HUAC (and presumably a similar committee in the Senate), and that he was the most influential man in Congress until the Army-McCarthy hearings.

120

The House Un-American Activities Committee was created years before McCarthy was elected to Congress, and he never served in the House.