America

Thinking about America today. 

Well, about the way it portrays itself, and the way it constructs and perpetuates its self-image. (I know it's problematic to personify a nation of millions, but bear with me.)

The land of the free. The paragon of democracy, openness and possibility. 'The American Dream'. The epitome of free enterprise. The culture that Britain seems to want to emulate - so dominant are American cultural values/elements here.

A country founded on the destruction of a native population. An economy founded on slavery. A country where a civil rights movement was necessary as recently as the 1960s. A country where - it appears to the outsider - to be left wing (or, God forbid, 'socialist') is beyond the pale...where the message of freedom/plurality is dominant, but where in reality what's permissable is narrowly constrained. Iraq, Grenada, Central America in the 1980s, Vietnam.

I'm not anti-American. But I have problems with the way that the 'official narrative' of a nation is draped uneasily over the more angular and uneven skeleton of its historical reality. (See also Britain and its 'Imperial History' narrative.)