I have sought via a set of quasi-formal essays to address what I take to be the central aspects of contemporary American culture and society. I do so from a critical standpoint of a form and style of comparative anthropology that has lost its own foothold in this society as a valid, legitimate science, to be replaced by a burgeoning plethora of would-be pretenders. It seems that social sciences in general have become the hand-maiden of government interests and control. I write this essay as both a student of anthropology and as a citizen of American society. Of course I will focus on those aspects of American society that I have come to have the greatest familiarity with. One cannot help in cross-cultural fieldwork to do at least implicit comparison with one's own cultural orientation, and in time the need to make explicit the dimensions of one's own cultural and social realities, those realities that have gone into the construction of oneself in the world. To fail to do so is not to do full justice to the anthropological cycle of field research.

This point was especially achieved with fieldwork in mainland China. There I became familiar with another political system that on one hand was fundamentally different from the American, and yet, in many ways, exhibited many parallel social structures and patterns. The Orwellian, Big Brother control structures that so dramatically constrained the lives of my students and friends in China, and that deeply affected our own lives as a family while we were there, are not as well marked or evident in American society that has prided itself on a history of freedom of the press. But this history has never gone unchallenged by governmental agencies, and it has won and lost major battles. It would be naïve for Americans to believe that they are never misinformed about important issues affecting their lives, and if not blatantly lied to, then they are at least often not told the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

An anthropological understanding stems from the notion that all state stratified societies share similar structural aspects of control and redistribution of basic resources. How and how well this control is achieved, and what its consequences are for the nation as a whole and for its citizens, is an altogether different and variable issue. Beyond and behind this understanding of political anthropology is a deep seated faith in human nature--people have many differences of culture and history, language and values, but they have many similar needs and motivations that drive them in what they do in life.

In my life, since childhood, I have been a participant and increasingly an observer of American society. My memories go back to the early sixties at the time of J.F.K. and the Cuban Missile Crises. I have watched American change dramatically over the last forty years, and it is continuing to change often in directions that seem, in the long run, ill fated.

There has occurred a fundamental loss of faith with the American government, as it has waded into its own inescapable cycles of corruption, from which no politician, it seems, is immune. In such a system there will arise no more George Washingtons or Abraham Lincolns. The worst part about corruption in American political and business life is that Americans are largely uncognizant of the social realities. There is a stratification of the American psyche as much as there is a foregrounding and backgrounding of American social and cultural life.

We live with a class stratified system, and whether we wish it or know it or not, this constrains our lives, our choices, our opportunities, our social relations, and even our feelings about ourselves and one another in the world. We rely upon the class system to serve us when and if there is a hidden advantage in doing so; and if we are members of a vast and growing underclass of Americans, we also learn to count upon the same system to systematically stymy our efforts at social mobility. Bank robbers in general do not come from wealthy backgrounds, and Harvard professors, even professors of "color" generally do not come from the ghetto. Nevertheless a great deal of money, attention and effort goes deliberately by many well-placed Americans into cultivating the right kinds of connections and ties, in business, in government, in public bureaucracy, that will serve their own or their families framework of opportunities.

The consequences for our society has been a collective failure to deal realistically with issues that could and should have been resolved several decades previously. At the same time, we are left to continue to struggle politically with unrealistic issues that only detract and prevent us for getting to where we need to be as a society. The loss of social and world realism, of a sense of reality, in the American consciousness, affects almost every area and walk of life to be found in our complex system. It entails a sense of collective denial and the need to "put on blinders" in order to maintain the 9 to 5 regimes that keeps our society functioning in a normal manner.

The lack of a sense of social and world realism in American life will continue to grow in an unresolved manner, as the vast majority of us as participants within the system are left to maintain and perpetuate the status quo that the system has come to represent in the world.

Of course, there must be a general public euphemization of class differences and conflict, as we are told to look the other way while things are happening in the world.

If hyphenated Americans of one color or another can claim that anthropologists cannot legitimately know them or objectively study them, that they can only rightfully study and present themselves, then as an American, with my own distinctive cultural background that exists in no other time or place in the world, I reserve a similar privilege to being in a special vantage point to speak critically about my own people and my own culture. It has struck me how fundamentally jaded such ideological perspectives are that are rooted in the exclusive identification of a race or ethnic group, that they do not in general permit a sense of reciprocity of perspective and approach between themselves and others of the world.

This work has been a very long time in the making, in the sense that it existed as a critical possibility many years before, during a prolonged period of gestation that covered most of the period subsequent to leaving Academia with my doctorate in Anthropology, up until now when I have decided finally to commit my thoughts digitally to my electronic notebook. I have studied the history of the US in relation to the Fur Trade and Indian-White relations, and I have been left with a unique perspective about things in the world today.

The basic issue that I would claim about American society is its failure to deal with its own class contradictions, which are an intrinsic part of its basic culture and which, therefore, is usually transparent and invisible to most people who are caught up in the games it entails in their lives. Furthermore, America has become an extremely complicated system of stratification, and there have arisen many ethno-class groupings and identifications that cross-cut traditional categories. Attached to these ethno-class groupings

Contradictions of American society include the following:

The development of an unconstrained capitalism versus the promotion of democratic principles of equality and individual freedom.

The charter of individual rights and freedoms rooted in a social contract theory of government, versus a new charter of group rights and privileges rooted in a social competition theory of political conflict and control.

