The Yahoos’ numerical system stops at four. “On their fingers they count thus: one, two, three, four, many. Infinity begins at the thumb.” Yet even more stingy and sublime are the real life Warlpiris, Australian aborigines whose language only allows for one, two, then many. Eternity snaps into being with one’s middle finger. There’s also the Pirahas. Numbering less than 350 souls, this Amazon tribe has no creation myths, no fairy tales, no arts, not even tattooing, no words for colors and no numbers except hói, which means either “one,” “few” or “small.” Compared to the 112 phonemes of Taa (spoken in Botswana and Namibia), 40 of English, 30 of Italian, the Piraha language only has ten. They also have no concept of the past. According to linguist Daniel Everett, the Pirahas believe that “everything is the same, things always are,” and nothing matters but the present.

Everett tried to teach the Pirahas to count from 1 to 10 in Portuguese, 1 + 1 = 2, with zero success. Hostile to numbers, they trade little with adjacent tribes. Like their ancestors, of which they have no memories–most can’t even name all four of their grandparents–the Pirahas hunt, fish, gather, grind some manioc flour, their only concession to farming and “culture,” but can’t be bothered to smoke or salt meats. They don’t mind going long stretches with minimal food, since it makes them stronger, they believe. Needless to say, an all-you-can-eat corn syrup, trans fat and Monsanto Frankenstein buffet would not do a brisk business in a Piraha village, and no Piraha has ever been seen trading on Wall Street or at a board meeting of Goldman Sachs, Bear Stearns, Bank of America, Wachovia, Merryl Lynch or Lehman Brothers. Compound interest, naked short selling, credit default swaps and the Yen carry trade just don’t interest these Pirahas.

The original Yahoos were those described by Swift in Gulliver’s Travels, of course, “Their Heads and Breasts were covered with a thick Hair, some frizzled and others lank; they had Beards like Goats, and a long Ridge of Hair down their Backs, and the fore Parts of their Legs and Feet; but the rest of their Bodies were bare, so that I might see their Skins, which were of a brown Buff Colour. They had no Tails, nor any Hair at all on their Buttocks, except about the Anus; which, I presume Nature had placed there to defend them as they sat on the Ground [...] The Hair of both Sexes was of several Colours, brown, red, black and yellow. Upon the whole, I never beheld in all my Travels so disagreeable an Animal, or one against which I naturally conceived so strong an Antipathy.”

Today, Yahoo! is the homepage of many Americans. Since we spend so much time on the internet, it can be said that we live as much on Yahoo! as in a real America, that we are, in essence, a Yahoo Nation. Unlike these other savages, however, we do know our history. Many of us are aware that O.J. Simpson’s glove didn’t fit, that Marilyn Monroe slept with two Kennedy brothers–John and Ted?–and that Britney Spears once shaved her head.

Compared with the Pirahas and Borges’ Yahoos, how are the math skills of Americans? In 2003, our 15-year-olds ranked 25th out of 41 countries, so we’re mediocre, not quite a .500 team, in other word. The top five were Hong Kong, Finland, South Korea, Netherlands and Lichtenstein. Unlike the Pirahas, however, Americans have no aversion to numbers. Quite the opposite, in fact, we’re obsessed with numbers, especially those that don’t mean anything. Take our sport scores, which are labyrinths of statistics sure to astound any foreigner. Everything done by anyone on the field is exactly tallied, from tackles, assists, sacks, yards gained, yards lost, passes deflected, interceptions, fumbles caused to fumbles recovered, etc. The average American knows not only many of the players’ jersey numbers, but their height, weight, years active and age. Multiplied by the four major sports, and that’s a lot of pointless and ungainful memorizing. In soccer, the world’s most popular sport, the only statistic reported in foreign newspapers is goals scored, not shots, assists, saves or corner kicks. Game over, non-Americans just can’t be bothered with such trivia, but not us.

No other people are so distracted by sports as American. Each of our professional baseball team plays 162 regular season games a year; each basketball team, 82; each football team, 16. With the preseasons, playoffs and college sports, Americans are bombarded by a daily dose of juvenile excitement hyped by grown men in suits. Every game is exhaustively discussed, and every millionaire athlete endlessly interviewed, with the unintended consequence that even a benchwarming, foreign-born pinch hitter can become as facile with words as our best politicians. It is worth noting that television cameras are never aimed at our deflated intellectuals, the writers and scholars whose lifework demands subtle, careful thinking and exact articulation.

