mikeybones

Its not America I find annoying; its Americanism: a social disease of the postindustrial world that must inevitably infect each of the mercantile nations in turn, and is called ' American' only because our nation is the most advanced case of the malady, much as one speaks of the spanish flu, or Japanese type B-encephalitis. Its symptoms are a loss of work ethic, a shrinking of inner resources, and a constant need for external stimulation, folowed by spiritual decay and moral narcosis. You can recognize the victim by his constant efforts to get in touch with himself, to believe his spritual feebleness is an interesting psychological warp, to construe his fleeing from responsibility as eveidence that he and his life are uniquely open to new experience. In the latter stages, the sufferer is reduced to seeking that most trivial of human activities: fun. As for our food? no one denies that Americans excel in one narow cubric: the snack. And I suspect there's something symbolic in that.