Beltane Garlic Moon
The U.S. looks different from outside its borders. Of course, that’s a truism, but, it is also true.
The guy who worked at the Best Western Stil said it was his dream to come to America. I would say it a bit differently, I believe America was his dream; that is, a place to lodge, for him, a wonder, a hope, a promise of a life he for some reason cannot find in Romania.
No different, psychically, is the dream the Islamists have of America. Again, their dream is America, but this time it is a nightmare of Islam hating, God denying, capitalist entranced monsters whose hope is to remake the world.
As world hegemon we have become a global Rorschach, an actual physical place and a real nation on which many project their most fervent inner hopes or fears. In this sense I suppose we’re not much different from the cult of celebrity or the faded past of monarchy, people in seemingly untouchable realms whom we can imagine as the embodiment of good or evil.
Have we a sort of free market in which irrational entrepreneurial exuberance can catapult a power to Trumpdom? If that’s what you really, really want, then, it could happen. Have we a legal system that honors and defends the individual against oppression by others or the state? Yes. No. Sometimes. Is this a beautiful, varied land filled with the best and the harshest and gradations between? Yes, the natural beauty of the USA matches that anywhere.
What it is and what it is not, this is home. And I’m glad to be back in it.