KEY POINTS:
I have a confession to make: I love America. I boycott Starbucks, don't buy jeans, protest the Iraq war, avoid watching reality TV - and yet, life without the USA is almost unthinkable.
This is a shocking new revelation to me, as they'd say on the E!
channel, but it turns out I've loved it all my life, since Sesame Street and the Beezus and Ramona books. And a dodgy thing to admit in our little piece of pacifist paradise.
I'm slightly afraid the liberal mafia may come after me - or at least stop being friends with me on Facebook.
In every generation - and the one I belong to is no exception - we proudly believe that, along with inventing sex, we invented anti-Americanism.
Such feeling started during World War II (given they were "overpaid, over-sexed and over here") and continued with Vietnam, nuke visits, and the two Iraq invasions. Each generation thinks it's the first to realise the full iniquity of American power because, between protests, we happily watch Happy Days reruns and listen to Norah Jones. Or Seinfeld and Queens of the Stone Age.
We balance demonstrations against globalisation (so often Americanisation - sorry, "Americanization") with using Facebook to organise those demonstrations.
So I love America, and I bet you do, too. Whoops, is that a further affront? I don't mean we're going to start eating hot dogs and mangling The Star-Spangled Banner in emotionally choked-up voices on the 4th of July. As scared as I am of the liberal mafia, I'm more scared of jingoistic hawks. I haven't fallen for America-the-aggressive-bully.
It's not America the Brave that I love, but America the Beautiful; not the American government but America's intelligent, enriching culture. Bet you've never read that last phrase before (even Google, our omniscient American-given oracle, knows it not).
Bet it made some of you splutter in amused superiority. Everyone knows Americans are stoopid, right? Lord knows there's evidence for the stereotype - not only the avoidable, horrific Marx-brothers-do-Greek-tragedy farce of the 2003 Iraq invasion and its continuing aftermath, but the fact that Bush was voted in again after it started. And Everybody loves Raymond? I don't.
It's the Brits who are the smart ones, always. But ... Pop quiz: you're being marooned on a desert island and can take with you one long-running sitcom which debuted in 1972. Do you choose: a) M*A*S*H or b) Are You Being Served?
But such evidence against the "dumb America" idea we just ignore. Much intelligent American culture isn't seen as American, but simply ... there. Generic. Trans-national.
For example, take their technical innovations - everything from elevators, skyscrapers and air conditioners to microwave ovens. Take every single popular musical genre of the last 50 years - there's really only country and western (American anyway) and reggae which don't ultimately trace their roots back to African-American jazz and rock'n' roll.
If we do notice the culture of origin, we think of it as regional - not from America, but New York or New Orleans or Seattle. Or we identify its sub-culture - it's not American but WASP or black or creole.
In any case, you could listen solely to Britpop and you'd still owe your listening pleasure to America. University of Auckland ethno-musicologist Dr Kirsten Zemke jokes that America is all that stands between us and Morris dancing for fitness and entertainment.
You can be a student of "American Studies" at the University of Canterbury; Zemke reckons the university could have called it "Popular Culture Studies", with pretty much the same programme. My favourite authors include Kurt Vonnegut, journalist Martha Gelhorn and Fight Club writer Chuck Palahniuk; I listen to Beirut (from New Mexico) and Nina Simone; and watch The Royal Tenenbaums and scriptwriter Charlie Kaufman's Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind.
Some of these deal with specifically American themes - and yet I have never really thought of them collectively as American. If these were all French and somebody enjoyed them as much as I do, they would probably quite happily label themselves a Francophile - so why not an Amerophile? So far, so arty-farty (who'd have thought - it's possible to be a snob praising American culture!)
But I can keep it real. I can describe the soft, green drapery the pregnant Angelina wore to Cannes (thanks to procrastination tool extraordinaire, gofugyourself.com) and I have more than a soft spot for a trashy movie and pizza on a Friday night.
Imagine if European cinema dominated the market and we saw Hollywood only during the film festival. We would say: so fresh, so charming, so innocent and carefree - that Adam Sandler! That Will Smith - a genius!
Such rare escapism makes a refreshing change from seeing Isabelle Huppert in yet another depressing psycho-sexual melodrama. The problem with the simple plots and obvious humour is not necessarily with the product itself but with how much of it is out there.
