Visions of America - it's all about them!

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.