Letter from America
Sinking down from 30,000 feet into the heart of the most powerful nation in the post Ice-Age era, how on earth are you supposed to feel on entering America for the first time? Cool detachment won't hold, the place will be too big and weird - big people, big cars, big noise. Irony will be lost, people will be too neurotic or too trailer-trashy. But the other option, being genuinely open, interested and impressionable, seems unthinkable because then you'd be... just like them.
When you meet something new you discover your own prejudices, and taking up an internship in Washington, DC next week has brought out expectations I am almost ashamed to have as a liberal, Guardian-reading politics student. The sudden fear that I'll be surrounded by Jerry Springer hicks who think Europe is in France, people who worship flags and shout "U. S. A.! U. S. A.!" for ten minutes every morning, noon and night... Where does this cultural snobbery come from?
It's not as if all my American friends in Oxford are anything like the caricature I expect. And it's not as though I've ever felt total pride in European civilisation, not after centuries of war, colonialism, and Coronation Street. So why do we look down on the United States? And should we?
At first glance, it is the corruption and hypocrisy of the US that encourages our cynicism. I'll be in Washington, city of Nixon and Watergate, of Reagan and Iran-Contra, of Clinton and cigars. I expect legions of clockwork suits wound up to a frenzy, lobbyists and lawyers clamouring for seats next to Senators in plastic, no-smoking restaurants, and where parties end at 8pm so everyone can rush home to catch themselves on CNN.
And this venal, money-driven cesspool is the beacon of 'liberty' and 'democracy' to which the rest of the world should aspire? Liberty - Guantanamo Bay? Democracy - remember Election 2000?
The reason we should look down on the US is not the corruption and hypocrisy itself, but what it prevents. Britain is hardly 'purer than pure', but that is of little consequence outside Britain. The reason I expect the worst of America is because the country has the potential to be the best but doesn't have the balls to be it. It is the unrealised potential that is objectionable.
The aftermath of 9/11 has brought home the sheer licence the US has to do what it wants in the world. Yet if the heart is base, its reach will be harmful. I don't expect people in Washington to realise the implications of their system, nor the wider responsibility that comes with such power.
In moments I'll be living and working in this urban lair, relieved to be wrong or angry to be right. Maybe I'll be seduced by the range of donuts and 'terror sex', and find a people just as fearful of their government's actions as the rest of the world is. Maybe I will have been deported back to Oxford for unconstitutional activities, or have escaped Washington in a huge convertible to find the 'real America'. As the plane touches down, will these cliches and prejudices evaporate?
25th Apr 2002