Maintaining the promise of a free and open society that promotes mobility, while fostering the development of powerful institutional contexts that serve to constrain the individual and to maintain a status quo of social relations rooted in an immobilization of the individual.

Reconciliation of domestic issues with international politics and paradigms of international law.

These contradictions are by no means separate issues, but have always gone hand in hand with the historical formation of American character and culture. We have maintained on one hand a cult of rugged individualism, but on the other hand we have always emphasized the role and value of team-work and group-identity.

The sense of contradiction in American society has grown only deeper and deeper with the passing decades. There was a brief period, at the end of the Vietnam War in the mid-1970's, during which a window of opportunity existed to create a new platform for peace and prosperity by global society. The Americans had already experienced the consequences of two oil shortages, and was ripe for the idea of implementing conservation policies and development of new sources of alternative energy. A conservative elite, entrenched in the profitability of gas-guzzling automobiles and a huge petro-chemical industry, has systematically stymied efforts to develop alternative systems.

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I have come to write this collection of essays around the central themes of contemporary American society, its structure, and its people, and about what it means to be an American. In spite of euro-centric origins, American culture is in fact autochthonous to North America--it is historically and culturally unique. It has been the product of a long colonial history, a revolutionary war, a vital and invigorating relationship to a western frontier, a civil war, industrialization, two world wars, and involvement in the last half of the 20th Century as a major game player in international politics. It is indeed the most powerful nation on earth at this time, and it has been able to exert its influence, at times forcifully, in almost any region of the earth it has had an interest in. Even so, the US remains uncharacteristic as an imperial entity. Its democratic tradition stands at odds with its capitalistic tendencies, and this has served to curtail and condition its foreign involvement in unique and often unprecedented ways.

American society faces today several inherent dilemmas that it must sort out. The most important problem the confronting the Unitied States in the future will be that of overpopulation. Due to dramatic population increases that are the result of open and unlimited immigration policies, in which American population has doubled by almost 50% in the last thirty years, the US will face in the coming decades of the 21st Century a growing crises of overpopulation, a crises shared primarily by most of the undeveloped world and only a few of the more developed members of the world community. American society had achieved in the early 1970's stable population equilibrium around 215 million people and zero or even negative population growth. Interestingly, this was also the period of the peak of US agricultural productivity, and the peak of the US fossil-fuel economy before the onset of the oil embargoes.

The consequences of overpopulation are being felt today in terms of overcrowding and the stress of especially public resources and institutional frameworks, as in education, government, and in health related areas. Employment shortages will become increasingly common and chronic, and rates of unemployment in future decades will continue to climb to unprecedented levels.

Historically, the turning point in American society was the result of a curious juxtaposition of domestic and international events during the 1960's, in particular America's growing civil unrest, and the violence and tyranny represented by America's involvement in the war in Vietnam. The consequences of this was Lyndon Johnson's Great Society and his escalation of the war in Vietnam. The aftermath was the importation of close to 300,000 Vietnamese along with other Southeast Asian minority groups at the end of the liberation of Saigon, along with about 16 tons of gold hoisted from the treasury of the government of South Vietnam by the President of the South, and the transfer of this wealth and these people to the US. Lessons learned from the Vietnamese refugee experience was consistently applied to general policies concerning other minority groups. At the same time, unexpected economic benefit was realized from the Vietnamese in the US, and I believe this lesson went a long way toward subsequent planning to import other wealthy Asians to the US.

Since then, our nation has witnessed some of the most dramatic and historically unprecedented population increases ever witnessed in the world. This has been due, paradoxically, to massive immigration and to secondary population increase as a result of this immigration. The largest immigrant group ever has been the Hispanic, and primarily Mexican, immigrants who have come mostly illegally to the US to find employment, make homes, and eventually to be granted under amnesty programs permanent residence. The second largest group, as a whole, to come to the US, have been a mixed bag of Asians, primarily Chinese from various countries, but also Koreans, Japanese, Indians, Pakistanis, Sri Lankans, Cambodians, Vietnamese, Thai, Indonesians and Filippinos. Pacific Islanders would also fit this general profile as well.

To a great extent, this problem of uncontrolled immigration has been largely an unnecessary one from the standpoint of the population logistics of the American population itself. The paradox of population in Mexico is a fitting example of the problems inherited by the US by its neighbor to the South. Mexican population in Mexico is almost equal now to Mexican population in the US--resources inherent to Mexico were enough to sustain a much larger Mexican population than actually exists. The real problem of Mexico is one of the extremely unequitable distribution of wealth in that society, and the cultural patterns that reinforce this structural assymmetry between rich and poor. Thus, the poor people of Mexico leave their homeland to escape the grinding poverty that is the result of a corrupt and unjust system. They are not themselves escaping overpopulation in Mexico. Foreign labor and other resources (brains and money) have been infused into the American economy in massive doses over the last twenty-five years especially, and this has served to fuel post-industrial development and to undercut the demands of American labor, again at all levels, for greater social security and equality. The dramatic increase in America's population is negatively correlated with the corresponding loss in socio-economic mobility and the increasing polarization and stratification between the socio-economic classes composing society.

Thus, unrestricted foreign immigration at volumes and of a character not previously known to previous first-generations of new Americans, has served US business interests primarily in terms of the globalization of both the US and world markets. Globalization has been to a tremendous advantage of the elite who control capital investment and production in the world, and the bureucratic government machinery of states where development is allowed unrestricted access. Yet it has remained consistently to the disadvantage and exploitation of the poorer people who represent an increasing majority of both the American and the world populations.

