A satirical look at the world

America is the Coolest Country on Earth

You’re just gonna have to deal with it

“Cynicism, like gullibility, is a symptom of underdeveloped critical faculties.” ― Jamie Whyte

America is the coolest, most bad-ass country on the face of the planet.

That’s right, I said it.

Although, notice that I didn’t say that “America is the greatest country.” That’s a whole other deal, and honestly, I couldn’t care less as to what country might be “the greatest” or if such a thing could even be determined.

I said America is the coolest country.

An Analogy

Imagine that countries are like kids in high school in the 1950s with the usual assortment: jocks, nerds, cheerleaders, etc. There are bullies that have a history of beating up other kids for lunch money (ahem… Germany) and snooty loner kids that are artsy and cool in their own way but keep to themselves and judge everybody from an aloof distance (I’m looking at you France). Then you have the ultra nice, safe, responsible kids — the Nordic countries. They’re the type your mom wants you to emulate but with their ultra-egalitarian, conformist culture, they’re a snooze fest at parties and there aren’t many girls trying to get into their pants (in this analogy, pants stand-in for borders and girls are the immigrants of the world who are dying to get inside them).

But there is one kid on the block who stands out from everyone. He’s the cool senior kid on the Harley Davidson with the leather jacket. He’s usually alone, doing his own thing in his own way. “The metric system is for pussy-conformist losers,” he says in a sultry, cavalier tone as he lights a cigarette and revs up his bike.

But even though he’s a loner, he’s always being trailed by an entourage of women just dying to get into his pants, not least because all the girls who have done so before always seem to go away satisfied. (America still leads the world in opening its arms to the world’s immigrants, especially those who are impoverished, and evidence shows that those immigrants tend to escape that poverty in a short time).

You respect him because he doesn’t take shit from anyone and you don’t mess with him cause you know he can kick your ass without even trying. In typical cool-kid fashion, America has an arrogant, individualist attitude that just makes you wanna slap him upside the head. He also has a danger fetish (America leads the world in accidental deaths) and a drug problem.

But that doesn’t mean he’s a bad guy. I mean, sure, he’s gotten caught up with the wrong crowd plenty of times and done some shady things. But he took one hell of a stand when that weird, angry kid with the small mustache brought weapons to school and almost turned everyone’s life into a living hell.

And as if that wasn’t impressive enough, he starts every day by opening his wallet and giving fat stacks to all the poor kids who can’t afford lunch money. (Referring here to America’s generous foreign aid budget).

But America isn’t just a cool kid with big muscles, lots of girls, and a sensitive side to boot. This kid has serious musical talent (being the origin of jazz and hip hop), kicks ass at the science fair (inventing the iPhone, the lightbulb, and leading the world in medical innovation), and still manages to upstage the nerds in intellectual achievement (America leads the world in Nobel Laureates by a large margin and 8 out of 10 of the best universities are in the US).

So you get the idea. This guy’s a bad-ass. But it gets better. By far, the one thing that sets him apart from the pack of wannabes and posers is that he took a stand for something he believed in back when he was the new kid. He faced up to one of the biggest bullies in school — we’ll call him George for allegorical purposes — and against all the odds, won the right to never be pushed around.

He stood up for an idea before it was cool: that of self-determination — the right to think, speak, believe and trade freely with others, and that had ripple effects throughout the entire school for how the kids saw themselves and their relationship to power.

Am I giving America too much credit? Here’s some food for thought from historians, starting with an analysis from the University of Groningen:

“The American Revolution had a significance far beyond the North American continent… Its success strengthened the concept of natural rights throughout the Western world and furthered the Enlightenment rationalist critique of an old order built around hereditary monarchy and an established church.”

Historian Gordon Wood, has a similar analysis, saying that the American revolution,

“not only radically changed the personal and social relationships of people, including the position of women, but also destroyed aristocracy as it had been understood in the Western world for at least two millennia…the Revolution had created a society fundamentally different from the colonial society of the eighteenth century. It was in fact a new society unlike any that had ever existed anywhere in the world.”

Make no mistake though, America is far from a tired cliche. He’s a complicated, walking contradiction.

America, for instance, is known throughout the world for its commitment to liberty, yet it also locks up more people per capita than any other nation on earth. Criminologists have pointed out that America’s high relative poverty rate of 17% is likely due, in large part, to the devastating effects of mass incarceration on the households destroyed by removing breadwinners and fathers from them in such large numbers.

According to the Center for Community Change, if not for the rise in incarceration that has occurred in recent decades, “the number of people in poverty would fall by as much as 20 percent.”

That fact is relevant because it suggests that much of America’s inequality problem may be a matter of a simple policy change, and one that has little to do with wealth concentration or economic liberty.

But even America’s high relative poverty rate doesn’t tell the whole story. When economists in the Journal of Economic Perspectives studied absolute poverty — the percentage of people actually struggling to make it, regardless of comparisons to median income — they found America’s rate of poverty to be lower than that of Finland, Sweden, and the UK.

There is also evidence that upward mobility is still alive and kicking. There is the economic mobility of immigrants that I alluded to earlier. Then there is The report on Income Mobility in the U.S. from 1996–2005 which stated that “there was considerable income mobility of individuals in the U.S. economy during the 1996 through 2005 period as over half of taxpayers moved to a different income quintile over this period.” The report goes on to state that “roughly half of taxpayers who began in the bottom income quintile in 1996 moved up to a higher income group by 2005.”

That’s just economics. America is the land of contradictions in other ways too. For instance, it is home to one of the most linguistically diverse populations in the world, yet has an unusually high number of people who are only fluent in one language.

Then there is its reputation for being stubbornly individualistic — and it is — but it still manages to donate more to private charity per capita than any other nation, and is second only to Scandinavia in its high level of civic group engagement, according to a report from the Brookings Institution.

The point is, there is no pigeon-holing America. He is a mystery, wrapped in an enigma. But let’s be honest. That’s just part of his charm.

Here’s the Point

It’s trendy today to hate on America. It’s easy to be cynical about a society that has become so powerful that there is little in the world that has not been touched by its influence. As with any powerful entity, mistakes are inevitable.

Is America unique in making any of the mistakes it is guilty of? If I answered “yes” I would have to ignore a lot of history: Nazi Germany, Maoist China, the Reign of Terror in Stalinist Russia, the institution of slavery that was pervasive across all cultures throughout human history, the practice of human, no less, child sacrifice, by the Aztecs and the Mayans. I could go on.

In his book, Enlightenment Now, The Case For Reason, Science, Humanism and Progress, Steven Pinker presents over 70 graphs showing that in almost all categories relevant to human flourishing — poverty, violence, human rights, education, disease, life expectancy, infant mortality, and even happiness — the world has, on average, improved by leaps and bounds since the dawn of The Enlightenment. And as I made the case above, the United States was instrumental in spearheading the Enlightenment project, in economics, culture, and political structures, as well as defending it when it came under attack from Fascism in the 20th century — to say nothing of the fact that when downtrodden of the world vote with their feet, there is no question that America is the place to be.

To be fair, patriotism has been hijacked by chauvinists. “America is the greatest country on earth!” they say. As far as I can tell, there is no such thing. An enlightened patriotism is about allegiance to the values and aspirations of the American experiment. And for those, we have reasons to be beam with pride.

We can unite under a new slogan, with the image of a sexy, strong, complicated, slightly arrogant, bad-ass rebel riding his Harley off into the sunset, planted firmly in our minds.

Because I think we can say with confidence, that while America might not be the greatest, it is without question, the coolest country on earth.