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250 Years of the USA

A Hollywood film poster that shows the best and worst of America in one product

Nothing made by humans is all good. Of all the verities that have been agreed on since the dawn of thought, and hence, civilisation and history, the imperfectability of humanity is high on the list.

The USA is therefore, like every other nation in history, a flawed, imperfect country, devised by humans, caught like us all in the flood of history. Since it is 250 years old (more or less today), we must also agree that it was conceived and born relatively recently, compared to many other civilisations (India and China and England, for example). Human recorded history is at least 5,500 years old, after all.

So, let us admit that the USA is deeply flawed: it was greatly enriched by human slavery, an extraordinarily callous evil; another mass evil, part of its founding myth and extension Westward was the near or total genocide of the indigenous peoples who first lived and belonged on the land now called the USA - let us admit that the USA has been marred by civil war, ongoing racism - also smeared and bleared by corruption, environmental destruction, greed, and a near-relentless materialism. As Churchill almost said, the USA is the worst country except perhaps for all the others.

However, despite and because of its democratic system, capitalist financial model, and the "American Dream" that once welcomed people from around the world to a "land of opportunity" - and its often brilliant, sometimes ruthless, many times war-like, leaders - American culture captured the imagination of the world. America has been at the vanguard of the West, for at least a century, in tech, film, TV, and often in music, art, literature, architecture, and fashion. Jazz, folk music, the Blues, rock and roll, planes, cars, stock markets, abstract expressionism, modern poetry, "Hollywood movies", Coca-Cola, fast food, comic books, theme parks, slam poetry, nuclear bombs, home computers, smart phones, social media, and AI - all pioneered and/or developed by Americans.

For every killer and billionaire pervert, slaveholder and war profiteer, huckster and charlatan, liar and thief, for every monstrous deed and bigoted act, for every gun killing spree, forever chemical toxic event, for every moment of atomic/ napalm destruction, for every dubious captain of industry and tech-bro madman, we have in no order, an Elvis, Helen Keller, Ali, Ashe, Angelou, Marilyn, Madonna, Biles, Clint Eastwood, Tubman, Orson Welles, Serena Williams, Thurgood Marshall, TS Eliot, F.L. Wright, the Wright Brothers, Twain, Fitzgerald, Wallace Stevens, Cher, Emily Dickinson, Hart Crane, Malcolm X, McCullers, Dr King, Obama, Spielberg, Harrison Ford, Plath, Baldwin, Edison, Poe, Morrison, Ellington, Nathan Lane, Lupino, Bogart, Marx Brothers, O'Neill, Alice Coachman, Lincoln, Lucille Ball, Ed Sullivan, Tom Ford, David Lynch, Bob Dylan, Wilma Mankiller, Wes Anderson, Langston Hughes, Douglass, Parks, Winfrey, Ellison, Ginsberg, Kerouac, Kubrick, Saul Bellow, Alice Walker, Jim Thorpe, William Carlos Williams, Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, Jessie Owens, Hammerstein, Ken Burns, Robin Williams, John Denver, Willie Nelson, Paul Revere, Steinbeck, Sitting Bull, Buck, Capote, Arthur Miller, Walt Disney, Tennessee Williams, Whitman, Bernstein, Jodie Foster, James Dean, Scorsese, and Melville, Houdini, Dewey, Harvey Milk, Emerson, Thoreau, William James, West, Hawthorne, H.D., Coltrane, DuBois, Spike Lee, Taylor Swift, Benjamin Franklin, Jimmy Carter, to name just a few greats born or raised or naturalised in the USA.

It is a paradox, and the current president exemplifies the magnified extremes, the dramatic poles, of the American experiment. With great wealth, freedom, hubris and adventurism, much can be denied, much harmed, much ruined. The current US moment is one of decline, decay, disruption and disrepute. Bad squatters have occupied a noble opportunity and mislaid the guiding ideals that were like flares in a storm at sea. The ship of state is foundering, on the rocks of human infamy; but other times and places have been beset by treacherous shoals, and outlasted the tempest, if only to be beached and begin anew.

As with all projects born of necessity, hope, and revolution, sometimes, some good can be accomplished, if only on the margins of a larger wastage.  May there be an America to salvage in another 250 years, and may it be greener, cleaner, kinder, wiser, better, safer and saner.

Happy birthday to a monstrously imperfect behemoth, the world's richest and most powerful country ever, a giant that, for every purposeful and accidental gesture of massive upheaval, somehow, from time to time, does enough good, to almost appear worth the effort, and the belief, in its higher purpose.
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