America

I am lucky, in a lot of ways, I guess. One of the bigger ways, though, is that I have some perspective from my brief travels abroad that while there are some pretty sweet places in this world, with some great people, some beautiful culture and interesting ways of life, they all have been missing one thing.

Those other places...well, they just aren't as sweet as the United States of America.

I've been a permanent resident here for almost 30 years, and save for some very specific periods, I have been pretty satisfied with this great country. What's not to like?

For me, the love starts with the movies. The homegrown movies of the U.S. outpace every other market in the world, in almost all aspects; the films are better, the actors are (generally speaking) better, the special effects are better, the soundtracks are better, the camerawork is better...sure, we occasionally get the exceptional import from France, or Italy, or China, or even India. But, film-for-film, you just can't beat the quality of the American flick.

We Americans have a holiday where, for all intents and purposes, we wait outside--sometimes for hours on end--just to watch shit get blown up for 15 minutes, then we go home. When you really break down Independence Day, what do you really have as a holiday, since most people here don't necessarily celebrate the birth of this country?

Barbecues.
Action movies.
Fireworks.
Beer.

We get a day off for this here! Sure, we don't get the whole month of August off to lolligag around the Spanish countryside, but we get three days off each year WITH THE SPECIFIC GOAL OF COOKING MEAT OVER FIRE!!! I think most people don't even know what Labor Day is supposed to be! But, I know that every time I'm in town for that weekend, all I do is try to get people to set up a barbecue! Memorial Day? What fuckin' memorial? I know I'm supposed to cook meat that day!

Supply and demand. They have that in other countries, sure. But, it feels like supply and demand here is just more beautiful than it is in other places, you know? I like to play video games. A lot. Where can I turn to get my fix? Maybe a better question is "where can I NOT go to get my fix?" My Palm Pilot has video games, my local Pizza Hut has video games, my fuckin' cell phone has games, even the most base of PCs has Minesweeper (heads up JY: 11 seconds on Easy), we have buildings constructed solely to provide video games (like Dave and Buster's).

It's this nature that I love, the fact that now, in almost any way, if I need something, it's out there, because there are enough people like every other kind of individual to appease the need, the need for speed! Like porn? Like websites that bash our current president? Got an itch for fresh fruit? Need a t-shirt with a Decepticon insignia on it? How about a club that specializes in sending bacon to your doorstep once a month? The beauty of America is that these days, from Portland to Poughkeepsie and every place in between, there's a way if you've got the willpower to make something happen, and if you want something, there's a 99% chance that you can get it with not crazy amounts of effort.

For me, I realized that we have a television network with a show on it that is tailored around the redesign of ONE FUCKING ROOM of a random person's house...and people will go out of their way to watch this show! If you go down our listing of channels now, there is almost nothing that is not addressed. A channel solely based around the weather. One that shows OLD versions of game shows. A channel that just shows westerns. A channel for black people. A channel for YOUNG black people. A channel for young black people that want to watch romantic black films! If you have the max package on DirecTV, you have--at last count--42 movie channels. Assuming that all ~275 films released in 2002 in the U.S. were sold to the cable networks and shown monthly (unlikely, but play along), every one of those films would be available for viewing EVERY THREE WEEKS, about a half-dozen times a day. When you consider that some bigger films, like the last "Star Wars" film, have been sold to HBO and its six different channels, you can watch that film almost any hour of any day when it is in rotation. Sick.

And, jeez, don't even get me started on eBay. When somebody smart decides to write about it, eBay will be placed in the top ten of most useful things ever, somewhere after the automobile, the personal computer, the ATM card and condoms. Any time I want something used, I dial that item up on eBay to see if I can get it for cheap sometime that day. About 50% of the time, all I do on eBay is check the "Going, Going, Gone" status of particular video games...if I can swoop in on the cheap, man, I'll do it. eBay is community to the nth degree, and I freakin' love it.

