| Only In America: A Personal Account of What I See Great About This Nation by Rami E. Cremesti BS, MS
1. The Harley Davidson is an awesome bike and it is 100% American. So is the Chevy Camaro (I owned a gorgeous 1985 V8 with black T-tops). 2. American sports like football and baseball are awesome if you understand them. 3. The skateboard, the roller blade, the snow board are American inventions. Surfing, of 4. The all-famous Hamburger, Hot Dog, can't deny it they are yummy! So Is Soul Food (Black-American traditional food) and Cajun (New Orleans food with French influence). In America, because it is such a rich cultural melting pot, you can have a plethora of menus to please your culinary tastes. Greek, Russian, Chinese, Thai, Turkish, Arabic, French, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Armenian, and Iranian are some of the ethnic foods I had the pleasure of savoring in the USA. In American I could taste the world... 5. Blues and Jazz are amazing genres of music, they are Black American. BB King, Nina Simone are American. 6. Community college is very affordable in the US. Education is widely available. It is estimated that an average american changes careers 4-5 times in a lifetime! That is awesome, if you consider that in Lebanon, most people are stuck in one career all their lives! Higher education is some of the best you can get in the whole world. 7. Amazing global companies and institutions that have revolutionized the 21st and 20th Century hail from America: Ex. INTEL, IBM, NASA and all the great Ivy League Universities: Harvard, MIT, Brown, Stanford, Yale, etc. Needless to mention the many Nobel prize laureates that are American. Americans are respectable businessmen and amazing business visionaries. Doing business in Lebanon is pathetic. If you go to fix your car, and ask for a quote on how much it costs, many times you hear "as much as you like." The government has its nose in any enterprise that has the potential to make serious cash and hence it kills the competition. The bureaucracy is so slothful, rusted, anti-evolutionary it is sickening. Bribery is flagrant in the government circles. 8. Contrary to what some European and Middle Eastern cultural elitists want you to believe, there are great American writers, intellectuals and artists: Herman Melville (wrote one of my all-time favorites: Moby Dick), Chahuli (the great glass sculptor from Seattle, Washington famous for his sea-anemone inspired vases) and the painter Peter Max whose works I had the pleasure of viewing in Laguna Beach, California. Check out the amazing left-wing books of Noam Chomsky. The best translations of Rumi poetry are by Coleman Barks. 9. America is the Land of The Free: mind-free and politically free. For example, it is OK to be a 30 year old single working girl. In Lebanon, such a girl might be the object of pitty, meaning that it is past her marriage age. Social repression and slavery to social convention in Lebanon is nauseating. The same in many Asian countries. In Irvine, California, around 1999, I had the fortune of meeting some cool Korean girls going to UCI. Some of them told me that in Korea your opinion as a woman is inferior and if you're past 25 your chances of getting married diminish. You don't have to be a Doctor or a Lawyer to earn good money and respect. There are cerative careers in America some people never even dreamed existed! America Is the Land of Opportunity - this is not a cliché. There is problems with natant racism and segregation and backwardness, but what country doesn't have such problems? Even in the EU... 10. Hollywood is 100% American. I saw some great movies here: Frida, MAX, Apocalypse Now. The Entertainment Industry is unique. The French and Arabs generally suck at movies. The SOPRANOS, The Simpsons, and Saturday Night Live are some of the coolest, most creative and funniest shows I have ever seen. 11. In America (unlike Lebanon and many Arab countries), politicians are accountable. Bill Clinton got in trouble for getting an unethical blow-job. The US Constitution is brilliant. 12. The Law is above all. Judges are untoucheable in America. In Lebanon, 4 judges were shot dead last year and no one could do anything about it. The investigation was hushed up. 13. I grew up in Lebanon and it was constantly dinned into my ears that US media are pro-Jewish, Zionist and anti-Arab propaganda machines. When I saw the objectivity, self-control, level-headedness and respect for the dead with which the 9-11 events were covered (Ex. Peter Jennings on ABC News) contrasted with the incitefullness and complete lack of objectivity in the coverage of the Arabic media (ex. Al-Jazeera), I felt a deep sense of revulsion. Al-Jazeera was happily showing images of body parts on TV to satisfy some sickening, gloating Arabs (some of which I had the nauseating opportunity of meeting in the US), whilst CNN showed respect for the dead and all victims' bodies were filmed covered in American flags. CNN was calling for the respect of innocent muslim citizens in the US while Arabic media were weaving mentally-ill conspiracy theories that thousands of Jews working in the Twin Towers didn't show up to work on 9-11. The same is happening today with the coverage of the War in Iraq. Al-Jazeera seems to love to portray disfigured bodies of innocent victims to incite feelings of hatred without any regard for the families of the victims and respect for the dead. Bottom line I have all the respect for the US Media. Forgot to mention Ted Coppel from ABC News too who is an amazing journalist. 14. Some like to demonize American Capitalism by picturing the portrait of the "Capitalist, greedy, materialist". I learned in America that many of the most affluent business men turn philanthropist at one point in their careers. Example, the Getty Museum was founded by Paul Getty, The Hammer Museum near UCLA was founded by Armand Hammer, The founder of E-bay was planning to donate 90% of his massive fortune to charity, and many more examples. I saw first hand the failure of Communism (Being half-Bulgarian) and I believed more than ever in Freedom. It may be true that some billionaires go overboard in trying to protect and increase the fortunes (through devious tax cuts, lobbies and laws), but believe me, wealthy people need as much help as poor people in America and I have worked with both. The wealthy have been blinded by their wealth from appreciating the beauty of the spirituality of poverty and poor people are blinded by the materialistic media blitz that is rampant in all sorts of published and broadcast media in America. 15. Only in America can you see movies like "The Corporation", "Fahrenheit 9/11", "Control Room", "Arlington West" being made and programs like HBO's "Real Time With Bill Maher" which have the audacity and freedom to criticize figures and bodies in powet without any danger to their lives (which is definitely not the case in many despotic Arab countries). Not all media in America in controlled by the Right Wing, check out KPFK in Los Angeles. Noam Chomsky is a giant in the left wing intellectual circles. 16. Most importantly, most Americans are good, kind-hearted, open-minded and generous people. Some of them may be a little uninformed, but that is why it is very important to build bridges of communication and exchange and the cultural, religious and information and knowledge levels.
Sincerely, A half- Lebanese, half-Bulgarian national of Greek decent who grew up in Lebanon and lived in the USA for close to 8 years. Rami E. Cremesti BS, MS
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