Bizcuits | America’s not the greatest country in the world anymore

Leanda Lee

If you are truly lucky enough with children (and students and employees, for that matter), you experience those rewarding moments when you’re offered a glimpse of the way they are developing and the internalisation of the values that you have guided and mentored them in. I just had one of those moments.
My charge came to show me a video of an excerpt from HBO’s TV series “The Newsroom”. I had seen this masterpiece of fictional oration when it hit the airwaves and went viral the first time around. Apparently, it’s still making people stop and think. The speech by the TV news anchor character, Will McAvoy, is fundamentally about testing assumptions, not merely swallowing received wisdom or thoughtlessly repeating rhetoric.
In the episode the question put to a panel of American journalists is “Why is America the greatest country in the world?” We of a different time and place we might pause to ponder but nationalistic pride, hubris and a dash of jingoism have a way of blinding people: we generally don’t think to question the question – the validity of it.
The brilliance in McAvoy’s “it’s not” speech is in the interrogation of what greatness might look like. McAvoy cleverly (as only a script can) expounds upon the virtues and attributes that make up a great nation and in doing so demands his audience compare America today against others. He flings an endless stream of such damning statistics that “the greatest country in the world” mantra is exposed as a lie. He dares question the question. In the face of the belief of a nation he stands up to and demands that the audience demand evidence to test the criteria.
With the opening of Studio City this week, we have been privy to some of Lawrence Ho’s similarly straight-shooting speeches, not all of which have been reported as assertively as they were said. Although future competition for an uncertain number of gaming concessions is imbuing such public presentations with a political agenda – of which we are likely to see a great deal more – we were again reminded by Ho, as we have by Steve Wynn before, that diversified offerings in entertainment and retail are only granted by the largess of the gaming dollar.
This diversification is pretend industry diversification, for these industries could never stand on their own business-model feet; they are mostly subsidised by the gaming table dollar. Unless we consider the family-based customer, it’s drawing a long bow to call the activity we are seeing a diversification of customer base, for Macau is still targeting the hordes over that Lotus Bridge. For industry (rather than offering or customer) diversification to occur, it would need to happen as viable and separate from the gaming industry and not subsidised by it: education (tertiary in particular), and tourist attractions that draw their own crowds for instance.
In Macau, we continue to conspire in going along with the diversification mantra but rarely do I hear us question the question. Either we should demand clarification of what success looks like and set some clear, specific and measureable targets for diversification regardless of how relatively miniscule they could only possibly be against the gaming juggernaut, or get over the rhetoric about diversification and accept that nothing of great substance is going to happen in Macau without the gaming industry propping it up.
As the news anchor says, “The first step in solving any problem is recognizing there is one.” Ours is that we haven’t a clue where we’re supposed to be going, what success in industry diversification looks like and who’s supposed to take us there.
Leanda Lee