Visions of America - it's all about them!

I returned a couple of weeks ago from a trip through parts of Germany, Holland and the UK and then through the USA and home. The feeling in Germany, Holland and the UK is often local pride and often patriotism. At times it verges on the global. “We do things this way here …” But there is most often awareness of some cultural differences. In contrast, Americans understand everything about any country in the world, as long as it is the US.

Ignorance of foreigners

Visitor, beware. You will get smiles and so on. But Americans don’t really understand you. Most Americans have never travelled outside continental US bar a little trip to Hawaii or Puerto Rico. Many times the weary foreign traveller will hear “Excuse me, sir” (with the fixed, patient smile) “you can’t do that here”.

Americans stick to inches and pounds while the rest of the world has long become used to kilowatts and megajoules. Aussies get “oh, Aussies!! Yeah - we saw The Crocodile Hunter” but there is little understanding of much outside the US borders, unless it affects the US.

A foreign traveller is constantly bewildered by Americans’ lack of consciousness of anywhere outside the US and its spheres of influence. On many occasions I tried to cash travellers cheques, but the bank teller didn’t know what these were. Then I got “Have you got an account with us?” It was difficult being polite when I had my Aussie passport in my hand. When I asked to hire a car, the salesman said sure, provided I had insurance on an existing US vehicle. It’s worrying that so many people in the US have little idea of the world outside their borders.

Race

Americans are excited about, and nervous about, the issue of race. America is a country still fascinated by racial differences. And the two biggest minorities are Afro-Americans or blacks, and Hispanics. Let’s begin with the former.

Black America still scares white middle-class Americans. On one US visit some years ago I found O.J. Simpson dominated every single television channel, nearly all day. White fears and anxieties about blacks are sent underground into private jokes: it doesn’t help that most public debate is frozen by fear of being accused of racism. This means that many issues are buried, or cloaked in terms no one could possibly find offensive.

Many blacks have become used to special selection for higher education. In particular, they are included in quotas at university. However, immigrant blacks from countries like Cuba, Ghana, India and so on are pushing onto quotas. A study in the American Journal of Education has found that immigrant-origin students make up 41 per cent of black freshmen. University and school teachers find they are more amenable to direction, easier to get along with and have less “attitude” i.e. hostility to authority. Nobody is unhappy, except the US-born blacks who are once again frozen out of many avenues to social and financial success.

Next let’s look at Latinos. Latinos are often raised as Catholics and can be strongly traditional in their attitudes: support the family, work hard, respect the church. The refugees from Castro’s Cuba who have settled in Florida and other regions are notoriously like this (there are exceptions, as we will see below).

Mexico is the US’ nearest neighbour and is being discussed avidly because Mexicans still stream across the border. Creation of a Berlin-type wall to keep them out has been one of many solutions discussed. But the wall across Texas and the Gulf of Mexico would have to be a long one. Meanwhile, because those who arrive by boat are traditionally welcomed, the Haitians and Cubans who arrive in leaky boats sail in without harassment.

An employer told me he hires Mexicans and other Latinos on the spot. They report early, work hard and support their families, so they are loyal workers. They are paid little, especially when they are illegal workers. Thus many powerful people make noises about immigrant workers but enjoy using them as cheap, dependable labour.

At about 26 per cent of the population, Latinos are the biggest minority in the US. The first sentence in Miami and many parts of California has to be “habla ingles?” (Do you speak English?) A Spanish guy I met said that in two weeks in California, he only had to speak English twice.

The Spanish reconquest of America will have vast consequences which we can barely foresee. Latinos seem to have given up on mainstream media and there are many examples of Latino radio shows and newspapers.

Like many other areas, crime has a racial aspect. Many blacks and Hispanics languish in jail. The racial issues featured in the SBS program set in a US prison - with warring groups of Italians, blacks, Hispanics and yes, white Aryans or Nazis - are based largely on fact. The US has both the largest number of men in prison of any country, and the largest proportion in prison. It’s a sad waste of human life.

America has long lost the battle between public good and private greed. There seem to be few champions of the public interest against the power of the almighty dollar.

Health is dominated by the big drug companies. In Brazil, the government is mass-producing drugs to help in the battle against HIV-AIDS. That could never happen in the US, where the drug companies are king.

Gun control is another issue in which the gun lobby has too much power over Congress for the public-interest advocates to succeed. When I was in Washington I asked about having a swim. And I was told, “Sure, as long as you belong to a private club. The public pools don’t open till Memorial Day” (late May). I suppose we Australians are used to having a swim free of charge on any beach on any day of the year. But it was just another example of money buying you better quality of life and better health.

