The Economist Christmas Special was about America, a Ponzi scheme that works.
http://www.economist.com/world/unitedstates/displayStory.cfm?story_id=15108634&source=hptextfeature
It projects 1 Billion Americans by 2100.
With its many niches, America seems to offer a bit of everything, for everybody: hunting, boozing, gambling, church-going and freedom to protest.
I remember my first Christmas, living humbly in a cold basement. But I created my version of America by inviting Vietnamese Students at Penn State to come over for a party, albeit makeshift. We dimmed out the lights and had a disco party (mid-70’s).
My America.
No eggnog, fruit cake or tinsel. Just foreign students away from home, sharing a common bond of humanity and most pressingly, in need of heat (it was cold in Winter 76).
People who wouldn’t otherwise have been friends: a hippie guy with hair down to his knees, a short guy majoring in Agronomy and a French-major gal with a condescending air about her. Yet, they came, at my invitation. First Christmas in America was our common denominator. It could have been a Roger Altman‘s movie: post-card X-mas outside, Saigon-like inside.
With sweaters over shiny shirts, every guy in the room had hair down to his neck.
Winter in cold Pennsylvania. Stores were closed and foreign students had no place to go.
With plenty of snow outside (by then, our early fascination with the white stuff had been melted away), and over hot chocolate, I remember quoting Shakespeare, that “life is just a stage, and we are here to play out our role -“.
We were joined by a throng of immigrants, before and after us, to becoming American.
The language and culture part came later (naturalized).
The lingering part was hard: neither here nor there.
(like the shopper gauging which cashier to line up behind just to end up in the longest line).
Back then, we couldn’t use the phone, since it was very expensive if possible at all.
Some people even had their calls patched through Canada. Now, even the I-phone got de-commoditized via I phone 5c.
To me, it was a one-way journey (25 years later, I found I had been wrong then).
Whatever America has to offer: from McCafe to McAfee, Morse code to Moore’s Law, it wasn’t without a price :”ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country”.
And church services would close with “who among you would stand up and give your life for the mission”, F/T or P/T”
(silence, organ music, and peer pressure to solicit your time or donation to the cause).
The Ponzi scheme that works. More will join us here in America, and it will be a self-fulfilling prophecy: your wish will come through, because America is not a place. It’s a platform, where you can launch your dream. America is Cape Canaveral, a dream launching pad. Be prepared and fasten your seat belt, It’s not a walk in the park.
By the time you land, you will wonder where the heck you have been, and most of all, who you have become.
American? That’s the answer from German, Italian, Irish, Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, Cambodian, Serbian, Somalian and soon Syrian, who have arrived and bought into the scheme. BYOD (Bring your own dream), the sign says at the door. Not “Welcome to America.” The Native Americans perhaps never put any sign up in the first place. The best you can get for free here is workplace frozen turkey (pre-recession years).
And that takes some cooking. And with that kind of party, I would put BYOB in the invitation, just to make it clear: it’s a potluck dinner, because, Ponzi, by definition, manufactures nothing except for a dream of getting rich, but never something for nothing. Buy now, pay later (either by us or our descendants, but pay we will). It has worked so far.
But we need more MLM recruits for it to work. The new sign will have to say “BYOD”, bring as many dreams as you’d like, but no preexisting condition preferred.
Thang Nguyen 555 