As I said, America has given much to the world. However, there are a bunch of individuals who've made world news for less than salubrious reasons.
Below is Ted Bundy. On the face of it Bundy wasn't the kid who'd grow up to become a serial abductor/killer of women. He was a middle-class Washingtonian, reasonably well educated, good looking, and by all accounts, attractive to women.
However, a combination of factors have been cited as influencing his path to psychopathy. He was illegitimate, raised with the belief that his mother was in fact an older sister. He was devastated when he realised the truth.
However, that was a situation faced by several million Americans of his generation, and they didn't all grow into angry sex killers.
Bundy was executed by the State of Florida in 1989.
The United States saw an exponential increase in stranger murders in the '70s/'80s. Many of these people have become celebrities of a sort.
Another very different individual who became a violent sociopath is Richard Ramirez. An El Paso native, he left Texas for California at 19, continued his lifestyle of drug abuse and petty crime. Then in 1984, aged 24, he stepped up his burglaries to include rape, torture and gory murder.
His crimes and his murder trial (he was charged with 20 murders, convicted of 13) were marked by lurid tales of Satan worship, and Ramirez attracted weird groupies, most of them young women.
However, like all serial killers, regardless of background and intellect, Ramirez was really just a creep who liked killing people. He remains on Death Row at San Quentin.
A very different man now. The late former President Ronald Reagan. I think his Presidency flagged a real downturn in American values; hard to stomach that a country of America's size and sophistication, would elect as its leader a not-particularly-intelligent old B-Western actor who had done fame and now fancied power.
When Arnold Schwarzenegger ran for the Governorship of California (as had Reagan before him) in 2003, fellow celebrities like Cybill Shepherd warned Americans that it was unwise to elect someone simply because they loved him.
Hold on - wasn't it Cybill's generation that elected Reagan???
More likely, Arnold had met Cybill at some point in his career, and grabbed her tits. Can't say I blame him.
Last but certainly not least, the aforementioned Arnold Schwarzenegger. Not an American of course, but he established his legend and increased his fortune largely by feeding America's TV generation their own bullshit. The modern personification of the fabled American Dream.
He's a hell of an individual, conquering the world and staying a somebody into his sixties, simply by force of will and a ruthless streak as big as his biceps. He is a remarkable human triumph, an Austrian pauper made good.
But he's NOT the type of man you want in high office.
TNBT