As meaningless numbers slosh around in our minds, crippling our ability to think, our infinitely corrupt and ruthless ruling class swindles, legislates and no-bid contracts away trillions of our dollars. Whatever money they don’t steal outright, they’ll depreciate through inflation. Unlike the Pirahas, we won’t even have a chunk of land to stand on after they’re done fleecing. Thomas Jefferson has warned, “If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their money, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them, will deprive the people of their property until their children will wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered.”

The Yahoos attacked Gulliver by climbing on a tree and crapping on his head, but we don’t have such a raw and robust option against our executive muggers, since they are always out of sight, in the highest towers, behind gates or dark windows or, as this financial, social and political disaster they’re orchestrating become ever more devastating, in another country altogether. In 2006, Prensa Latina reported that George W. Bush bought a 98,842-acre farm in northern Paraguay. That’s 154 square miles, larger than the entire city of Philadelphia. What do you think he’s doing, investing in real estate?

The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem [...] One sees it must indeed own the riches of the summer and winter, and need never be bankrupt while corn grows from the ground or the orchards drop apples or the bays contain fish or men beget children upon women.

–Walt Whitman, from his preface to Leaves of Grass, 1855.

Cool, the American stands on two legs, favoring neither left nor right, his weight equally distributed. No contrapposto wuss, he declines to lean on stumps, cherry trees, walls, chaise longues or, god forbid, another man. In his mind at least, one or more babes could be seen draping themselves, melting, practically, all over his dry solidity. For a casual yet don’t-mess-with-me equilibrium, his feet are set slightly wider than his hormone-bred, steroid-fortified shoulders.

His forebears stood at a sepia-tinted bar, draining liquor. Though sitting, he hasn’t gone soft but is perched on a high stool, his height nearly that of a man standing. Even at rest, he is erect and ready for action, be it darts, dancing or a preemptive strike against some dark pest of an enemy.

Just east of Italy or south of Spain, men squat. In all of Asia, even Japan, they squat. That says it all, he reflects, turning off his credit card charged plasma screen. If ever evicted, he would never squat, he doesn’t think. He imagines a squatting form in his foreclosure encroached, exurban cul-de-sac. With a running start, he would boot this collapsed, balled up, abject, defecating alien through the goddamn upright. You just can’t have shit on the sidewalk.

And baseball catchers don’t really squat, captain, since their feet aren’t totally flat on the ground. How long have you been in this country?

Standing tall, the status/stature of a state depends on its wealth and asskicking power, one sprung from the other. Lacking either, it’s just a one-legged pretender on the global stage, leaning on a patron. Lacking both, it’s nothing but a basket case, immobile flesh plopped on woven faggots.

Power requires symbols, a throne or a staff, etc. While plebeians crowded benches, the big man had his own chair, hence chairman, a head that schemes, tastes and barks orders. Tongueless, the middle class is a stomach that churns and digests. Upset, it aches and threatens to fart. The lower class is a sullen or shuffling rectum. “Would you like some freedom fries with that?”

As a symbol of money-generated power, the skyscraper was the obvious choice, with the biggest and baddest flaunting the tallest and longest, pricking heavens. No confusion of tongues here, we all speak Globish. Ramrod straight, free of decorative, barbaric frills, it’s just straight ahead shock and awesome, ya’al. Better yet, make it two towers, two legs, two pillars, down there, downtown, in the Finance District, where all capital actual or hallucinated are diced, bundled and swapped, with a proper commission for me! me! me!

Minoru Yamasaki’s career began with the Pruitt-Igoe Housing Project in St. Louis. A hellish, Utopian prototype, it was made up of 33 11-story buildings containing 2,870 apartments. Its elevators paused only at the first, fourth, seventh and tenth floors. On March 16, 1972, after 18 years of use, it was demolished by controlled demolition on live television. Yamasaki’s other famous buildings include the Century Plaza Towers in Los Angeles, the Picasso Tower in Madrid and the Pacific Science Center in Seattle, but his magnum opus was undoubtably America’s twin legs in lower Manhattan, white and visible even in New Jersey. Erected in 1972, they came down on September 11, 2001. “Minoru” must mean “controlled demolition on live television.” The architect blustered, “World trade means world peace [...] The World Trade Center should, because of its importance, become a representation of man’s belief in humanity, his need for individual dignity, his beliefs in the cooperation of men, and through cooperation, his ability to find greatness.”

