Supersize me with an extra order of some shock and awe

Just last night I was reading “The Limits of Power- The End of American Exceptionalism” by Andrew J. Bacevich and say the following:

“Committed to quantitative solutions, Reagan never question the proposition that the American way of life required ever-larger quanatities of energy, especially oil.”

This was a resonant statement. It really seemed to describe the entire American culture and society that we have, perhaps, unwittingly crafted to our detriment. The culture of more and more, rather than less is more. Bigger is better. He who dies with the most toys wins, and of course, ‘Supersize me’.

America has been a remarkable experiment in how people deal with abundance and plenty out the ears. It seems to define our collective civic theology right from the beginning.

With the historically unequalled abundance that the American experience has given its people they have done many things. They have written great enduring works of literature, composed  music that pleases beyond the generations and decades, invented some of the most important technology known to mankind, built, restored, preserved and served to inspire an entire globe to the possibilities that seemed as limitless as our resources and boundaries.

Once the boundaries became fixed, the resources still seemed to go on. Not just the resources of creativity and aspiration of its people but the boundless, or so it seemed, resources that our geography provided. There was always plenty. Plenty of oil, timber, uninhabited land, under-utilized human resources, water and more. So we built a society to fill the vastness of those resources. Rather like having a large bank account and spending to exercise it to its limits.

If there were one idea that expressed the American experience it would be the concept of ‘more’. For those new Americans from improverished countries ruled by harsh regimes it must have seemed like heaven indeed. I know that my Swedish ancestors that came over just after the turn of the last century saw it that way

They came from essentally serfdom to unimagined plenitude, to an America that had no limits other than the grime and sweat of honest work. It’s a good thing that they are no longer around to see what the peculiarly American preoccupation with more would ultimately bring.

From Big to Bigger Macs, from small towns to sprawling suburbs, from the family car to the five car garage attached to the McMansion, from a struggling Jeffersonian democracy (small ‘d’ intentional) to a globe encompassing corporate profit driven imperial presidency, America has become almost a charicature of itself. Sort of like Las Vegas is a movie set version of the real New York, Paris and Venice.

As Reinhold Niebuhr wrote: “the paths of progress proved to be more devious and unpredictable than the putative managers of history could understand”. This is especially true of the current breed of arrogance that has ruled this country from the corporate boards to the White House over the last 30-plus years.

It’s led to overweight children with early stage heart disease, a populace that feels entitled to never ending credit for shopping sprees to make them feel better after a tougher than usual day, to a government machine that believes that just  what the rest of the world needs is a good making over in our own delusional image. Based on smoke, mirrors and sitcoms.

My African ‘daughter’, Natacha is the best thing that could have happened to my little family here in Reno. From the Congo, she is a constant reminder - and reality check - about how having more doesn’t necessarily make us the people that she came over here expecting to find.  Like she told me the other day when I remarked on some people in a restaurant that, as I described them looking like refugees, “no, I was a refugee in a civil war. We didn’t dress that way.” She doesn’t understand how people with so very much, living in abundance, can act like so much less. Neither do I.