Propaganda dies the second you meet the person it was written about. The whole world is finding that out this summer — one gas station at a time. Just not about Israel.

Somewhere in the American South this week, a German soccer fan walked into a Buc-ee’s — the Texas gas-station chain that is less a rest stop than a small sovereign nation — took in the wall of jerky and the 50 fuel pumps and the acre of brisket under heat lamps, and had what I can only describe as a religious experience. Millions of people have watched it. I am one of them — an American Jew, watching from a couch in Florida, as charmed as everyone else. I have watched it more than once.

This piece is about why I can’t fully enjoy it.

My FYP has been a genuinely lovely place to live lately, which is not a sentence I expected to type in 2026. My Twitter feed too, somehow. For weeks it’s been wall-to-wall World Cup tourists discovering America in real time, and discovering it the way a Victorian explorer discovers a waterfall. A Scottish guy weeping over the sauce-by-the-vat situation at Raising Cane’s. Japanese visitors narrating a Walmart cereal aisle in the hushed tones of people touring the Vatican. Grown men becoming visibly emotional about free refills. Free ice. The radical proposition that you can simply take more.

It is delightful. It is also, if you watch closely, not really delight. It’s surprise. The specific surprise of a person discovering that what they were promised and what is actually in front of them do not match.

Because here, roughly, is the brochure the rest of the world has been handed on the United States these last few years:

A war zone with a flag, gunfire in every parking lot.

A place where one illness bankrupts you and the bodies stack up in the street.

A cruel, stupid, joyless dystopia in the late stages of collapse.

And then they land. And the guy behind the counter is kind. And strangers wave, and nobody is dying in the road, and the portions are frankly unreasonable, and a whole genre of video turns out to be the same admission, over and over, in a dozen accents: we were lied to.

That’s the engine here. Not that America forgot to advertise its Waffle Houses. That people were sold a story — a deliberate story, told confidently and often, built to make them fear a place they had never set foot in — and ten seconds of contact with a real human being blew the whole thing apart.

This Is How........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)