Born in the USA

"Men become civilized, not in proportion to their willingness to believe, but in proportion to their readiness to doubt."

If only that line had been inserted into the national anthem, so that blind obedience and monoculture chauvinism couldn't be called American traits. Alas, such was not the way the cookie crumbled. The fact that Americans have become the Alpha humans says more about the nature of mankind than most are willing to admit. Freedom, liberty and justice are words that mean absolutely nothing nowadays. They are vague concepts that we are programmed to believe in, but not to grasp. The real tripod on which the might American Empire rests upon is Greed, Fear and Ignorance. These three factors are the backbone of our power. The greed makes the war machine useful, the fear makes it necessary and the ignorance makes it just. Say what you will, this is a very solid foundation for global dominance. The US learned a lot from the 20th Century. Primarily that in the game of geopolitics you are either dominated or dominate, rule or ruled, kill or are killed. Failing to accept these facts as the basis for our behavior on the world stage is a perfect example of the other great strength of the American people- collective amnesia. Every generation has virtually no grasp of what came before it, nor any desire to even remember what happened when they were young. Whatever becomes of this wild odyssey we call a nation, it will teach humanity a thing or two about itself. Lessons that probably need to be learned if we are ever going to make our presence in the Galaxy anything but coincidental and brief. A very wise American named HL Mencken had this to say about how things work politically in this country- " Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule—and both commonly succeed, and are right... The United States has never developed an aristocracy really disinterested or an intelligentsia really intelligent. Its history is simply a record of vacillations between two gangs of frauds."