There will be a host of associated problems accompanying overpopulation. Not only will social service systems be severely strained and depersonalizing, but they will eventually begin to breakdown under the weight of so many people. Social-behavioral problems can be expected to increase, along with rates of mental illness and personality and adaptive disorders. As a result, the rate of crime can be expected to increase, with an increase especially in violent crimes. Corruption at all levels, already clearly evident, should increase to the point that in most contexts inefficiency and interference will become the norm rather than the exception to the rule. These are not just expectable trends of run-away population growth. They are predictable, indeed, they can be considered inevitable consequences of policies initiated 20-25 years ago and continuing in unabated fashion in our post 9-11 world.

Multi-cultural diversity has been the official bandwagon and ideological agenda that has largely disguised and is used to justify these policies of unrestricted immigration to the US. This ideological rhetoric of diversity is really what can be called by some a "false consciousness" and by others an ideology of pseudo-liberalism that disguises in fact an extremely conservative "Homo economicus Americanus." This agenda is really an extension of the policies of affirmative action that were promulgated sense the late 60's. These policies have largely led to the structural embedding of social double-standards that have been used as devices for manipulating opportunity and resource structures by different people for different ends.

Multi-culturalism is itself not an evil doctrine, but from an anthropological standpoint is it both an undesirable and an unrealistic doctrine. The association with dramatic population increases with increasing socio-economic stratification supports the contention that, from a structural standpoint, diversification at the bottom of society is tied to systematic closure at the top, which is always mediated in a state society by a bureucratic and communally defined bureaucracy. It has also put the United States fundamentally at greater risk in the future to inter-ethnic conflict, of which recent terrorism are to be considered a part, that will lead to greater levels of violence. It is likely therefore that administrative authoritarianism in American society, something we have never been immune to, will also increase in order to maintain the security and stability of the social system. We will in a sense no longer have any choice but to conform to such policies, and bear their undesireable consequences as it will be seen as the lesser of two evils, the evil of social anarchy or the evil of too much social control.

In conclusion, the US, by pursuing policies of unlimited immigration, associated with deregulation of business and industry, increasing corruption and inefficiency of government, is systematically undermining its own foundation of democracy and democratic institutions founded upon priniciples of universal equality and freedom.

If I were to summarize today what I construe to be the central dilemmas of American society, I would offer the following laundry list:

1. A blurring of the boundary between political and economic and social, such that there are double standards, indeed "multiple standards" that are promulgated structurally in the name of one set of interests but that are actually serving other sets of interests. Thus, a consequence, is the promotion of inequality and "reverse discrimination" in the name of equality, on one hand, and the corresponding ideological denial that makes this possible without a sense of internalized subjective contradiction, on the other. Another consequence is what I would call the structural embedding and cultural sanctioning of what I would refer to as structural conflict of interests, especially by politicians and other leaders of society and captains of industry. This of course leads to an endemic form of corruption that resonates throughout the system at different levels.

2. A runaway population that is increasingly foreign-based and foreign-serving, and a concomittant cultural loss of what can be considered traditional American cultural values and patterns, with the attendant consequences of American deculturation, disorientation leading to increased sociopathy, psychopathy and incidences of violence. We have shifted subtly but surely from a "contract" based form of state-society resting on the principle of informed consent, to a "competitive" based society that results in different ethnocultural and ethno-politically defined groupings competing for limited resources, resulting in both forms of scramble and interference competition. Individual rights yield, as they have yielded consistently, to priorities of ethnic based quotas and control measures.

3. A basic dialectical tension between democratic orientations, values, attitudes and institutions on one hand, and private, capitalistic orientations, values, attitudes and institutions on the other hand, with the latter achieving perennial dominance over the former set of cultural orientations. This will lead ultimately to the increasing loss of freedom and democracy in American society and the rise of increasing assymetry, authoritarianism and inequality.

4. The continuing failure of Americans as a corporate, collective cultural concern, to realize their own mistakes, through the promotion by mass communications media of a culture of denial, that is preventing Americans from either realizing the problems that lay before them, their magnitude, and immobilizing them from achieving any effective form of collective action that would permit them to overcome these dilemmas in a timely way.

5. Americans suffer pandemic "affluenza" the source of the disease of which is a gross fetishism and unconstrained materialism that is hooked to status-identity and status consciousness in society, and that is the basis for political-economic manipulation by unscrupulous people. It has begotten a media-bound collective consciousness rooted in deception and half-truths as much as it is rooted in the communication of information and the "getting the facts."

My argument is that American government has become fundamentally compromised at all levels by serving private interests before considering in a sincere manner the public good or the collective interests of all Americans. All politicians pay lip service to the second agenda, but it remains second in their priorities as well, with the unspoken agenda invariably being to cater to those who offer and promise campaign contributions and those who provide support, fringe benefits and other connections.

At the same time, we have promulgated structurally a system of racial and ethno-political double-standards that has served to provide a foundation for competing ethno-national political groupings to organize, mobilize and compete with one another within the narrow resource spectrum. This process has in a direct sense been promoted and mandated by the government. My argument is that this has resulted in promotion of a second set of basic contradictions that have reverberated with the first set of contradictions between democracy and capitalistic interest, to produce an operating system based upon multiple standards that are arbitrarily determined in an authoritarian (i.e., nondemocratic manner.)

