So, it seems like I'm deluged with Europeans lately, and sooner or later, the conversation starts hitting familiar questions.

1) Why are Americans so patriotic?

2) Why are Americans so stupid?

3) Why are Americans always at war?

Since I don't like repeating myself, I decided to write my theory here so I can just give them a hyperlink and go back to pixie hunting.

Ok, in Europe, regardless of where in Europe you grew up, you're growing up in a country that has an established history, unique language, and generally a single religious institution providing spiritual instruction to the populace. In other words, you're coming from what is essentially a unified cultural paradigm, despite recent waves of immigration.

In America, we don't have a unified cultural paradigm. We have literally hundreds of displaced micro-cultures that hold fading fragments of their origin. Unlike in Europe, these micro-cultures do not have designated territories, and as such, are constantly forced to compete amongst each other in order to establish any sort of longevity. Think about the process of "gentrification" in this context, and you realize that what you're seeing is a tiny war - an economic war, but one that results in the kind of constant displacement I'm trying to illustrate.

So what keeps us from killing each other? Patriotism. Or more appropriately, the constant indoctrination of patriotism. Every American kid remembers taking the pledge of allegiance every morning. From the very beginning of our lives, we are taught that the idea of America - the dream, the religion - transcends race, culture, and class. It is what binds us, despite our flaws, and despite its untruth.

Don't get me wrong - what America has accomplished, regardless of how it has accomplished it, is remarkable. Look at what China has to do to keep it's conflicting cultures in line, or the riots in France a few years ago to see the simmering tensions when boundaries are removed between cultures. So yes, we're patriotic in part because deep down within us, we know that without that patriotism, we'd be at each others' throats.

Now, think about the education system here. Yes, we have the best universities in the world, yes we have the most wealth in the world. So why so stupid? Well, there are a couple of things going on here. First off, education has always been, to some extent, cultural indoctrination. In fact, a culture's history and artistic expression fundamentally influence the core developmental skills that are necessary for educational success.

In America, we tried to enforce what was essentially an Anglo-European educational system. This meant that historically, a large numbers of American micro-cultures have been trying to navigate a system that doesn't speak to them with any personal cultural significance. This has begun to change, but even my generation was raised with glowing tales of the Indian Wars and how the aggressive attitudes of rogue military men won us the plum of California from Mexico.

Because a great number of Americans don't have a cultural investment in the educational system, they only use it for what they need. There's no need to know the works of Shakespeare if you know that you're gonna be spending your life working the fields speaking Spanish. This attitude permeates the system, confuses and burns out the teachers, and finally ends with the public school system as a series of in-doctrinal holding pens.

But this could be overcome, were it not for the unique nature of the American political system. America is a plutocracy with a democratic basis for it's middle management functions, which serves to ventilate social displeasure in what is usually a non-violent manner. The plutocrats love their democracy, for it provides entertainment and distraction from their movements, and by "involving" the public in their actions, they remove themselves from being the target of blame when the decisions made by the country fail - even though they've been guiding the path we take all along.

This could only be accomplished with America's peculiar makeup. Because we are culturally fragmented, we tend to only pay attention the doings of the country that directly affect us. Because our educational system has indoctrinated us to be patriotic, but not open and loving of other cultures, it further serves to fragment us.... think about the cliques in high school, or even whether you know your neighbor's birthday.

Needless to say, this fragmentation is necessary for the corporate plutocrats to act with little impediment.

But lets say we solved the problem of cultural fragmentation in the classroom, and actually got a majority of our students interested and engaged with courses of study that are relevant to their culture and society... actually turning out well-educated Americans....

Well, we saw what happened in Berkeley in the 60s when just a small microcosm of educated Americans began to examine the Vietnam war. There is absolutely no interest in enabling this kind of resistance in the upper reaches of the plutocracy. After all, isn't it funny that "No Child Left Behind" actually ended up with hundreds of thousands of children being held back a grade?

So that answers the first two questions - we're patriotic to keep from killing each other, and we're stupid by deliberate design. So why are we always at war?

Well, we've never known peace.

Look here - never been a period of more than 30 years when the country hasn't been involved in some sort of major military operation. But I'm not talking about wars against the forces without... I'm talking about the war within. The black community only now is somewhat safe from domestic terrorism after hundreds of years of slavery. The Latino community well remembers the Zoot Suit Riots, and the Japanese the internments. And there's no place to really even start with the Native Americans.

But I'm not just talking the instances of oppression. The war dream moves in strange ways. You might blink when I tell you that the key inspiration for the Beats is actually back 80 years before they really began writing, when Billy the Kidd ran his gang through a small Missouri town, carrying the Confederate flag. But I'll take you through the steps, so that you won't assume that I'm crazier than I actually am - here we go backwards without too much detail:

• The Beats take off, inspiring the cultural explosion of the 60s, which, in effect, becomes a cultural war between generations.
• Kerouac writes On the Road, basically the Beat bible
• Ginsburg, Burroughs and Kerouac spend most of the 40s and 50s traveling all over greater America. Burroughs is the "old man" of the group, and his influence has a profound impact on the two younger artists.
• Burroughs meets Ginsburg and Kerouac after he drops out of Yale and into heroin and petty crime.
• Burroughs grows up in a small Midwest town. He reads Jack Black's You Can't Win. He's intrigued by Black's life as a petty thief and junkie, but it's Black's childhood memories that truly inspire him.
• Jack Black, after a life of opium dens, burglary, prison, and murder, briefly enters civilized society to publish his book. He disappears soon thereafter.
• Jack Black, a child, sees the Billy the Kidd ride through his small Missouri town, with the Confederate soldiers that would later become his gang. He so struck by Kidd's passion and freedom, that soon later, when he finds that Kidd has been shot down, he's heartbroken. He becomes convinced that the feds and American society in general isn't worth his time, and slowly starts moving towards a life of crime.

I guess what I'm trying to illustrate here is that war in America never goes away - even when we think we've put it down to bed, it keeps boiling up. We give it different forms and faces - economic, cultural, even religious when we're feeling really peppy - but the country was built on conflict. I'st why we're a bastion of capitalism - the competitive nature that we've adopted as being part of a culturally fragmented society fits well into an economic system that relies on aggression.

So yeah, usually when we go invade another country, we're really just giving ourselves a break. Plus, large infantry deployments are exceptionally useful for getting rid of the most dangerous element of the micro-cultures on the lower economic scale - the young man. Needless to say, the plutocracy is well convinced that war is healthy for their interests - unify a fragmented country against an outside threat, remove disruptive forces from society, and maybe even grab some territory or oil while they do it.

So that's my answer to the third question.

America is war.
We have always been war.
Expect us to change at your peril.