Food

American food is … not really food, most of the time. And the food is designed to make you gain 10 pounds at a sitting (remember that Americans prefer pounds to kilograms, because a man of 300 pounds couldn’t understand kilograms). There are all kinds of hideous American foods. Hamburgers that seemed closely related to sawdust. Plates loaded up with beans, and fries with everything except ice cream. Even the health fanatics I met thought this was real food.

Sweets - my God, the Americans have a sweet tooth. And they pour on the sugar in one dish after another. Even their beer tastes sweet, or rather not the bitter smack in the mouth we are used to. Loads of coffee, bacon and pancakes drowning in syrup - that’s breakfast. What a healthy start to the day!

Tips

Americans seem to use Haitian taxi-drivers, Hispanic labourers, and waiters from all over. They pay the waiters about US$4 an hour. The rest of their wages comes from you, the poor sucker who has survived eating the awful food mentioned above. How much do you tip? It’s never enough. Your cab driver got lost, drives all over the countryside, and doesn’t have change from US$50. But he still wants his tip or he will curse you loudly. In Australia we try (I said try) to pay people properly. We don’t expect them to beg.

Guns

Most Australians simply can’t understand why the US tolerates guns to such an extent that school and college shootings seem endemic. I was in Washington DC just after the shooting at Virginia Tech. People were anxious and visibly concerned about it. But everyone had a different solution: ban guns, make it harder to get a gun licence, bring in restrictions on handguns, screen schools, cut out violent TV.

And the National Rifle Association apparently said that if every child had been armed, the massacre wouldn’t have happened. Just another massacre in America. Nothing will change.

For many ordinary people, being American means supporting the military. I was lucky (?) to have a holiday in Fort Lauderdale at the time of the 60th annual McDonalds Air Show in May.

For three days the beach was dive-bombed by jets screaming across the sky. These included Stealth Bombers, costing $1.2 billion each, according to Airshow military intelligence. The beach was stormed by Marines and there were huge demonstrations of what US military hardware and personnel can do.

Three million people - they said- were on the beach watching these shenanigans, sponsored by McDonalds (main sponsor) and many others sponsors including Australian wines. It was all done to “salute America’s heroes”.

The attendant multitudes stood with their bottles of beer and Jim Beam and apparently enjoyed the circus, though when I got lost (as usual) nobody could hear a word I said. Perhaps they had had their hearing damaged, temporarily or permanently, by the onslaught to the ears. God knows what it all cost. The songs played were illuminating: “America, America”, and one I hadn’t heard before:

I’m proud to be an American
Cause Americans are free …

… Or some such.

All wrapped up in one big event are fast food, capitalism, conspicuous consumption and masculinity (US female military personnel seem to get lost in translation, though there was a feature in a local paper about one of the four females out of the 370 Stealth Bomber pilots). Hmmm.

I began to understand how the military curry popularity with ordinary folk. Circuses for the plebs. I wonder what happened to the ideas of Thomas Jefferson - that small government is good government?

Talking

Americans never stop talking, unless perhaps we take into consideration when they are sleeping. Sit on mass transit in New York or Washington or Miami and you will hear people dissecting relationships, bemoaning their boss’ policies, or bewailing their man’s failure to commit.

If nobody is around, they talk to their cell-phone. Traffic moves slowly in so many cities because they are talking on their phone. So I began to count people talking on the phone AS WELL AS drinking coffee; eating; shaving; applying lipstick. But I suppose we can see all that in Sydney or Melbourne too … A ban on cell-phones (mobiles) on one train-trip from Washington DC to New York was one small island of quiet and one we could usefully adopt here.

Education

Education might be seen by some as the answer to many of these issues. But American education is largely about Americans: American issues, Americans in Iraq and so on. American history dominates the school curriculum, though a year is devoted to world history (i.e., how America saved the world). Study of foreign languages in US colleges and universities has sunk so low that the foreign-language departments are almost invisible.

Media

And at bottom of many of these is the US media. The US would have to have one of the most determinedly provincial media of any country I know. The media pander to Americans' interest in themselves. There are frequent discussions of favourite issues like abortion, creationism and evolution, gay marriage and similar, doubtless influenced by the obsessions of the religious right. In most European countries these would barely rate a mention bar in Eastern Europe. The media comfort and coddle Americans - they do not challenge them.

All in all this looks like an ignorant, flawed and worrying nation. Australians are often suspicious of Americans and many of us resist American influence. But however we dislike the US, we have to ask ourselves - how would we like a world in which the dominant influence was China? Love it or loathe it, we have to work with the US on a host of issues in the hope of making a better world.