It has resulted in a form of structurally justified discrimination that has consistently advantaged some groups communalistically at the expense of other groups.

Such double standards invite corruption, indeed, make such corruption inevitable. Furthermore, I believe they are in fundamental violation of basic constitutional rights that guarantee political equality under the law. We have substituted what can be called social and cultural definitions of equality for what has been political equality. In a sense, we cannot promote what amount to fairly questionable and subjectively defined definitions of what constitute social or cultural equality for what can be clearly defined as political equality, without giving up the one form of equality for the other.

Therefore, the logic of the argument demands that the law constitutionally be essentially what is called "color blind" or in otherwords non-discriminating of racial or ethnic based markers of identity, and if it is not, then it is not serving the constitutional interests of the American people. This argument is not to claim that the government should be insensitive or unresponsive to the special interests and needs of disadvantaged people, in whateer groups we may place such people. It should recognize though that individuals are either advantaged or disadvantaged, and that, under the law, all groups are "non-gratis" or have no special identity except that defined by the state itself. Redefinition of the constitutional basis for our system on the basis of what can be called social and cultural rights of groups, has tended to set in motion political processes and developments that have been fundamentally at odds with the original conception of the constitution in the first place. It has shifted emphasis away from individual rights and liberties, towards group-defined categories and interests.

The fact that individual rights and equality has not been promoted over social definitions, and that reverse discrimination has been an unseen consequence of policies of affirmative action, has set the stage in the last thirty years for both the promotion of "political correctness" as a means of sanctioning conformity within the resulting system of inter-ethnic competition, and to the promotion of policies which serve to advantage some groups systematically over other groups.

I believe that the original formulators of these new laws had the best and most ideal of intentions to decrease what has been seen as chronic social inequality, especially across certain ethnic or racially defined boundaries. But also I believe the history of these legal institutions have had unintended consequences for the society as a whole that have been less than ideal, and that has set in motion an entirely new dialectic unfavorable to the original spirit of the American political system that was based upon guarantee of individual equality and freedom under the law.

It has institutionalized the basis for what amounts to arbitrary discrimination in terms of established quota systems. The comparison with Malaysia that had established a very similar quota system for many of the same justifications is insightful. The Malaysian system of quotas has served to systematically exclude the significant minorities of the Chinese and Indians from equal participation in the various institutional organs of the Malay state, i.e., the military, state bureaucracy, education, health and the communication and transportation services. Besides the differences of majority/minority relations and the political economic polarizatin of Malaysian society, the two quota systems of the US and Malaysia are virtually the same in organization and consequences for the two societies. The Malaysian system is now being abandoned due to what is construed as its across the board failure to achieve its original goals of creating social equality between the Malaysian "races". Still the Malay majority has come to depend greatly upon the special privileges, handicaps and leverage that such a quota system provides them. This system has formed the basis for Malay communal solidarity, reinforced politically through the party-based administrative machinery of the central ruling party (UMNO), and has tended to perpetuate the ethnic cleavages and demote inter-ethnic integration in the larger society between the races.

A similar conclusion can be said to exist for the US system, except that it has led primarily to a form of socio-economic and socio-political stratification within racially defined ethnic groups as well as broadly between subgroups within these broad-based categories. The worst effect of such a program in the US are the null costs of loss of opportunity and interference in opportunity structures for lower class "white" Americans, especially those of rural backgrounds, and the promotion of a "mediocracy" and double standards of selection at every level of the administrative and government related articulation of the system. Negative consequences can also be claimed for the perpetuation of race-based concepts and categories of ethnic labeling, upon a structural level, that might otherwise interfere with natural processes of socio-cultural integration within an unconstrained market system. We simply cannot answer the question of how things may have shaped up if such categories were not made a part of every job application form.

It also follows that color blind is not necessarily color insensitive and the requirement of sensitizing teachers, employers, managers, and administrators to structural differences based upon color or ethnic or other cultural identities does not necessarily require abandoning what can be called a color blind approach to social management. Comparatively, it can be claimed that status markers of ethnic identity and difference have become exaggerated because of the existence of a structural basis for selective discrimination on racial categories, and this has led increasing interethnic competition and the fostering of greater intraethnic communal solidarity than would otherwise exist. It is clearly the case that in Malaysia the similarities between individuals across ethnocultural boundares on the basis of shared traits of national culture are greater than the differences that are tied to religion, cultural heritage or skin color. Clearly, in the US and in Malaysia, the guarantee of freedom of religion has gone a very long way toward ameliorating potential conflict on religious grounds, and it is probable that Malaysia as a state system could not exist as it does without such a constitutional guarantee of freedom. It is apparent that a religious-blind system works effectively in both American and Malaysian contexts, and little religious based violence is perpetrated in either society. In fact, there is a great deal of mutual tolerance, respect and even syncretistic integration by people between different religions in both societies.

