America is extraordinarily good at building fantasy worlds. The trouble begins when fantasy becomes a substitute for the country its people deserve.
Look at the castle. Try not to notice what lies beyond it.
America arrived in my life long before I ever arrived in America.
Growing up in Australia, with a short spell in Italy, I encountered the United States through television, films, music, advertising and games. It seemed less like another country than the place where everything happened. The streets were wider, the cars were larger and the possibilities appeared endless. America was where ordinary people stumbled into extraordinary lives. It was the future, broadcast to the rest of us in vivid colour.
Like millions of people outside the United States, I watched with awe. I wanted to visit. At times, I imagined moving there permanently. America did not merely export entertainment; it exported a feeling. It offered the intoxicating possibility that life could be bigger, brighter and more significant than the life immediately around you.
That fascination has never entirely left me. But as I have grown older, it has become tangled with disappointment.
The America I once imagined now resembles a vast, country-shaped theme park: spectacular, immersive and constantly selling an experience of itself. It presents freedom, abundance and individual possibility with unrivalled confidence. Behind the attractions, however, millions of people struggle with insecure work, unaffordable healthcare, gun violence, debt and a political system that often appears more interested in staging conflict than solving problems.
The theme park is not entirely fake. That is what makes it so convincing. America really has produced extraordinary art, inventions, movements and personalities. It contains immense beauty and genuine opportunity. Its ideals have inspired people well beyond its borders, and its citizens have repeatedly fought to make the country live up to them.
The problem is that the performance of America can become more important than the condition of Americans.
No country is better at turning its identity into entertainment. Politics becomes a televised rivalry. News becomes an endless panel show. Personal tragedy becomes content. Wealth becomes celebrity, celebrity becomes authority and authority becomes another kind of performance. Even dissent is quickly branded, packaged and sold back to the public.
This creates a strange national atmosphere in which almost everything feels urgent, but very little seems to change. There is always another election, scandal, shooting, trial, outrage or cultural battle demanding attention. Each event arrives with dramatic music and a cast of recognisable characters. The audience is encouraged to choose a side, react immediately and keep watching.
Meanwhile, the less theatrical problems remain.
Many Americans work full-time and still struggle to afford housing. A medical emergency can become a financial catastrophe. Parents worry about sending their children to school in a country where mass shootings have become a recurring feature of public life. People are told that they live in the wealthiest and freest nation on Earth while being asked to accept forms of insecurity that citizens of comparable countries would find astonishing.
The contrast is difficult to ignore. America possesses the resources to address many of these problems, but action is repeatedly delayed, diluted or defeated. The country can mobilise enormous sums for war, corporate rescue or technological ambition, yet basic public provisions are treated as unrealistic fantasies. Universal healthcare is described as impossibly expensive while the existing system extracts extraordinary amounts of money from the people forced to navigate it.
This is where entertainment serves a deeper function. It does more than help people relax at the end of a difficult day. At a national scale, it provides a language through which anxiety can be redirected. Structural problems become personal stories. Political failure becomes partisan theatre. Economic insecurity becomes a contest in which everyone is encouraged to imagine themselves as a future millionaire rather than recognise their present vulnerability.
The American promise has always depended on aspiration: work hard, take risks and become something greater. There is real beauty in that idea. But aspiration can also be used to prevent solidarity. If success is understood entirely as an individual achievement, hardship can be dismissed as an individual failure. The person who cannot afford treatment, rent or education is told to work harder, budget better or reinvent themselves.
There is always another product, programme or personality offering escape. Reinvent your body. Build your brand. Start a side hustle. Become the main character. Buy something that signifies the person you hope to be. These messages are not uniquely American, but America has refined them into an entire cultural ecosystem.
Then there are guns, perhaps the darkest expression of the national contradiction. The firearm is presented as an instrument of personal freedom and protection, yet its widespread presence creates a background hum of fear. Schools practise shooting drills. Public spaces are assessed for exits. Arguments carry the possibility of sudden escalation. After each mass killing, grief is followed by ritualised political combat, and the country eventually returns to its regular programming.
The promise is safety through individual power. The result is collective insecurity.
What makes this especially painful is that America is capable of imagining almost anything. It can build private rockets, cinematic universes, artificial worlds and cities in the desert. Its creative and technological ambitions seem to recognise few limits. Yet when asked to imagine a society in which illness does not lead to bankruptcy or children are not trained to hide from gunfire, the national imagination suddenly contracts.
The phrase “first-world, third-world country” is sometimes used to describe this contradiction. I understand the frustration behind it, though the comparison is crude and unfair to countries flattened by the label. The more precise point is that the United States combines extraordinary private wealth with startling public neglect. Its richest spaces can feel futuristic, while its poorest communities are expected to survive without reliable access to the foundations of a secure life.
Still, it would be wrong to mistake the failures of American institutions for the character of the American people. Many of the country’s most perceptive critics are Americans. They are teachers, organisers, journalists, artists, healthcare workers, parents and students who understand exactly what is happening and work every day to change it. The United States does not lack awareness, compassion or courage. It lacks systems capable of turning those qualities into durable national action.
Nor is this an argument against entertainment. Stories, games, music and spectacle are not trivial. They help people endure, connect and make sense of their lives. America’s contribution to global culture is immense, and much of it deserves admiration. The danger comes when entertainment stops being a reflection of society and becomes a curtain drawn across it.
A theme park offers excitement inside carefully maintained boundaries. It creates the feeling of danger without its consequences, progress without disruption and community without obligation. Most importantly, it allows visitors to suspend disbelief. For a few hours, the world outside can disappear.
A country cannot survive indefinitely on the same promise.
America deserves more than to be the world’s entertainer. It deserves more than recurring spectacle, ritual outrage and inspiring language unsupported by public life. Its people deserve healthcare that does not terrify them, work that sustains them, schools that protect their children and institutions that treat dignity as something more than a reward for winning.
The castle is impressive. The lights are dazzling. The stories America tells about itself remain powerful enough to captivate the world.
But eventually, the gates close, the music stops and everyone has to go home. The measure of a country is not the brilliance of the fantasy it sells. It is the quality of the life waiting outside.