Yamasaki died in 1986, long before the double amputation, castration witnessed by the entire world as well as its hapless victim. What happened on September 11, 2001 was worse than the 1975 embassy evacuation from Saigon, since it took place on American soil, in the greatest American city, inflicted by American instruments — Bush, Cheney, American and United Airlines — on American assets with the greatest and most visible symbolic power. It was worse than Pearl Harbor, which had occurred away from the Mainland, in a territory that only became a state 18 years later. Further, Pearl Harbor wasn’t shown live on television. By retaliating against a wrong enemy, Iraq, America confirmed its impotence. By humiliating its “detainees” in Abu Ghraib and elsewhere, it betrayed its pettiness and sadism. By legalizing torture, it trumpeted to the world that it no longer even pretended to be moral.

The Twin Towers surpassed the Empire State Building as the tallest in the world. Conceived during the roaring twenties, an era of jivey speculation and easy money, like our last two decades, the Empire State Building was built during the Great Depression. As excavation began in January of 1930, it was far from clear what the country was going through. Although the stock market had crashed on October 29, 1929, Lou Levin recorded in November, “Happy days are here again, / The skies above are clear again / Let us sing a song of cheer again / Happy days are here again.” This became the campaign jingle for Franklin D. Roosevelt, who famously declared during his 1932 inaugural address, “We have nothing to fear but fear itself.”

With its destruction of America’s major rivals, World War II not only restored but greatly increased this country’s prosperity and political clout, but with its oil running low and its industries gone, not even a global bloodbath will save it now. It doesn’t mean it won’t try.

There are 246 foreign born players in Major Leagues Baseball, compared to only a handful in the NFL. This is only appropriate in a country that invented the assembly line. Streamlining the production of objects, it also systematized and homogenized the behaviors of men, turned them into seething robots. Manning an assembly line at Boeing, Frank Perdue or McDonald’s, a person becomes just as uniform as the jet engines, drum sticks or freedom fries he’s cranking out. If stockholders had their wishes, he could be switched off at the end of his shift, given a cursory wipe and a pat on the head, then flipped back on the next morning, the costs of his daily upkeep automatically deducted from his debit card. Fuck healthcare.

With his steel head, invisible face and angular, padded shoulders, a football player resembles nothing so much as a robot, a hulking steel humanoid, impervious to pain yet eager to dispense it. Knights in armor also appeared robot-like, but that was only cosplay for the elites. Only the Ringo Starrs and Elton Johns of their days were allowed to dress up like proto-robots. Not so, football players. Even the lowest American could aspire to become a tackling, blocking robot, provided he’s not a wussified, pencil-necked, tanka-composing creep, with barely enough facial hair to not shave.

Like cars, robots are super cool. Tom Brady and LaDainian Tomlinson are also cool. Cool is where it’s at. Americans who lose their cool must do it online, in the dark or out of sight, preferably in another country, while on vacation or in uniform. Criminals or trash, they’re only shown on TV to be ridiculed. Real Americans keep their cool. Stay cool, keep cool, be cool, act cool, even as one is suffering or inflicting pain. It’s only shock and awe, y’all. All football players are cool.

I’d be very surprised to learn of another language that uses cool as a blanket substitute for all positive qualities. Hot also appears frequently in American English, but not nearly as often as cool. Hot’s not really American. Yankees are cool, Latinos hot. If you’re an American man, don’t even think of blurting in public that LaDainian Tomlinson is hot, for example. Humans are supposed to be warm, machines cool. Americans are definitely cool.

Cyborgs, androids, gynoids, American fictional robots include the Six Million Dollar Man, The Bionic Woman, Star Trek’s Data and many, many more. The ultimate American robot is The Terminator, an indestructible killing machine that stops at nothing. Outside of his role, Arnold Schwarzenegger also projects a machine-like hardness and coolness. No reflections, no irony, no moods. No method actor, Schwarzenegger.

The ultimate self-made immigrant, Arnold Schwarzenegger governs the most mythologized state of the union, brightly lit, plastic, hardly real, a self-parody, with San Francisco a foggy aberration. Don’t ever confuse him with that other beef jerky, Sylvester Stallone. Arnold would never consent to mouth such a lame ass question like, “Do we get to win this time?” Sylvester sounded like a hurt little boy asking his mom if he could go outside and play. That’s not American, dipshit. What’s next, approval from congress?! Just kick ass, like Schwarzenegger. Instead of asking stupid questions, The Terminator just threatened, promised, “I’ll be back,” like General McArthur, the last American with truly depleted uranium gonads.