In this instance, we can invoke the example of the state of the People's Republic of China to gain a third contrast, for there freedom of religion is not guaranteed and religion has tended to be tightly controlled and sanctioned by the state, being officially communist and therefore by definition atheistic. China has witnessed unusual violence on religious and related ideological grounds, and the rise of alternate religious organizations is usually viewed by the state as a threat to its totalitarian Big Brother kind of control over the minds and bodies of the Chinese people. Religions therefore tend to be persecuted, especially at the higher leadership levels. On the other hand, though some discrimination on ethnic grounds occurs locally in China, China remains largely an ethnically "blind" and universally incorporating society. It boasts 57 minority groups within its territorial boundaries, and for the most part, except for the case of Tibet, there is no noticeable or organized friction between ethnic minorities. Of course, China is also close to 99% Han Chinese in ethnic identity, and even the minority groups have little choice but to adopt Han-styled ethnic markers of identity via the shared contexts of the Chinese market place and governmental institutions.

I would conclude therefore that the history of affirmative action wherever this has been adopted by state societies has proven to be largely a history of the promotion of a quota system and double standards based upon the social reification of labels and categories of race and ethnic identity.

Certain trends that have been occurring in American society and that continue unabated, are statistically undeniable from an anthropological standpoint, even if the statistics are denied or at least hidden from an official point of view. Murder rates characteristic, for instance, of certain "ethno-class" positions and categories probably continue to climb upwards. Another for instance, increasing gatekeeping in Academia and in the world of work is serving the immeasurable null cost of increasing frustrated human development potential. It has led to a condition of a lack of intellectual investigation and questioning of reality, or a lifestyle or worldview supporting such investigation, by the vast majority of Americans, and it is presenting increasing obstacles to most Americans to achieve the kind of state of mind or lifestyle needed to realize more fully their sense of freedom. So also, we can cite a bias and preferential hiring of foreign scholars in institutions of higher education, in lieu of American counterparts, based upon the application of multiple standards. These kinds of statistics do not get publicized because they paint a grim picture of American society, especially if it becomes known that as much or more than 47% of Americans, mostly from rural areas or regions, live below the poverty line.

The bottom line is that business by itself is morally or publically unconstrained, and requires always the hand of government to effectively limit and curtail its more destructive and abusive tendencies that are innate to human nature of self-interest. The bigger the business, the bigger the problem. Therefore, deregulation does not work, and the "silent hand" of Capitalist competition does not lead to trickle-down prosperity and greater opportunity, but only to amassing of greater wealth in the hands of the few at many people's expense. There is nothing intrinsic to capitalism that makes it socially responsible to common well being of either Americans or the rest of humanity, therefore it continues to require responsible government control. The dilemma is when does government control become too much control, rather than not enough, and I believe this is a delicate tight-rope to walk. The answer to the problem of poverty for instance is not welfare dependency leading to greater taxation, but the provision of effective and realistic job programs and opportunity structures that provide poor people with incentives to work harder to get ahead.

Americans have inherited an unfortunate legacy of a worldview with unrealistic and overly idealistic political implications. We are all raised to think that right makes might and that the reason for power in the world is to make the world a better place for all people. We have culturally inherited a "Wilsonian" legacy that we have a god-sent duty to promote democratic values and institutions in the world, which is a bit of a joke to most of the rest of the world that has little experience or truck with democratic institutions. We also naively take on faith that we are ourselves the exemplars of such democracy when in fact our democratic institutions have become increasingly compromised by structural double-standards, no standards at all, and by the capitalization, or globalization, of an increasing number of facets of our society and culture.

If the essential and critical difference between Roosevelt's America and Hitler's Germany was in the naive idealism of most Americans, shared by their democratic government, that the world would become a better place through more open and tolerant social institutions, an idealism that no good Germans at the time could afford to voice, then in the Brave New Amerika of the 21st Century this sense of idealism has led to disillusionment and the differences making Americans unique in the world are quickly disappearing.

Other people who come to America, often anymore with a great deal more wealth and political-economic savvy than most Americans, do not lack in the same way of political consciousness or realism as Americans. They often see Americans as gullible, naive, and therefore as quite manipulable, as we have proven to be. In our post 9/11 world, I would cite our political realities that we have been alerted to as the following:

1. Might makes right, and in politics there is no right or wrong, only winners and losers.

2. It is better to be a winner than a loser, always.

3. Losers tend to lose everything, including their lives.

4. If winning is the name of the game, then anything goes, including playing the game "by other means."

5. When times get tough, and push comes to shove, Americans must, like everyone else, "ball up their knuckle bones, and take care of their own."

Other group's who come to the US, often from backgrounds where human life is cheap and readily sacrificed, know these basic principles instinctively. The average American child, raised on very high standards of living and terms of endearment, find such lessons in life, if learned at all, a very bitter pill to swallow.

These statements are not made to be used as justification for the perpetration of violence in the world, only as legitimate justification for the active defense by any people from the perpetration of violence by other people. In the game of living and dying, and making love and making war, those whose interests are primarily in preserving peace must be as hawkish as those who have an interest in making war. A Gandhian form of pacifism would not work on a Hitler type of dictatorship. Therefore, preserving the peace through active defence becomes as critical a component of safeguarding and guaranteeing the freedom and liberty from violence and undue social constraint by an open society. No society can afford to be so open that it lets its guard down against would-be aggressors or that it fails to protect and uphold the interests of its people. The history of humanity is replete with barbarian invasions upon unprotected frontiers.

