I got a kick out of Prince’s Super Bowl half-time show: big and bombastic, fireworks and klieg lights and tens of thousands of people all hooting along. The hyper-bloated spectacle of the thing couldn’t be argued with.

It seemed to sum us up so well, we trippy weirdoes called Americans. We like everything big – no, bigger – no, biggest. Wait – can we super-size that? We want a zillion synchronized lights and a digitally enhanced fireworks show, with a 300-person brass band marching in unison. Then we download the whole shebang to our iPod and listen as we speed our Hummer to the mall to buy something bright and shiny – and big, like a 137-inch high-def TV.

Because the same way we like it big (no, huge!), we always need something more. Somewhere in our house, some tiny corner is not absolutely jammed-packed full of stuff – glorious, glorious, stuff! – and that bothers us. It makes us anxious.

(Isn’t there something that blinks and beeps we could get to fill that corner? Yes, but you’ll have to buy the regular size, because the mega-size is all sold out!)

We’re ringing up the most gigantic debt any people has ever seen anywhere, because we need more, we definitely need way, way, way, more – we don’t have enough! – but it’s still not enough – we need more! (Maybe there’s something with pink polka dots we could get for that corner…)

But here’s the strange part, to get back to the artist formerly known as a popular singer. Prince’s show really was good. He’s enormously talented. And that’s part of us, too. The drive to always be bigger, better, grander, produces outsized achievements that future cultures will look back on admiringly. Medicine, the arts, business, technology. Somewhere, there’s a tribe in outer Borneo that lives in perfect harmony, who’s satisfied with what they have, living the same way for 800 years – but what the hell have they ever achieved? (Probably something – but we’re Americans so we don’t care.)

Abraham Lincoln said that a person with big virtues necessarily has big vices. I don’t know if that’s true, but if so, it’s definitely us. Soaring virtues and strange, overblown vices. I just hope we don’t drown underneath all our crap…