By Scott Berkey

What is America? Most would answer that America is a country of the free and the brave, but America is more than that – and less. Yes, America is a country with borders and states; yet, it has ceased to be merely just a country and become an idea and to some an ideal.

America is different things to different people. To the Japanese, America is a country full of frantic consumers with bionic wallets willing to buy any gadget at any cost. To starving people in Third World countries America is a place where people actually go on diets because they have eaten too much. To Canadians, America is a country where industry controls the government to the point where it can poison the earth, swindle the military, and still not pay taxes. To Europeans, America is a country full of arrogant fools who hold the power to destroy the earth. Yet, in all these places money talks just as it does in America more than anywhere else, and thus with all its faults, to the outside world looking in, America is the land of opportunity. To me, one who tries to look objectively at the empire from the inside, America is fresh milk gone sour with age.