Collective identity and security in American society has been increasingly jeopardized, and the sources of this jeopardy have been politically deliberate and unnecessary from an historical or cultural standpoint. The future welfare of America's posterity has been jeopardized and cast into a darker shadow of uncertainty as a result. The Declaration of Independence is a foundational document for Americans, as well as for all humanity, that sets a charter, a course of action, in the case of political situations the realities of which are undesirable for the collective. Americans do not realize this explicity, but remember it implicitly because it is so deeply rooted in their culture. If many Americans refuse to give up their right to keep and bear arms, it really has as much to do with a deeper legacy of their cultural values, than it does by the gratification or perverse sense of power or security that owning a gun might bring. It is something about their cultural identity in the world, however unrealistic or unfounded in a modern world.

Americans are ensconced in their own culture and they rarely have or make the opportunity to step beyond these boundaries. Even when they travel abroad, or even if they had at one time come from abroad, when they are in America they have little option but to conform to American cultural patterns, either by hook or by crook, sink or swim. American culture has become largely "contested" and therefore can be considered to be "decentered" in a post-structural sense. Remaining largely democractic, it has become susceptible of "minoritocracies" and of ethno-racial communalism that serves to promote the interests of special groups in competition for resources with other groups. Most Americans do not even see how their own cultural patterning may be biased. If I ever tell someone that America is not only class-stratified as a state system, but class-stratification is effectively, functionally, the primary criteria of social differentiation in American society, even more than class, race, or other factors, then I am treated with incredulity and disbelief. This is largely because one's own cultural patterning is embedded in one's behavior in an implicit sense and remains largely invisible and therefore out of awareness, transparent. By passing culturally back and forth between very different societies, and by objectifying my studies and experiences in doing so, to some extent I have managed, however imperfectly, to make opaque and visible what remains transparent and invisible to most Americans. This of course has made me a "professional stranger" and a "marginal other" in my own native society, often to our personal disadvantage, but it has provided the anthropological insight necessary for an objective and critical analysis of contemporary American culture.

If I am critical of the contradictions, inequalities, hypocrisy and other problems of American society, I attempt this criticism in an objective, constructive and as unbiased a manner as possible. The only axe I have to grind really is with the way the American government has systematically over the last few decades worked, at times deliberately, against the colllective or common interests of the American people, usually to the special advantage of one or another private interest group. In this category I would include not only wealth multinational corporations or their executive elite, but also ethno-political groups and many other groups as well.

The fact that there is almost no open dialog or official publication about these issues in American society indicates that America is in a phase of cultural self-denial, and will be incapable of reforming its behavior before things get further out of hand than they already are. It also indicates that political correctness, that demands at least implicitly conformity to narrow and conservative, falsely liberal standards, serves to stifle either open dialog or active reform in these areas. In academic arenas, such discourse is not just seen as "incorrect," but it has become downright "taboo." And yet this pattern of response, of denial and ideological obfuscation of the realities is the worst possible thing that Americans can be doing to themselves and about themselves right now.

It is my opinion that 9/11 represents an important turning point in American society. It was the moment of awakening to most half-sensible Americans, about these issues and where they are leading our country. It has embarrassed a government that was half-asleep on the job and that was far too lax about the status of foreign nationals in the US. It was more preoccupied with largely mythical "white extremist" groups and "domestic terrorism" to the point of turning a blind eye to the risks involved in having a large foreign resident population in the US. But this turning point is not one of just an awakening, or the consequences of our awakening to the harsher realities and consequences of our own making. It was an awakening to how the US has changed and how Americans must, if their government fails them, to take command them selves of their own sinking ship. This is by no means yet an organized response, but it is a growing concern, voiced in editorials across the US, and a collective understanding that promotes American's own interests, rather than the interests of others at American's expense. It is a realization that unlimited diversity is not only unrealistic but undesirable and quite unnatural from a cultural standpoint. I see the flag flying that has been consistent and widespread since 9-11 as an indication of an awakened American consciousness, not only as a national consciousness but as an "ethno-national" consciousness vis'a vis the ethno-political behavior and organization of other groups in American society.

9-11 was really therefore a very dear and costly warning shot across the bough of our Captain's ship. It is a shot warning us to tread carefully in the deep and murky waters of an uncertain future. If we have a bright optimism about a "multi-cultural" world peaceful and prosperous for all kinds of people, then this is at best a naive illusion, and at worst a dream that is preventing us from seeing the crueller human realities of the world.

In these essays, I have sought to focus primarily upon key social and cultural issue that I at least consider to be most important to the definition of what it means to be an American, at least the "old school" of Americans who have lost any sense of critical ethno-national distinctiveness beyond being Heinz 57 American muts. I do not focus upon other related sets of issues that concern for the most part the health and wealth of our natural and man-made environments and that are equally pressing in importance for Americans and the rest of the world.

I write this as both a cross-cultural anthropologist who has been interested in objectifying one's own cultural background and potential ethnocentric interests and involvements, as well as in order to give expression as an American citizen of issues and concerns that I have found, as others around me share, that are deeply troubling and beguiling for many Americans. The United States has seemed to have been in recent decades hellbent for a form of "redevelopment" and diversification that is being achieved within a global framework of development that has not been without its as yet unacknowledged victims of "progress." In a sense, the US government is seen to have consistently sold out the collective and public interests of the American people in the promotion of the interests of many different private groups. The American government, as an adminstrative bureaucracy, is seen to have grown increasingly controlling, arbitrary and authoritarian and without necessary accountability or due process to be responsible to the American taxpayer. Many policies being promulgated in the name of "progress" appear in fact to be in the final analysis regressive in a social or economic or other structural sense.

