Starvin Larry

It’s very hard for people born and raised in a country to actually see it as it is.  It is even harder for people in a country and in a culture to have a dispassionate view of their own culture and the state of it.

This is particularly hard for the US because we’re such a great big country, (as a friend said about my older son, once “larger than life in all directions.”)  Our pop culture even projects outward, appealing to people who frankly don’t get most of it save for the fact that it’s “new” and “cool.”  Our language is spoken — for varous values of spoken, and particularly UNDERSTOOD — the world over.  We can leave our enormous country and still be home, as the people talking to us are to a great extent influenced by the image the US has created of itself in the media…