My anti-Americanism has peaked. Like most Americans, I don’t care anymore. Give me the serenity for what I cannot control, etc.

Things about this country I like:

1. Life opportunity. If you are willing to educate yourself, network, and move your ass, you will be rewarded with a salary above the national average, and a lifestyle better than 98% of the world’s population. Money will not be a problem as long as you live within your means.

2. I’m fluent in the native language. One thing slowing me down from making an equivalent salary in another country is language, but a lot of immigrants here prove it is a hurdle that can be overcome.

3. Fast sex opportunity. There will always be strong demand for men who know how to turn on women using words and touch instead of money and status. The market is saturated with guys who don’t have a clue.

4. The Bill Of Rights. Even with the erosions to our rights since 9/11, there are not many countries where I can tell a police officer that he can’t enter my home or search me or my car, or one I can say that our current president sucks horse cock without going to jail. While police agencies are revenue corrupt (parking tickets, red-light cameras), I feel confident that most of my interactions with law enforcement will not end with a beating or drug plant.

5. Target (and it’s little cousin, CVS). From sex lubricant to cutlery, gardening supplies to crazy pills, I love how I can walk in a building near my house and buy everything I could possibly need. Compare this to a European pharmacy where your two choices of bar soap are hidden in cabinets and you need to find a clerk to buy chapstick.

Things I don’t like:

1. Consumerism. The masses devote their life working to buy luxury crap and Ikea furniture, asking what thing can be bought to bring happiness instead of what can be experienced. The result: a superficial culture that turns something like a stupid party slut going to jail into a national obsession.

2. Aggressive government. With over 600 700 military bases worldwide, we’re in everyone’s business to preserve the power and interests of the white man elite. People’s lives, American or not, are meaningless.

3. Corporate power. Industries that form trade groups to spread propaganda and buy politicians have the power to write public policy to maximize profits at our expense.

4. The suburbs. A soulless experiment of strip malls and asphalt that waste the world’s most precious energy resource with automobile dependency while isolating individuals to cars, cubicles, and assembly-line houses.

5. Female obesity. If you lower the obesity rate here to a country like France, and reduce the shallowness that stems from individualism and consumerism, American women would compete well with foreign women. Finding a thin American who is not messed up in the head and girlfriend worthy is so hard here that I wonder if going to another country would completely solve the problem.

Even with the negatives, this country is a comfortable, safe, and decent place to live, one that I intend on growing old in unless I find something better. While I don’t have American pride, I back all of you up whenever a Aussie or British traveler tries to talk trash with their “Americans are so fat/stupid/materialistic” talking points. I can make fun of Americans because I am one, but I’ll be damned if I let someone who eats Vegemite (yeast waste) trash my fellow countrymen.

I’m tired of seeing and hearing the phrase “Support the troops.” It’s meaningless unless you explain what type of support you are talking about. You can want to support the troops but have two completely different outcomes in mind.

Do you mean support the troops in fighting the war? In this case you want to pump more money into weapons and send more troops to back up the ones already there.

Or do you mean support the troops in increasing the likelihood they will survive in the next year? In this case you want to remove them from the bullets and bombs in Iraq and send them back home to comfortable suburbia where they are more likely to die falling down in the shower than getting hit with an IED.

I’m not sure how “Support the troops” has come more to mean “Support the war” instead of “Support life.”

It only took me about three months but I have finally finished the 600-page book Ghost Wars, about events in Afghanistan and Pakistan leading up to 9/11. My favorite paragraph:

The [CIA] sent out a team of mechanics knowledgeable about Russian helicopters to try to resolve the [helicopter mechanical issue]. Massoud’s men took them to their Dushanbe airfield and opened up one of the Mi-17s. The CIA mechanics were stunned: Massoud had managed to patch an engine originally made for a Hind attack helicopter into the bay of the Mi-17 transport. It was a mis-matched, gum-and-baling-wire machine, a flying miracle. The CIA mechanics were so appalled that they did not even want Massoud’s pilots to fire up the helicopter’s rotors. They were afraid the whole thing would come apart and send shrapnel flying.

The freedom fighter leadership would fly in these helicopters.

I still find it amazing that one man who traveled in SUV caravans in third-world countries continues to stymie the most power empire in the history of the world. The book, which I highly recommend, lays the groundwork for how this all came to be. Reading it has been the biggest commitment I made all year.