Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Wealth

Does anywhere in America resemble this except The Highlands, Washington or Jupiter Island, Florida?

Americans have a touching innocence, a child-like belief in their country and in toys (gadgets) of all dimensions, colors, sounds, smells, and shapes, that I think is a specific reflection of their country's history and geography.

Many Europeans and some Asians, in general, seem to have a more nuanced approach to things like, for instance, capitalism ("versus" socialism).

What strikes me as particularly pertinent in this century and the last is that you have American values of liberty and democracy on the one hand and the aggressive, often times ugly and vicious capitalism that has made 1% of the population extremely rich (as in having more than 40% of the wealth of the country, possessing bank accounts in Switzerland and houses in the south of France as well as their own private jets, and living segregated in walled compounds), the middle class a minority, and tens of millions of Americans living in abject poverty whose physical, educational, and moral conditions shock countries and people around the world.

The middle and upper middle classes, respectively, apparently content themselves with aping "their betters" and in living in a dream, the American dream, the rest of their hard-working lives.

(And this does not even begin to touch upon what rapacious Coca Cola, Chiquita Bananas, Anaconda Copper, etc. have done in Latin America and other parts of the Third World. Or the effects of consumerism on the environment).

What will happen to the United States--the second Garden of Eden for conservatives--with its promise of eternal youth, beauty, material bounty, happiness, and expansion (in many senses of the term)?

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Only in America would global warming be seriously considered a hoax.

Only in America--and countries ruled by right-wing, often military, regimes--would being anti-corporate be considered anti-American.+

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American capitalism has served as the model for development in China, India, Brazil, and other developing countries, with, without exaggeration, disastrous effects.

Is ignorance truly bliss?

Take down the wall (of ignorance), Hollywood, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Citibank, Comcast, the big oil companies...*

No, we don't need 200+ cable television channels, a more awesome dance club, or even 4D special effects or 5G networks to be happy. Or to find meaning in a life.

* But would we then lose the very innocence--some might say "stupidity"--that many Americans still possess, this belief in "the system," in the "American way of life" as the Garden of Eden?