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TEN THINGS I LOVE ABOUT AMERICA

The land of the free where nothing is free, the home of the brave where everyone needs a safe space. Making fun of America is low-hanging fruit at this point, just look at our geriatric leadership and obese citizenry. Today, I want to focus on  the good stuff about this country, to escape cynicism for a little while, because despite our issues we do actually have a lot going for us. Here are ten things I love about America.

Everyone loves to shit on America for having lousy public transit and unwalkable cities, but who cares? We’ve got cars. Not just that, we have a whole culture around cars. Having a personal automobile is the ultimate symbol of freedom. You can go where you want whenever you feel like it. No waiting for the bus, no sharing a bench with strangers.

Car culture brings a lot of options. You can get a pickup truck for work, or a fuel-efficient commuter, or a cheap Japanese pile of crap. You could even have all three, because buying a car in America is super cheap! If you’ve got a job, you can afford a car.

If you’re really feeling froggy, you can modify the hell out of your car into something completely new. Meet up with your driving buddies and show off all the work you did! Can’t do that with those fancy European trains. You can’t have sex on them, either.

Americans love to make a whole bunch of noise. Football is a great example of that, with all those fireworks and fanfare it’s like having the Olympics three times a week. We love to scream and cheer, we even take that flag-waving chest-beating attitude to the dull, dull world of politics. Clearly, this is a reflection of our own meat-headed arrogance. Good. I like arrogance, and I like when people get really excited about stupid stuff. It’s fun.

France and Italy can shove their fancy food and eight-course meals right up their squeaky-clean colons. Cheeseburgers are the greatest food item ever invented. It’s as versatile as it is delicious. You can put anything on it and it’ll still be a winner. You can sit down for a gourmet burger and a beer, you can grab an easy, greasy “slutburger” from the local drive-thru, or you can grill one up in your backyard and never be disappointed. I could eat a cheeseburger every single day and never get tired of the bastards.

“It’s fucking close to water!” goes the old joke comparing American beer to sex in a canoe. Yeah, and both things are great! When I get off work, I want something light and refreshing, not a tankard of warm, unpronounceable German beef broth. American beer is light and cheap, meaning you can have a few of them without hurting your wallet or overloading your stomach. It’s sweet, it’s tasty, and above all, it’s COLD.

America’s pastime has been supplanted by America’s religion: Football. Football is fine, I like that people get really loud and stupid over it (see: #2), but baseball is just so much more relaxing. It’s a game where you can hang out with your buddies rather than obsessing over distant millionaires. When you get up for a beer and a hot dog, you likely aren’t missing a crucial play. Most importantly, if you’ve got better things to do (which you should), you don’t have to follow every single game in the season. There are 161 others for you to catch.

America is the laughing stock of the erudite Western world, and we don’t give a fuck. Americans would rather skip the classroom and the boring lectures and get straight to work. Having multiple careers as you try to figure out your path in life is not only common, it’s pretty celebrated (see: #10), which top-down, expert-obsessed countries just can’t wrap their heads around. We have no respect for experts because we don’t like the authority they represent, and most of us would rather learn things on our own through trial and error. This learn-it-yourself culture is exactly why we have so many entrepreneurs and small businesses here.

The only downside is that if you did sell your kidneys for college, you’ll be completely unprepared for having an actual job. That’s because your boss didn’t learn his system from school, he learned it himself. That’s also why he’s way cooler than you.

The Red, White and Blue kicks ass. We’ve got a really cool flag and we love to plaster it on all of our favorite things. Most of our government buildings hold true to the colonial architecture styles of old, and even though nobody likes going in there, it’s nice to look at. Our national anthem is about watching the flag refuse to fall during our darkest hour. We invented Hollywood and rock n’ roll. Our cities are beautiful, and there is so much variety between them. And you can’t forget the wilderness that we haven’t developed strip malls over yet, like the lush forests of the Mountain West, the Great Plains, the southwestern badlands, or the endless Florida swamps. America truly is a beautiful place, in both the urban and exurban senses.

The American creation epic is one of the greatest stories every told. It brings us larger-than-life heroes like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, as well as a clear villain in King George. Paul Revere’s midnight ride, the Boston Tea Party, John Hancock’s giant signature on the Declaration of Independence- these are thrilling tales of inspiring people risking life and limb to not just free us from British rule, but to create a whole new system where the even commoner was free to live as he chose. I don’t even care if these stories have been embellished over the generations, they give the United States a rich and vibrant history and instill us with our own fighting spirit. The dream of rising up and overthrowing a tyrannical government is still a big part of our culture, whether you’re a punk rocker of a 2^nd Amendment diehard.

Personally, I could never live outside of the city, but I recognize that the bulk of America can’t stand the uber-social hustle of the metropolis. In a country of 330 million people, our largest city of New York only accounts for 8 million. Almost all of us live in the flyover states, doing flyover things, preferring to be left alone by the powers that be, because that’s what America is all about. It makes for a culture where we look out for each other, because we all know each other, and if something bad happens to the Jacobsons down the block, then we all know there’s a threat to the community as a whole. Americans are very nice, that’s one of the biggest points of praise we get from the rest of the world, and I think this love of small towns in why.

I dated a Chinese girl once who was fascinated that Americans like to do things themselves. She tagged along one day as I was doing some home repairs, and she explained her home country this way: In China, you have one job, and going outside of that one job is rude. You’re taking away somebody else’s opportunity to be helpful. If an accountant needs a lightbulb changed, if would be unthinkable of him not to hire an electrician for that simple task.

That’s stupid.Doing things yourself is fun. It gives you a more intimate connection with your stuff and it builds skills along the way. It is way better to have basic skills everywhere than to be completely useless in all but one field. I can’t imagine how having more skills could ever be a bad thing.

The difference is that China doesn’t like individualism. Decades of communism (followed by decades of “communism”) have eliminated that kind of thinking from the gene pool. In America, individual self interest is the norm. I can learn how to do my own home repairs because I can save money. An electrician losing business on me isn’t really my problem.

This American DIY mindset goes beyond chores. You can try a hundred different careers, and people are actually impressed! Suppose your resume includes stand-up comedy, sales, oil rigging, Uber driving and floristry. Many cultures, especially the Asian ones, will assume you’ve failed in all those things, which is why you keep jumping around. An American will think it’s awesome that you’ve done so much stuff.

Do-it-yourself-ism is the cornerstone of American culture. Half of this list can be traced back to it. Why depend on public transportation when you can drive to work yourself? Why pay through the nose for college when you can learn via YouTube or trial-and-error yourself? What the hell do we need the British for when we can build a whole country ourselves?

Why get a job when you can even do that yourself? America, because of tinkerer culture, is a small-business driven economy. Firms with fewer than 500 employees make up for 99.7% of private sector employment (excluding solo businesses). Half of our GDP comes from tinkerers, experimenters and do-it-yourselfers. When these small employers don’t make it (and most of the time they don’t), it doesn’t negatively affect the economy as a whole.

Compare that with when large businesses fail, and occasionally have to be bailed out for fear that they’ll destabilize the whole system. Having half of the economy in small businesses mostly balances that equation, and that balance is what has made the United States of America such an economic powerhouse for so long.¹ Plus, there’s the added benefit of shielding most of America from the soul-deadening slog of big corporate employment. It’s just better to work for a small firm where you know who your coworkers are.

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¹ The GDP share of small businesses (SGDP) is declining. This is really bad. In the spirit of this article, I’ll save that subject for another time.