Similarly with music: more than half the tracks played on commercial New Zealand airwaves come from the US - although this has lessened as playing New Zealand music has become fashionable. Are the sitcoms and rom-coms and cheerleader pom-poms set before us because that's only what we want? Are we begging for it? I don't buy a simple "yes" or "no" to that question - it's more complicated than that.
We like American entertainment, sure, but we only see it in the first place because America dominates both culture delivery and content - the media networks and infrastructure and the products they deliver to us. Don't forget, they practically invented marketing, too. Maybe we'd like other stuff - from Brazil or Japan or Egypt or India - but we'll never know because America is monopolising the scheduling space.
Put simply, the US is "the world's only information super-power". So wrote a former senior official in the Clinton administration, David Rothkop, in a 1997 paper entitled "In praise of cultural imperialism?".
I don't know what the question mark is doing there at the end of the title; he's totally keen to exploit US media dominance to spread American values to all four corners of the planet. All in the name of world peace, of course. The US uses entertainment as weapons of mass docility.
And, like any imperial power, it can convince itself its actions are in the best interests of the countries it colonises. My point is, I can love a lot of American culture without loving the fact that I'm living in an American cultural hegemony. But if I have to live in a hemisphere where one country is culturally dominant?
Make it a multi-cultural country with something for just about everyone's taste, with the finances to create spectacular extravaganzas and an upbeat attitude on an average day.
If Europe was in charge, well, Isabelle Huppert is a great artist but it would be hard to watch her being intense and moody every day, without wanting to top yourself. (Don't forget Europe's idea of light relief includes Dad's Army.)
For native English speakers, there are benefits in being part of the Empire that invented the Death Star. It means our washing machine buttons are labelled in the "right" lang-uage. It means that, linguistically, overseas travel is a breeze - and even living in Amsterdam or Tokyo is possible without any extra language-learning on our part.
And why are we allowed to live in Tokyo, in the first place? To teach the imperial language, of course. We're also beneficiaries of the US military-industrial complex many of us abhor: for example, TCP/IP Protocol, on which the internet is based, was developed as an American military communication tool. It paved the way for the web to be built - and for other Americans to imprint on the world such icons as eBay, Facebook, YouTube, Wikipedia, Google ... so far.
Because most international travel makes me a tool of the Empire and the internet is thanks to the military, all this convenience makes me uncomfortable. So while I am pleased my life is made easy, that's not a reason I love America.
The America I love sometimes doesn't recognise itself as "America" because it's too ashamed. By "America", people often mean Uncle Sam, McDonalds and the "American dream" of making more money than your neighbours, even if that means selling them mortgages they can't afford and bankrupting the whole world in the process.
Yet the flip-side of that, the antidote - the sharp counterpoint counter-culture to all those trite, crass, lowest-common-denominator movies and hollow, generic songs rhyming "you" and "true" - is also America.
It's South Park, comedian Jon Stewart, rapper Kanye West, growler Tom Waits and that most long-running of sitcoms, The Simpsons. It's the beat generation and William Burroughs' Naked Lunch. It's Gummo and Donnie Darko. It's Andy Warhol combining both the American dream and its nightmare. America is "I heart Huckabees".
I heart American anti-consumerism. I would know a lot less about America's problems, including its addiction to political hypocrisy, if it wasn't for Vanity Fair and New Yorker magazine; books like Fast Food Nation; movies like Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, Control Room, Spike Lee's New Orleans requiem When the Levees Broke, the Fog of War interview with Robert McNamara and Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine. All from the good old US of A.
There's an idea that all of that critical stuff is not really America. That the real America is Mom, apple pie, Fox News and the right to use depleted uranium weapons. Says who? The people who mostly talk about America and ask God - its fellow omnipresence - to bless it, that's who. The ones we don't usually believe.
Dubya might want to disown the fact, but the States has a long tradition of subversion. It's time that called itself American too. If you're not for us, you're against us? Then America is tearing itself apart from the inside - and has been for a long time.
Rather than say "it's all the same, stoopid America", I know which American side I'm cheering for. I may even use pom-poms.