If only America had a mile-long assembly line to crank out millions of Schwarzeneggers, its army wouldn’t be short of robotic soldiers. Desperate, it’s accepting foreigners, middle-aged fatsos, drug addicts, Aryan Nation, Blood, Crisp, Latin Kings and Tiny Rascals members, not to mention borderline retards. One overzealous recruiter even crossed into Mexico, to track down two potential suckers in a Tijuana high school. A female soldier has to be 28-week pregnant before they send her home. On May 23, 2003, a 33 year-old Marine even gave birth to a baby boy on the USS Boxer, deployed near Kuwait.

The Pentagon thought it had landed a poster robot in Pat Tillman, a square-jawed football player who turned down three million bucks to go zap terrorists, payback time, except that Tillman actually had a brain and a heart. Sent to Afghanistan, then Iraq, he said to a fellow soldier as they witnessed the bombing of a town, “You know, this war is so fuckin’ illegal.” He urged other soldiers to vote against Bush, and even asked his mother to arrange a meeting with Noam Chomsky, of all people. No robot, Tillman was morphing into a fire-breathing dissident in front of his handlers’ eyes, so they had three shots blasted into his forehead from ten yards away, then declared him a hero. Case closed. Even after the criminal details had leaked out, the mainstream, corporate media gave this sensational story only a cursory glance, leaving his family and the alternative press to pick through the sordid facts. In the absurd funhouse that’s contemporary America, Ellen DeGeneres’ dog is more newsworthy.

Robotic soldiers are only a stopgap measure until real robots could be perfected. Although they may not be as well-spoken as Arnold Schwarzenegger, they won’t feel pain, hunger and fatigue. Israel already employs bulldozer robots and, on the border with Gaza, a series of wall-mounted machine guns remote-controlled by female soldiers. South Korea uses SGR-A1 robots along its border with North Korea. According to Samsung, the robots’ manufacturer, “the system is designed to replace a human-oriented guards, overcoming their limitation of discontinuous guarding mission due to its severe weather condition or fatigue, so that the perfect guarding operation is guaranteed.” Leading the field is the USA, of course, with 5,000 robots deployed in Iraq alone, everything from a nine-pound Dragon Runner, a “throwbot” that can be tossed over a wall, out a three-story window or up a flight of stairs, to the Special Weapons Observation Remote Reconnaissance Direct Action System (SWORDS), armed with an M249 rifle. All these systems are still controlled by a human, but that will soon change. Noel Sharkey wrote recently in The Guardian:

[F]ully autonomous robots that make their own decisions about lethality are high on the US military agenda. The US National Research Council advises “aggressively exploiting the considerable warfighting benefits offered by autonomous vehicles.” They are cheap to manufacture, require less personnel and, according to the navy, perform better in complex missions. One battlefield soldier could start a large-scale robot attack in the air and on the ground.

This is dangerous new territory for warfare, yet there are no new ethical codes or guidelines in place. I have worked in artificial intelligence for decades, and the idea of a robot making decisions about human termination is terrifying.

The Pentagon is taking its cue from a 1995 dystopian movie, Screamers, which features a fighting robot called Autonomous Mobile Sword. A self-replicating crawling machine, it tracks a living pulse, then leaps to dismember its target. A small problem: it cannot distinguish between friends or foes, civilians or soldiers, men, women or children, primary or collateral damages. It sounds like we’re already there. Cool!

Road rage is all-too-common and abusive comments run rampant on the web. Before the widespread use of the internet, a decade and a half ago, Americans didn’t have such a ready, anonymous outlet to vent their anger. Normally, one hesitates before calling someone an idiot or a coward face to face, at a bar, for example, not merely out of civility but because a crisp right cross might crashes against one’s eyeball, but online, there are no corresponding restraints. Freed from the burden of having a name, face and personal history, one can rail against strangers, flirt with children and do pretty much whatever. Even when a real name is used, there’s still enough safety and privacy to unleash one’s secret desires and demons.

