America: The Next Empire

Prompt: America as Empire?

America is known as a very powerful country, however, it becoming an empire is a questionable issue that strings along many tribulations. I don’t think the reality of America becoming an empire is very positive because in actuality we are not the best liked country in the world. However, due to our advanced American culture we are slowly luring in the foreigners, thus making them a part of our empire.

In Norman Mailer’s book, Why Are We at War?, he states, “Behind the whole push to go to war with Iraq is the desire to have a huge military presence in the Middle East as a stepping-stone to taking over the rest of the world.” (51) Mailer could actually bring up an important point when he talks about this issue. However, from another stand point, it could just be that the military forces are fighting in Iraq to express the wrath of the Americans who lost loved ones due to the events of September 11th. The explanation can go in multiple different directions.

Mailer makes many points in his book just relating to different aspects of the American way of life taking over. One of his main points was that of technology, Mailer just thinks anything new or different from previous years is taking over the simple ways of life. He thinks technology is taking over religion, cultural values, our minds, and our souls. Mailer states, “Now take the West’s cultural invasion into Islam. The Muslim, reaction is that Islam is endangered by modern technology and corporate capitalism. They see everything in America as aiming to destroy the basis of Islam. The huge freedom given to women in American culture is seen as an outrage by orthodox Muslims. American TV they find licentious in the extreme. They feel all that Islam stands for is going to be eroded by American culture.” (26- 29) Basically, I think that he is saying that America is already taking over, because he feels that there is a lot of cultural invasion taking place when it comes to the American culture and foreign cultures.

America becoming an empire is not one of the best ideas, because other countries actually despise our culture. Other countries feel that the citizens of America have no morals or values, and don’t really know anything about hard work. Therefore, for us to become an empire would only bring about more chaos, because foreigners might not obey by our rules and consequently there will be infinite numbers of wars. We wouldn’t be able to live peacefully at all. Everyday, I see the work ethics and morals of people from other countries. For example, we have Mexicans who get paid less than minimum wage doing hard labor jobs just to get by and survive. Their work ethics are way beyond ours, the Americans. We get things handed to us freely, and we might not acknowledge it, but it is reality. In actuality, America is slowly becoming an empire. I say this because our country is already taking over other people’s ways of life. We might not have physically taken over foreign countries but slowly our culture is taking over their ways of life.