Spin and Swagger

One of the realities of living in Korea, as a South African, is that you are always being asked to pretend to be American, to mimic Americans and their accents. Some schools ask you to tell your students that you're from America, or Canada.

This morning a recuiter called, mistook me for the previous American teacher (at GnB), but offered me a morning job anyway. After enthusiastically trying to sell me the job, she asked where I was from, and then she suddenly hesitated, weakly asking me to send my resume with a photo. What's the photo for? To determine my ethnicity? The email came back saying the job was no longer available.

I arrived in Korea with puppy dog curiosity and enthusiasm, and didn't mind rolling with the punches, but now I do mind. Why should I pretend to be from another country? That's racism all over again.
Even worse, I am not going to pretend to represent a country I don't even believe in, and daily lose more and more respect for.

America is a lot of hot air today. It's a tragedy that a country destined for so much, has become filled with its own vanity, sold on its own spin, until all it is, is spin. Take Microsoft, one of the world's biggest companies. My computer runs on Microsoft. It doesn't work very well. It's flawed. You have to wipe out the whole system every few weeks to get it to work properly. And this is from a top American company. A company that made a reasonable product, and then flattened its competitors. A monopoly doesn't care how good its product is as long as it's the only product on the market.

America is no different. They don't care what their policies are, how they effect other countries, because they, supposedly, are the sole superpower.

You have a leader who is all swagger and no substance, and a population who have endorsed him over and over again. On critical issues like the Environment, Energy, Foreign Relations, America has managed to be terrifically stupid. If America could be averaged down to one person, that person would be an overweight, steamrolling, Pop Idol type personality, dressed in glittering sequins, and lip synching to his own song. This person would be starstruck with himself. But the live performances would only work for so long. If there was a special request from the audience, there'd be a problem. And eventually booing.

Did you know that America's entire economy is propped up by Asian economies like Japan, South Korea and China? And the only reason these countries continue to prop up the American dollar, is because their trade investments are so huge. It's really like paying the rent for your local supermarket so that you can continue to buy and sell stuff to the supermarket. Eventually you're going to think, hell, I virtually own the supermarket, why should I let it dictate terms.
Why? Because if the dollar fizzles and the American economy crashes, the whole world crashes.
And so it goes on.
The problem really lies with a country that builds nothing, does nothing of value, its primary industry is Americans that sell houses to each other. WalMarts and McDonalds is not industry. IBM an American company? Even Levi jeans are made in China today. America is all OUTSOURCE. That would be fine if what it did produce was of any value. But all it produces, all it creates, is spin. That's like a car company making commercials of cars but no cars. Yes, you can make a certain amount of money that way, until someone decides, when something goes wrong (like an engine that only runs on too expensive gasoline), to rather go to a real company, one that actually makes engines, and not the spinner/selling agent.

A good way to gauge the American mindset is to have a look at the films pouring out of Hollywood. They are garbage, with few exceptions. When you have movies like The 40-Year-Old Virgin at the top of the box office, something is wrong. Just Like Heaven (currently number 1 at the box office) is about a man in love with a ghost. At number three is Lord of War:
A wily arms dealer dodges bullets and betrayal as he schemes his way to the top of his profession, only to come face to face with his conscience. But it's not easy to leave a life of girls, guns and glamour when nobody wants you to stop, not even your enemies.
This is the stuff that is entertaining people today.
When a Hurricane hits, people have no idea what to do, or how it happened. Why? Because they have no idea what is happening in the real world anyway.

Already Asian countries are looking to the Euro as a reserve currency, and we've seen the Euro gain a lot of strength against the dollar.
Asian countries are still stuck with huge amounts of US bonds in their possessions. Dollars. They want to get rid of them, but they can't, not without endangering their own currecies and thus their economies.

But at ground level, the Koreans, and Japanese, and Chinese, all want to be like America. They want to learn American English (which is becoming increasingly unpopular everywhere, especially Europe), pierce their ears, tattoo the backs of their shoulders and walk around in cargo pants, and T-shirts that say "American Princess".
I don't really understand the fascination (in Asia) for a country that dropped two atomic bombs on Japan, and wiped out over a million Koreans in the Korean war, not to mention other Asian catastrophes like Vietnam and Cambodia. Vietnam did very well after America lost the war there, and today Korea still struggles with itself, still torn in two, because America 'won' it here, and they're still here (and so is the Cold War). Is it Asian culture to voluntarily submit to and serve the bully?

I suppose it is all about money. America is rich (actually they aren't), and all countries aspire to the glossy magazines and shiny television commercials that show shiny happy people in shiny happy neighborhoods.
Americans are in movies like Lord of the Rings. Written by a South African, inspired by life in Britain, directed by a New Zealander, shot in New Zealand, but populated by Americans called Viggo, Elijah and Liv. There are some British actors, and they make sense, but the starring roles go to some of the worst actors. Peter Jackson, to his credit, makes them look good enough.

We will see, in the next few years, the big balloon of America, deflate - or burst. America is headed for economic catastrophe, whether or not oil is a factor. America simply does not save, and cannot balance its budget. It simply continues to spend more than it saves, and now it can barely pay off the interest on what it owes to other countries. Yet so much of the world continues to foolishly endorse this powerful but foolish government.
We're also going to see converging catastrophes, including widespread disease like this world has ever seen. We already have Aids creeping through society, but saying the word 'Aids' today is like saying 'God'. Everyone has an idea of what you mean, but there's no concept of reality. And gaining momentum, every day, is H5N1. There are reports that this pandemic in waiting, has already found some efficiency at human to human transmission in Indonesia.
As if all this wasn't enough, we will struggle to find the energy to just run our lives. Fuel will become unaffordable for transportation, and then we'll struggle in winters with heating and overheated summers to find ways to cool ourselves.
And added to all this, is the slow process of the climate, absorbing all the years of human excess, and slowly, but inexorably, throwing it all back at us. You might think the climate is the least of our worries, but you'd be wrong.

And which single country has done the most damage to our environment?

Just as it does no good to point a finger at George Bush (he's there at the behest of his American voters), neither does it do any good to blame America. You and I are to blame. We're part of this world and we've endorsed, through default or delusion, the ridiculous thoughts that govern this framework of lunacy. We endorse America whenever we watch an American movie, or eat McDonalds, or buy or imitate something American.

Where I begin to draw the line, is where I basically own up to my beliefs. I don't endorse what America is today, or what it is doing. I won't pretend to either. But you're damned if you do, and damned if you don't. That's where we are today.

I'd rather be somewhere else.