What Americans never stop saying, often saying nothing else

America is a place where you can say anything as long as you don’t say it to anyone. And the price of being able to say it is that you say it in writing or in an artwork of some kind, and that work or text is by its nature irrelevant.

So if you feel mistreated, you can talk about it provided you pretend not to be doing that; otherwise, you could be accused of a crime. Similarly if there is something in the situation (an institutional one, perhaps) that you want to criticize. To actually assert a statement about anything to anyone is never tolerated. Unless it is the kind of statement that people are alone encouraged and expected to make. This is any statement that rhetorically has the function of the reminding the other person to stop being abnormal and just go back to work and do what they are told.

America is a business society that in the end has nothing to say to anyone except: Do what you are supposed to be doing! What I used to experience as harassment is exactly that, only it has a rationale: everyone must call out every apparent lapse of normality. “If you see something, say something.” A society of laborers who just do their job and vigilantes or petty police officers who remind them to.