Well, I simply already had a basis of comparison, Mick. I lived in Canada from age 1 to 10. It's a very different psychological upbringing, because the root assumptions about our country and its role in the world are radically different than in the USA. We don't see ourselves as the boss/mentor/example/policeman to everyone else, telling them how they shoud live. We see ourselves as one country among many, that's all...an association of relative equals in a large and varied world. We seek accomodation, not confrontation. We do not assume the mantle of "ruling superpower".

Then we moved to upstate New York when I was 10...because of what my father considered a business opportunity at the time.

So as a younger child I had been brought up in a society that still proudly considered itself part of the British tradition. To us Canadians the Redcoats were the "good guys" of history...just like our mounted police. Suddenly I find myself transplanted into a society where the Redcoats are the "bad guys" and are vilified constantly in history classes. I become acutely aware of this right from Grade 4 on, and it just keeps getting worse. Well, that made me suspicious right away, because it went against my cultural grain, so I wasn't about to buy it.

*(In all fairness, the American revolutionaries had quite legitimate reasons to pick a fight with Great Britain in the 1770s, and you can definitely argue for the rightness of their cause. On the other hand, many colonists sided with the British at the time. They were called "Loyalists" and many of them fled to Canada at the conclusion of that war. I grew up in a country that honoured the Loyalist tradition and that had remained somewhat suspicious of the American approach to things ever since the 1770s, and that had also been attacked by the USA in 1812-1814. None of that has been forgotten.)*

So I was a natural sceptic when it came to standard American rhetoric, because it had not been implanted in me since day one of my life, and it rubbed me the wrong way. I had seen something else first. However, I had to put up with it right through till I was 21...when I moved back to Canada. I fought it every inch of the way.

And that's just a brief explanation. There was a lot more to it than that. The entire time I was in the USA I felt like an alien living in a foreign land, and I deeply missed my own country which is every bit as free as the USA (if not more so) and which is a hell of a lot less inclined to go all over the world attacking other people (although we are not completely innocent in that regard...we used to be a satellite of Imperial England and its policies...we are now a satellite of corporate America and its policies...but we remain essentially far more liberal and far less aggressive internationally than America).

America nowadays is in the same position of hubris in the world that Great Britain was in, say, 1816 to 1914...it sees itself as the dominant conquering empire and greatest financial power of its time. So far. Someone else will come along and supplant America in that role presently. Someone always does. Maybe China.

That won't necessarily be so great either...but it is as inevitable as the changing of the seasons. Empires have their day and then it's over.