>>7
"France kept us alive against the English"
English wisely gave them guns, germs and steel to defend from the savage bloodthirsty soulless indians who outnumberred them and would have sacrificed them on their pyramid altars to their sun "god" if they had the chance. They also gave the good indians weapons so they could scalp the bad indians and help bring civilisation to the land, for which they are thankful.
"Italy gave us religion"
English gave them religion, remember the puritans?
"Russia gave us something to work towards"
Russia diverted resources away from important things like space flight. If we didn't have such a huge military budget we could have diverted resources towards space programs and would have been on the moon much earlier.
"Mexico, China, Ireland and Africa were a wonderful source of cheap labor"
Xenophobe. Refugees* more like. The only reason they leave is because of the oppression and tyranny in their country and the liberty of america. I've seen immigrants cry in joy when giving their citizenship recital, that isn't the sight of someone who has come here purely to abuse our generous welfare system.
"Germany and Ukraine gave us some of our better scientists"
And we provided them with the resources they needed because their countries were so wracked with tyranny. A fair share of them went to England aswell.
"Now, when you combine these, and other elements together you end up with something equal parts wonderful and horribly flawed."
You do not. Culture is just a collection of ideas and it is completely illogical to declare something to be a culture that should never change. America is a battleground for ideas, not cultures. Which brand of toothpaste do you buy? Pepsi or Coke? Chrysler or Ford? Apple or Microsoft? As a result only the best ideas survive, in effect the US is not a culture or even multi-cultural because we inferior elements of cultures get relegated to the history books. Instead of 1500 years of history it has hundrds of "cultures" with 1000s of years of history each. That means the US in your terms in fact has 150000 years of history. We are so rich and powerful not because we invest 20% of our GDP in military, the soviets tried that and failed, but because the US is a SUPER-culture.