Anthropology has been a dying discipline during these troubling times. The cross-cultural anthropologist is no longer respected or appreciated for a sense of cross-cultural objectivity or for providing the kind of ethnographic and ethnological realism that only anthropology seems competent to systematically achieve. This state of affairs has lead to a kind of "corrected" anthropology that is "designed" to be the voice for the legitimation of the interests of minority groups and cultures, and that is preoccupied with the diatribe and trappings of "political economy" and post modernism. American born and bred anthropologists have been systematically replaced by hyphenated "others" who come into the field with axes to grind that are not necessarily or genuinely their own.

And yet the anthropological perspective, as a genuine science of humankind, remains theoretically interesting regardless whether or how it is being promulgated and practiced in the international ranks of American academia today. My concern has been to seek to understand what I consider to be the deeper implications and broader patterns of American culture, identity and society as these occur in the here and the now. If we are to conduct cross-cultural fieldwork in a foreign setting, it is wise that we have formed first for ourselves an "internalized" baseline in an objective manner that we can then compare to our cross-cultural experiences. Since cross-cultural anthropologists are rapidly being replaced by a new breed of the multi-cultural "other," this concern may not be as pressing for students of anthropology as it was a couple of decades previously.

American cultural identity is unique and sui-generis to the North American continent and took shape between the early 17th to the early 21st Centuries. It has been the product of a long series of important historical events, the latest of which occurred just this last year with the tragic 9-11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. American cultural identity has been the product of many diverse cultural inputs and influences from many different groups--the Dutch, Germans, English, Irish, Scots, Welsh, the French, the Native Americans, the Africans, the Spanish and latin Americans, the Chinese, Japanese and other Asian groups, the Pacific Islanders, Eastern and Southern Europeans, the Jewish peoples, many different peoples of the Middle East, Russians, and so on and on. All have had their inputs and left their mark upon the amalgamation that is American culture. American culture is therefore not European, it is native to America since the 17th Century. It is unique to this continent. But American culture is coherent symbolically and behaviorally--it is consistent and has its own distinct sense of history, heritage and tradition.

These various ethnocultural influences have been affecting the profile of American identity for several hundred years, and continue to do so today. American cultural identity was originally derived from British culture, transplanted to the US, but it has undergone upon its transplantation and rooting in American soil a transformation that continues today and that makes this culture unique. American culture is identifiable and coherent as a distinct national culture with many local varieties and dialectical-regional variants. In this sense, it is a fully modernized culture that has incorporated many of the values and worldviews typical of a secularized modern state society. American culture has both conservative and changing elements, and remains active and vital as a culture that is continuously incorporating and integrating new elements and synthesizing new forms in solution to the common predicaments and problems that confront any cultural grouping.

It is a common feeling and an acute observation to suggest that American culture has been under attack in recent decades, and is now threatened in a number of ways as to its basic foundational and symbolic legitimacy and to its adaptability and future survival in emergent ethno-political contexts. This threat will be increasingly realized in political ways that will determine the American people's freedom and ability to determine for themselves their own choices in life. The tragedy of this trend has been that this has been largely a self-induced reality that was in any sense historically unnecessary. It has been the result largely of the unintended consequences of what I consider to be well-intentioned but anthropologically naive and misguided social policies attempting to foist within a capitalist system a non-capitalist vision of social equality between categories and groups of people. This vision has largely been coopted and "capitalized" by the powers that be to the result that, from a post-structuralist perspective, we've become the victims of our own in-built contradictions. The American government has largely orchestrated an assault on virtually every facet of American culture and the American people. This relationship can largely be described as increasingly parasitic. Any government becomes parasitic to its own population base when it no longer clearly serves the interest of its people, but instead, because of corruption and authoritarianism, increasingly serves its own interests at the expense of the larger collective. It is an open question whether the American political system, as a constitutional system, can survive without permanent disrepair the government by its current people in power or their successors and predecessors.

The source of interest and involvement in American cultural affairs has been due to the incredible productivity and creativity that this cultural systems has achieved through the decades due to its curious structural dialectic that embraces both democratic and capitalistic concerns. It is this tremendous capacity for work and creative adaptability that many interests wish to tap into, capitalize upon, and ultimately control for their own benefit.

I do not believe that these statements go beyond the bounds of an accurate and realistic anthropological assessment of the general predicament of American culture and the American people today, in either a negative or a positive manner. Americans are the inheritors of great faults and great strengths, and they have proven themselves consistent to be their own worst enemies in the world through their naivete, their gullibility and their false sense of Americanistic idealism that they seek to impose upon the rest of the world. But Americans have not been, and will never be, into the sense of "empire" that other peoples have tried to build for themselves. Americans are not even necessarily interested in economic empire, at least not in the sense that the British, Europeans, and Japanese have been interested in sense World War II. Rather, Americans as individuals and as members of companies have been greatly concerned with their own personal or private fortunes and misfortunes in a larger world, and this has led to both happy and sad outcomes. If thirty or forty thousand Micronesians remain essentially on the government dole, the American government does not pay to the Micronesians this money year after year in order that the Micronesians of the trust territory will become little brown Americans. The only legacy that the Americans have inherited from their European ancestors and forefathers is the sense of the White Man's Burden that it quietly carries in the larger world, often in any ugly manner. But unlike the Europeans and other Asians, this sense of White Man's Burden has rarely extended itself to direct or even indirect colonial administration or attempts at political control of foreign territories. This mythology of the White Man's Burden is a moral worldview rooted in traditions of enlightenment and a christain worldview of the Great Chain of Being. Americans have tried to buy their friend's abroad, and are great for throwing a ton of money at problems, often without a clearcut sense of how to solve a problem, with the naive faith that money never hurt anybody.