Football is also one of those things about America that is mostly considered but overlooked in the early summer months, but now, as we approach the preseason with a fervor not seen in some time--like, uh, six months ago, when we watched the Super Bowl, maybe the most beautiful American thing in sports if the game is any good--football fever is back. Men and football and being American is really just freakin' cool, isn't it? Don't get me wrong, I know plenty of women that truly love and understand and "get" football, but allow my sexism for just a moment:

How beautiful is that first NFL Sunday each year? Men, huddling around a warm television screen like fire on a subzero afternoon...in a moment, as they finish watching the pregame show before the early session of games, those cheesy 30-second intros to the game at hand--be it a matchup of two doormats or a reprise of the previous season's championship game--watching a football game takes on the air of a presidential inauguration. There's a quiet, tense pause as other men take a deep breath, pop the fliptop of a taut, impatient Bud Light, wipe some wing grease off their upper lip and pull out their fantasy roster...when kickoff arrives, it almost always achieves pure ecstasy. Even better than this? That first moment in any game where we hear those bugles on CBS or that childish "bidda-bing, bidda-BING" on FOX just before the screen is minimized to show us stats from the other games, just to see if any of our players have scored touchdowns. I have been completely asleep in front of the television sometimes during a Ravens/Browns matchup and been awakened by the sound of those CBS bugles...so beautiful.

Like the women. I have been to other places where there apparently are beautiful women--and, as my friend Alvar promises me, there are apparently real beauties in places like Estonia--but man, the mix of the women here is unstoppable. I can't speak for the sights of the men of America, but if you like women, you can rest assured that we've got the skills that pay those muthafuckin' bills. It's the mix of the females that always gets me; you can't really go wrong here, no matter what you like. The female diversity in DC, Chicago and New York has always been special; the mix in Miami isn't as diverse as those other three cities, but the Latina influx more than makes up for this. LA is great, I hear that Texas is great, I thought that Phatlanta and Seattle were pretty nice hotbeds as well. Really, if you throw out San Francisco--two more people I met this weekend (women, at that!) talked about the lack of attractive women in San Francisco!--we've got a pretty deep bag of funk for domestics and visitors alike. "Yeah, we've got that"...indeed!

Health care. Man, I love health care here in America. I don't like it because it's always good, safe or even convenient...no, I love it here in the U.S. because it is better, safer and more convenient than ANY OTHER PLACE IN THE WORLD. How many horror stories have you heard--or worse, experienced--about Americans who suffer an accident while traveling abroad? Man, you have anything serious happen to you while out of the country, and 8 times out of 10, you are totally fucked. Sure, I'm generalizing, but here's a pop quiz for you:

You break your leg while traveling in _______. What do you do?

Let the ______ doctor operate on your leg.
Let the ______ doctor look at your leg and give you some painkillers prescribed by leading doctors in his country.
Don't go to a doctor at all, board the next flight home, possibly incur even more serious damage to your leg and see your Primary Care Provider when you get back to the States.

Without taking down the informal results, I would imagine between 115% and 128% of you did NOT pick a), and with good reason, even if you did buy temporary international coverage as part of your trip insurance. As much I hated using Kaiser Permanente in the past--at least, the east-coast Kaiser, because the west-coast version of Kaiser is A+ healthcare--I would take Kaiser Permanente and their sometimes nonchalant care over 99% of the doctors in foreign countries. Whenever I start to complain about getting an appointment four weeks past my call date for a routine checkup, I think about how crazy it must be when you need a checkup in India. I'll stop my bitching now, thank you!

Okay, you're right, we've got a lot of problems here in America, and in general, I believe that the average American works too hard for his own good without considering the long-term effects of what it means to spend even 15 extra minutes each day to smell the roses and/or play with your kids. Crime, or more correctly, "violent" crime, is a problem here like almost nowhere else. Television has taken hold of many Americans' lives; lately, it seems like the foreign market in many countries have made us Public Enemy #1, and sometimes with good reason. The U.S. government (I hesitate to say "we") has done a good job lately of overstepping the bounds on international policy, and what little understanding I have of it does include the knowledge that not everyone outside of the U.S. loves this country as much as I do. But, much of that is out of my control.

All I can focus on is the here and right now, and right now, man, I love being an American. Don't you?

Random Bellviews, courtesy of Bell and Longer Community Trust:

A week of vacation amidst a schedule where you normally work 70 hours a week: Opening Weekend
Free filet mignon: $9.50 Show
Kids that love to dance...without the rhythm: Matinee
"Staid": Rental
No kiss at a wedding ceremony: Hard Vice

bellview--muchos besos

America