Born on Third Base, Americans Think We Hit a Triple

America has been lucky since its founding. What's the price of good fortune?

A Spanish friend once said to me, "Chris, the best and worst thing about your country is that you have no sense of the ridiculous." He could have pointed to Jimi Hendrix, Donald Trump, This is Spinal Tap, or rolling coal. Sure, other countries have plenty of brilliance, corruption, cultural innovation, incompetence, national pride and outright stupidity, but America takes it all to the next level. Our dials go to 11.

by Michael Satterfield

Ours is an adolescent culture, not yet moderated by an inescapable awareness of the absurdity of life. We seem still not to have quite grasped that power is only ever partial, that money can buy only passing snippets of something resembling happiness, that companies selling beer made from melted hockey rink ice and pickup trucks spewing theatrical smoke are playing their customers for the fools they demonstrably are.

This adolescent perspective isn’t our fault, but it is our blind spot. We've only had one war that affected civilians on a large scale, and that was 160 years ago. Most European countries have weathered such wars in living memory, plus severe depressions, fascism, and refugee crises that make the Mexican border seem well under control. So there's that. But there's something more: circumstance. The U.S. was born rich but we tell everyone (and ourselves) that we're self-made.