Word: amerika
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...Latinate: incursion, attrition, pacification, termination with extreme prejudice. The linguistic underside of that was the flip, sinister slang that the American G.I.s contrived: dinky dau (crazy), numbah ten (the worst), Charlie (the Viet Cong), grease (kill). The antiwar movement built a massive vocabulary of rhetorical excess about "fascist Amerika." Officers lied in writing up citations for their men and themselves. The Viet Nam Memorial is, in a sense, the most purely true thing that can be said about the American war in Viet Nam. It has the tragic grace of the incontestably lost and therefore the incontestably true--the names...
Americans are in some ways a uniquely self-conscious people. If they do not feel good about themselves, they feel awful about themselves. America becomes Amerika, evil in the world, or else an overgrown incompetent. But perhaps Americans have developed a more mature appreciation of themselves. They exhibited last week something of the sweet, intense idealism that they have demonstrated as the Olympic torch has made its way across the U.S. to Los Angeles, and some of the mellowed fervor that they felt on Memorial Day when an Unknown from the Viet Nam War was installed at Arlington National Cemetery...
...Dreams of Movie Stardom she constructs a Hollywood that never was, where the '30s stars Lola, Priscilla and Rosemary Lane invite her to join them. Like Kafka's Amerika, Anne...
...from which the Beatles appropriately sprang) were an era of fine, ripe exaggeration-all of that bright, angry, lulu rhetoric parading in costume across the counterculture and the war zone,en route to conciouseness III. America was amerika. the young were "freaks", the police were "pigs" a hundred different chemical substances were on hand to perform radical exaggerations in the brain. The 80's seem to be taking a preppier line with reality; certain voices run to understatement now. Still, a great deal of exaggeration has been built into the culture and, of course, the traditional home of exaggeration...
...country must always be rescued from scoundrels (Know Nothing nativists, racists, anti-Semites and other thugs), and Americans seem to know that now, seem briskly capable of loving their country without being nationalistic bullies. In any case it has been years since some Americans went around spelling it "Amerika." Not that Americans have become moronically self-congratulatory; they just seem more realistically self-aware, less given to their previous extremisms, the essentially trifling Manichaeanism that saw it all in black and white...