To be more general, then: nobody really gets the reality of other countries until they've left theirs - but since America makes most of the world's blockbuster

To be more general, then: nobody really gets the reality of other countries until they've left theirs - but since America makes most of the world's blockbuster movies, everybody has an "America of the mind" that is an internally consistent model. I hasten to add that Americans have the same model - even though we live here and see reality all the time. Europeans and the Japanese, for instance, think that society naturally agrees that education is a good thing. After all, educated people have created everything worthwhile in life, right? Doctors are educated, government administrators are educated, engineers are educated - stands to reason! Americans, on average, mistrust educated people, to such an extent that education can actually be a liability for anyone proposing public policy. And yet this is not reflected in movies, where scientists or engineers may be goofy, but they're always respected. So the America of the mind is profoundly out of synch with real America, in ways that flummox anyone who tries to live here in the blithe assumption that America is a first-world nation. That's just one example off the top of my head. This is in no way discriminating against Europeans - everybody thinks America is movie-America. It's just that it really, really isn't.