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The
US claims to be the greatest success story of the modern
world: a nation made from an incredibly disparate assembly of
people who, with little in common apart from a desire to
choose their own paths to wealth or heaven, have rallied
around the ennobling ideals espoused in the Constitution and
the Declaration of Independence to forge the richest, most
inventive and most powerful country on earth. Despite
polemicists who justly cite the destruction of Native American
cultures, racism, imperialism and the CIA's shady operations
at the top of a long list of wrongdoings, half the world
remains in love with the idea of America. This is, after all,
the country that gave the world the right to the pursuit of
happiness, free speech, electric light, airplanes,
refrigerators, the space shuttle, computers, blues, jazz, rock
and roll and movies that climax at the high school prom.Come
prepared to explore this foreignness rather than stay in the
comfort-zone of the familiar and you'll find America has
several of the world's most exciting cities, some truly
mind-blowing landscapes, a strong sense of regionalism, a
trenchant mythology. |