We’re constantly thwarted from life itself, since all media are mediated, and what connects also separates. The seductive screens we’re addicted to keep us isolated, unsocialized and removed from whoever’s sleeping a wall or a floor away. Reduced to pure minds, we may yet realize that the body, without mouthwash and deodorant, is not such a bad buffer after all. Phone sex isn’t a long-term solution. Tila Tequila isn’t all that, put your discount family jewels away. She needs a spine specialist, them headlights are fake. Cars and ipods are yet more emblems of our isolation. Glimpsed through a windshield, life comes at us with the unreality and speed of television, that ultimate control freak.

Zombie machine, electronic pacifier, the boob tube is at the heart of American relaxation and good times. Americans sit in bars not to talk but to be fixated by a whole bank of televisions, showing half a dozen sporting events in different time zones. They go to ballparks to gaze at the Jumbotron, then home to study TV highlights of what they’ve missed at the games. As for family entertainment, Americans gorge on a diet of kitschy, feel-good stories interspersed by sadism, a normal American pastime by now, bubbling up from the subconscious, complete with nooses and feces, trickling down from the executive level.

Passively watching, Americans feel no complicity enjoying scenes of staged yet real degradation, in witnessing an endless parade of people being screamed at (Hell’s Kitchen), punched, kicked and kneed into a bloody mess (Ultimate Fighting) or eating cockroaches and maggots (Fear Factor). The Toyota, Froot Loops, Coke and male-enhancement commercials, interlarded between these vile, entertaining scenes, reassure viewers that they’re still safely within the mainstream, that they’re still God-fearing, patriotic, baseball-loving Americans. The cheeky rudeness of the Gong Show are now super quaint by comparison.

In this TV environment, natural disasters and wars are also entertainment, to be enjoyed with a Bud and a tub of Dorritos, with Abu Ghraib an even more thrilling version of Fear Factor. It’s true that people have always rejoiced at each other’s misfortunes, and nothing is more cathartic, fun and funny than someone else’s death–one even feels slightly taller in the presence of a corpse, Elias Cannetti has written–but our death porn is being whipped into a frenzy by an endless orgy of destruction, all with the aim of selling us a few more bags of Cheetos. Asian tsunami, San Diego fires or Katrina disgrace, they’re all cool to watch, dude. Chill, everybody else is into the same shit.

Radio, on the other hand, has long been populated by a truly creepy fraternity of adolescent men, the so-called shock jocks, who earn their market shares by spewing boorish, crass, racist, sexist, homophobic and genocidal opinions. The audiences for these borderline psychopathic losers are just as charming. It’s such the norm by now, no one remembers that it only started with Howard Stern in 1981. Rush Limbaugh, a pill-popping lout, became so popular, Monday Night Football hired him to be a commentator.

Capitalism is predicated on growth, it profits dependent on increasing demands for everything. Desire has to be stoked, all addictions encouraged. As every pusher knows, junkies make the best customers. Five hundred TV channels and 162 baseball games a year are not enough, nothing is enough. Through BabyFirstTV, even infants are now being conditioned to seeing everything, getting nothing, so they can spend the rest of their lifetime lusting after all merchandises, material, psychological, spiritual and pharmaceutical, so they can become good consumers. “Mom is boring, give me more teletubbies!” By the time these pavlovian babes get into a classroom, a flesh-and-bone teacher, talking at normal speed, coughing and yawning every so often, cannot compete with the sped-up special effects and cool graphics they’ve come to expect from life, albeit a virtual one, the only one most of us have. Get a virtual life, dude!

Numbed by all the fleshy and opulent come-ons, eternally frustrated and restless, many Americans cannot even be sated with an open-ended snuff show that’s Iraq, now in its fifth season. Many are clamoring for a sequel in Iran, so they can channel surf between a Kobe slam dunk, nuclear war and American Idol.

Some of these pissed off zombies are suicidal, brainwashed or broke enough to enlist in the military, the ultimate depersonalizing apparatus. Before a man will obey orders to kill or be killed, he must be broken down. When every able body is drafted–a never-achieved, Utopian ideal–the moral risks of war are spread evenly. At its best, an army is a necessary evil, used as a last resort, but at its worst, it becomes a professional tool, corporate and mercenary. It will go anywhere to fight anyone, without asking too many questions. It will consent to be stationed in at least 702 bases in roughly 130 foreign countries, as long as the bottom line, personal or corporate, is agreeable. Sounds familiar?