American re-visions: it’s all about us

There are times when West could be describing any country in the developed world, and more besides. “If nobody is around, they talk to their cell-phone.” Italy, for instance, has the greatest number of cell-phones per capita in the world, and two are compulsory for many. The continent where the use of mobile phones is growing exponentially is, oddly enough, Africa. The nature of conversation is changing - people, infuriatingly, bring their phones to lunches, to dates, to the gym, to the parks. Americans are sadly far from the only ones responsible for this conspiracy against solitude.

Americans are easy to mock. Their “Mr and Mrs Smith” earnestness, in the manner of a Graham Greene novel (added to The Quiet American, we have the caricatures in The Comedians), invites criticism. Author Gore Vidal accuses his own country of being the United States of Amnesia, and there are times he has been proven all too right.

But a cold shower on this version of America the ignorant might be in order. Josef Joffe’s Überpower: The Imperial Temptation of America (2006) provides something of this. As editor of Die Ziet and adjunct professor at Stanford, he comes from that great tradition that has taken a battering in recent years - Atlanticism.

Wade through the dirge of romantic alliterations of this Atlantic idealist, and the problems become clearer. America is more complicated than a caption, impossible to note in a neat summary. Microsoft mingles with McDonald’s; Harvard with Hollywood. Seductive, America beguiles the world, continuing to attract its visitors (Australians are no exception, clogging Colorado) while inviting attacks by insurgents and anti-globalisation protesters.

There is much to agree with West’s summation. Guns are embraced with idiosyncratic panache. Race is an enduring problem, avoided like the plague in politics. Insularity is not discouraged. Media networks describe “world” news in rather limited terms (on the West Coast, New York might as well be Europe and vice-versa); World Series baseball is painfully provincial, stacked with such global teams as Canada. Then again, after a dose of the Seven Network’ Sunrise, or any programme with Ray Martin and the various content-free dispatches from the storm troopers on Channel Nine, you might suffer indigestion. Australian television, like its American counterparts, lacks cerebral punch.

America, in short, is less unique than we would like to believe. As George Bush once claimed: Australians remind him of Texans. John Howard did not disagree.