Only our involvement in Korea and Vietnam, due to an anti-communist and pro-capitalist orientation, has led us down the path of inheriting the colonial dilemmas of our European counterparts. These conflicts and the countries that engulfed them were merely pawns in a larger chess game between the white capitalists and the red communists that was played out on a truly global scale. It was a game that ultimately ended in a stalemate, as neither side could win a clear and decisive victory over the other without simultaneously destroying itself in the process.

There remains hope that Americans will be able to rise to the occassion and work themselves out of the predicament they have been working themselves into. In a sense, this is a question directly tied to a larger issue of the global predicament facing all humankind. Will the American people, increasingly put upon by an increasingly top heavy and self-serving government, increasingly attacked in every direction by alternate cultural orientations that seek to gain greater control over its resource base? Similarly and related, can the human race survive the increasing depredations that are the result of uncontrolled capitalist development and authoritarian nationalist regimes the world over.

The great capacity of American culture remains, in spite of criticism to the contrary and in spite its many contradictions of class, race, ethnocentrism, its ability to integrate and synthesize new forms and elements without undermining its own foundation. It has a virtually unlimited capacity for actually incorporating new elements in a way that enhances and builds upon this foundation. It is the loss of this foundation for American culture that is of gravest concern, of which personal freedom and individual political equality and opportunity are a part. Without such a foundation within a geographical and historical framework, or the ability to control this foundation, American culture will be increasingly vulnerable to the social and historical vicissitudes of shifting political realities in a large and often hostile world. It will suffer increasing desymbolization and disintegration as an adaptive orientation.

There is still place of relevancy in this neo-colonial world for an objective anthropological perspective and this role is not necessarily or only disinterested inquiry in the service of elite or powerful interests. There remain larger anthropological realities of which we all share, increasingly in a modern and more globalized world, than are dreamt of in our shallow ego-centric or ethnocentric ideologies. Anthropology as a science does not answer to ethno-political or higher special interests. It answers to itself as a professional paradigm, and to a larger community of humankind as its ultimate purpose and object of study.

In closing I would state that living culture in no context is a fore-gone conclusion or a closed book, by any means. There are no long term guarantees or assurances. Culture is largely a constructed reality, and the processes of this construction are continuous and on-going from one day to the next, from one year to the next. It is up to the Americans, and to the people who seek to become new Americans, to define or redefine American culture in the manner that is both adaptive and consistent with its sense of the past. What can be constructed can also be deconstructed and, in the end, destroyed.

What most characterizes American culture patterning today, besides a curious sense of cosmopolitanism and cultural ethnocentrism and closure, is what I refer to as the culture of denial, the consistent refusal to face and deal with certain cultural realities about American life by the American people. Like recalcitrant socio-paths who refuse to admit their guilt and responsibility in their own behavior, as long as the American system participates and promulgates this culture of denial over the consequences of its own contradictory behavior, it will fail to reform and improve itself and to resolve the sense of contradiction that is at the heart of the matter. And if this problem has not been around for a long time, the United States is one of the only countries on earth that has had a major civil war over an issue like slavery. Americans today, especially those in control, or who like to think they are in control, participates in a culture of unavowed denial over its own realities and its consequences. This culture of denial is more than the mere dream-state of a society lulled to sleep by the misinformation of its communication media. It is rather like any other kind of culture it is one in which constructed and unnecessary realities are reified because they are shared and mutually reinforced in almost any social setting in which American culture gains expression. It is afterall an easy trick to fall into and foist upon others, especially when we have very good reasons for not wanting to look honestly and squarely at reality. I believe many cultures have at times in their history lived with a sense of denial unique to their situation. Roman culture obviously dealt with such a sense of denial in the later half of its history especially. And so too the Germans before World War II or possibly the British during the reign of King George or Queen Victoria, and possibly the Russians during the Stalinist era and the Chinese during Mao's reign. Human beings, in large groups, indeed seem quite prone to this kind of phenomenon, and Americans, in spite of their liberties and freedoms, are no exception to the rule.

Structurally reinforced relations between ethnic groups as these have become institutionalized in our society through affirmative action type programs have had the unfortunate consequence of creating assymmetrical and non-reciprocal relationships between members of different racial and ethnically defined groups. It is not only permissible for Hispanics, Blacks and Asians to form their own exclusive ethnic solidarity groups and to espouse even anti-white bias, but this situation is not permitted for their white counterparts, who if they form the same form of organization and espouse the same kind of rhetoric, are branded as perpetrators of a hate crime. The non-reciprocal nature of these relationships extends to virtually every facet of interaction and relation that may possibly occur across ethnic and racial boundaries. I personally find the murder of a white woman by a successful black athlete and actor no less of a hate crime than if the woman had been black and the man white.

If we are to take the rhetoric of multiculturalism seriously, and carry the logic of its arguments to their natural conclusion, then we must be willing to accept the proposition that indeed, under the law at least, all people should be treated equally. Promotion of ethnic interest, communalism and communal solidarity, as is common and expected of many ethnic minority groups, especially at the expense of members of out-groups, becomes antithetical to a truly multicultural and tolerant society.