The American Dream is dead

  In these days it's hard to figure out who's a friend, a partner or an enemy. "America", by which most people mean the U.S., has gone mental. Europe has gone... nowhere, as usual. China has become reasonable in comparison. Everybody else is shivering in their boots because they have no idea how the new world order intends to cut the cake up.

  The latest insanity is the American soft invasion of Venezuela, done with impunity and against clear international law guidelines - because what's a law no one can impose if not a guideline?

  The talk is about several simple concepts:

• geography - the Monroe doctrine of Western hemisphere domination
• ideology - freedom, democracy, that kind of thing
• resources - oil, dollar hegemony and so on
• military - we've got the bomb!
• drugs - yeah, right!

  And as usual, there is almost no discussion about the thing that (we the) people value most: culture. It's the same with the immigration, race and gender wars and others like that, focusing on skin color and what specific sexual preference or physical characteristics people have, instead of the obvious issue: the clash of cultures.

  Politicians often use the "simple idea" to polarize the electorate into clear sides. They don't necessarily believe in the idea, they just pick one that seems popular and underutilized at the moment. But even when they draw these artificial ideological lines, different people understand different things about what these concepts mean.

  I would argue that democracy, freedom and all other simplistic ideological memes that are trumpeted around turn us away from the physical and human realities. My reasoning is that, if all people desire freedom - for example, they only want it within the confines of their own belief system and they would sincerely militate against freedoms that are contrary to their chosen culture.

  From this perspective, there is no Western Hemisphere, no democracy, no autocracy, no continents, but cultures in which some ideas can thrive and some won't. Culturally, Latin America has NOTHING to do with the one in the United States. Canada is Western European, not American. Eastern Europe is culturally closer to Russia than to the Western nations. Oh, yes, they want to be as wealthy and free, but to also maintain their cultural identity. Same for Asia, where India and China could not be further apart culturally and have very different traditions within their borders as well. Same for Australia, which is more Western than it will ever be Southern - if that makes sense. And then there's Africa.

  I think this is what people like Trump are missing completely. There is no superior culture. You can claim a qualitative difference between anything, but not cultures as a whole. Yet you can't separate America from the idea of the superior culture, their entire mythos would collapse. The Germans tried it, too, BTW, and they tried to impose it by force. Didn't work out for them.

  The U.S. has had a specific problem of a rather peculiar culture compared with the others. They branched off from the British Empire and made their own thing, then they had the geographical advantages that allowed them to become the biggest economy and military in the world. But their culture is what took them the extra mile. They used their resources to project it so well that now English is the most spoken language in the world, even when native speakers are a small minority of that. Everyone watches American movies, talks about the same series, uses the same sites, understands the cultural memes and even engages in the same polemics, even if meaningless elsewhere.

  And if Trump did anything more wrong that anything else is to destroy the myth of superior American culture. He truly believes American power lies with the military and is basically following the Fallout historical textbook - which is really a game, just putting it out there in case you're reading this, Donald.

  The city on the hill no longer shines, just shits - from a plane. No one believes in the "American dream" because most other countries have other - often better - solutions for life than corporate debt bondage for eternity. The "American exceptionalism" was never smarts, money or even power, but the idea that no one else achieves what they have and that the way forward was culturally towards the United States. You've got people that don't want to ever visit that country now. What a difference from 50 years ago when whole nations were dreaming of becoming American colonies.

  Yes, it was always a bedtime story, wishful thinking, a shared belief that everybody wanted to have, didn't reflect reality, but it was a nice dream to have. Now it has become a nightmare, almost overnight, and shocked people into waking up, or at least switching the side they sleep on. And yes, there is a real and present threat to American dominance when their well oiled (pardon the pun) dollar machine suddenly splutters and people start using anything else, the technology advantage switches to countries where people are actually motivated to work - ironically against American arrogance - and long term plans overshadow "democratic" election cycles and Americans wake up to being just a small country amongst many.

  What we are witnessing is a deconstruction of American mythology.

  Culture is an amalgamation of ideas that people want to believe in and feel comfortable doing so. You can convince them to change those beliefs through methods that include violence or financial wars, but they are slow and very inefficient methods. If an Iranian wants to be free, their idea of freedom is not to become an American. In one episode of South Park, Mexicans were realizing they don't actually like living in the U.S. and the border patrols were switching from keeping Mexicans out to preventing them to leave, because they were needed as cheap labor. It was a satire on what Trump was doing in his first term in office. In the second, that is becoming an international reality. If America is just another asshole with a big gun, what's making them different from any other?

  Reality may be about economic flows, resource chains and military industrial power, but most people are sticking with a narrative they particularly like that doesn't involve any of that. People just want to live their lives in a way they are comfortable with. For a long time, that seemed to be "The American way" and now everybody wakes up to the lie and quickly jumps to the next available one. Even when people say they are "pro-Western" and "pro-democratic", they now mean something entirely different than what they would have a decade ago. The dream is over.