Living in America
In 1985, inside the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, James Brown walked onto a stage rigged with enough sequins and pyrotechnics to light the Nevada desert. He wore an electric blue cape. He danced as though gravity were a suggestion. And he sang a man to his death.
The man was Apollo Creed, the fictional former heavyweight champion of Rocky IV, who entered the ring draped in an American flag, utterly certain of his superiority. Brown sang the anthemic “Living in America” while Creed showboated before Ivan Drago, the Soviet machine who would, within minutes, beat him to death in front of a horrified crowd. The song reached number four on the Billboard Hot 100. It won Brown a Grammy. Today the video has sixty five million views on YouTube. Hardly anyone remembers that the character it introduced was dead before the second act.
The irony is worth pausing on. Brown’s song was a celebration of American confidence, released at the high water mark of Reaganite optimism. Its lyrics rattle through American cities and landmarks like a Greyhound route map. Somewhere in the song, Brown sings about stumbling across the promised land without ever setting out to look for it.
For a boy born in a one room shack outside Barnwell, South Carolina, abandoned by his mother at four, sent home from school in Augusta because he lacked sufficient clothes, and jailed at fifteen for petty theft, the promised land was not a metaphor. Brown danced for soldiers’ pennies outside Fort Gordon, picked cotton, shined shoes, and clawed his way to a Grammy by way of a prison gospel group and a genius that no institution had thought worth cultivating. If anyone had earned the right to sing about American promise, it was the Godfather of Soul.
But the song’s deeper resonance lies in that phrase. The promised land. In the American imagination it means the dream: upward mobility, reinvention, a second chance in a new city. In a different tradition, it means something more literal. The land promised to Abraham, the territory whose modern expression is the State of Israel. Since 1985, the year Brown’s sequins caught the Las Vegas light, the two promised lands have drawn steadily closer together, their alliance deepening from diplomatic courtesy into structural dependence.
By February 2026, they were inseparable. Two hundred Israeli fighter jets and American warplanes flew in tandem over Tehran in what the Israel Defence Forces called Operation Roaring Lion and the United States named Operation Epic Fury. It was the largest military flyover in Israeli Air Force history. The strikes killed Iran’s Supreme Leader, dismantled nuclear infrastructure, and prompted a ceasefire within forty days. On the surface, the alliance had never looked stronger. It was the kind of strategic intimacy Ben Gurion spent a lifetime pursuing and never quite secured.
Yet as Foreign Policy observed this summer, the relationship may already have entered a period of terminal decline. Pew Research found in March 2026 that views of Israel among Americans under fifty had grown sharply more negative, across party lines. Trust in the federal government itself has collapsed from seventy three per cent in 1958 to seventeen per cent in September 2025, among the lowest figures in nearly seven decades of measurement. The 2026 Global Peace Index ranked the United States one hundred and thirty fourth, its worst showing on record. Life expectancy, after a pandemic era decline, has clawed back to seventy nine years, but still trails every comparable wealthy nation.
Brown’s song catalogued a different America: smokestacks and rail lines, all night diners and black coffee, everybody pulling overtime. That country has not vanished. But four decades on, the diner has become a gig economy platform, the factory has moved offshore, and the radio plays algorithm curated playlists rather than the Godfather of Soul. The structural metrics tell one story. Median wealth has risen, legal rights have expanded, and American universities still draw the world’s talent. But the sentiment metrics tell another. Social trust has eroded. Institutional confidence sits near its all time low. And a growing share of the population no longer agrees on what the song was celebrating in the first place.
For Israel, the implications are existential. The alliance with Washington has always rested on two pillars: strategic alignment and popular legitimacy. The first is at its zenith; the bipartisan FUTURES Act, introduced in February 2026, would embed defence cooperation deeper into the legislative architecture than any previous framework. But the second pillar is cracking. If American public opinion continues to drift, no quantity of joint flyovers will compensate for the loss of the democratic consent on which the alliance ultimately depends. A relationship that survives on hardware alone is a relationship with a single point of failure.
Apollo Creed did not lose because he lacked talent. He lost because he confused spectacle with strength. He walked into the ring believing that the performance was the thing, that the flag and the fireworks and the voice of James Brown would carry him through. They did not. The Soviet he had dismissed as a machine simply kept hitting.
Brown himself understood something Creed did not. He had fought his way out of a one room shack, and he knew the difference between a show and a fight. The song he sang was not, in the end, a celebration of invincibility. It was a celebration of survival: of the long haul, the hard graft, the fine line you walk when nobody is watching. That is the America worth singing about. Not the country that walks into the ring wrapped in its own mythology, but the country that picks itself up when the mythology fails.
The building where Brown performed still stands on the Las Vegas Strip. It is no longer called the MGM Grand. It became Bally’s in 1986, then Horseshoe Las Vegas in 2022. The Ziegfeld Room where he sang has been refitted beyond recognition. The sequins are gone. The cape is in a museum in Augusta. Even the name has been stripped away. The room, when the last tourist leaves, is empty.