He adds, “Let me repeat what I just said there so there can be no possible mistake. We have, dear people of the Internet, a hard core of morons. They are: dull-eyed, humourless (though they think they aren’t), wearisome, insistently vocal and—consistently—American. However, how-ev-er, the large majority of Americans are quite, quite lovely. I adore them all. If one of my children ever came home and said, ‘Father, I’m in love with an American,’ I’d swell with delight. I’d have a feast prepared and bells rung. Americans are ace. I genuinely do like Americans. Excluding (for obvious reasons) the French, then the only set of people I think are more rubbish than not are the English—sullen, littering drunks, clutching a mobile phone in one hand while in the other there is a lead which ends in a crapping dog. OK? Is that plain? America—come here, I want to kiss each and every one of your pretty faces. Tch.”
Back to me. Americans can’t grasp principles or ideas, only things. I keep a gun beside my bed, an American will say. The gun is then stolen and used to kill a child. Not his fault, the American says. Because guns don’t kill people, people kill people. The fact that the gun is a wildly effective way to kill people, much better than bare hands, is not mentioned. They use those guns to rampage through the world, killing millions of people who are, not by coincidence, smaller and more beautiful than Americans. Millions of children starve because Americans swelled up on this planet and nothing can be done.
Yet Americans at home are so obedient. Their Congress hasn’t raised the minimum wage since 1997. It stands at $5.15 an hour. But they did vote to reduce the estate tax, so that only the top half of a percent of estates will pay it. This will cost the government $602 billion over the next ten years, money it sorely needs from people who don’t need it at all. But this is just fine with Americans because they think that one day they will be in that top half of a percentage of the money pyramid. They have no clue that they will probably die in harness while still young, all the while saying, Thank yuh, thank yuh, land of opportunity. It’s hard not to despise people that dumb, admit it. Your children will likely be poorer than you, you tell them. Thank yuh, thank yuh, land of opportunity.
My God, what a place. We used to call them slow learners, and then we called it special ed, but half the country is so stupid you wouldn’t tolerate it in a six-year-old. That’s why they’re racist. Stupid people always have to feel better than someone else. So the whites dump on the blacks, probably because the blacks are better-looking. I can’t think of any other reason to envy black people in the U.S.A. Americans tie black men to the backs of their trucks and drag them down back roads in Texas until they disintegrate, and you like that, don’t you. Their women wear blue eyeshadow and Be-lie-eve in songs by Cher. Don’t deny it.
And all these stupid people with their stapled stomachs and guns are watching Fox News and learning real good from human carrion like fat, limp-penised druggie Rush Limbaugh (caught returning from a weekend in the Dominican Republic, celebrated Sex Tourism Central, with a bottle of Viagra with someone else’s name on it—who had to service him? At least the woman who slept with British Deputy PM John Prescott got £100,000 for her story. What will some Dominican hooker get? Crushed, I’d say) and that ignorant bloated lump of rage Bill O’Reilly and that’s all there is to say, there’s nothing more.
Americans can’t even do anger properly. People they disagree with are harpy millionaires enjoying their husbands being burned to death in the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001. Or so says Ann Coulter. They can’t even do insults properly. Whereas the British do it right. Charlie Brooker wrote of Bush, “Where’s Lee Harvey Oswald when you need him?” No more need be said. Of course it was the Americans who got upset. About a man whose presidency was nothing but telling lies and torturing people, while tapping their phones and prodding their bank accounts. I swear, they only objected because Oswald killed Kennedy, and Kennedy and Clinton were the only do-able U.S. presidents in history. How low this country has sunk.
Go to hell, America. I couldn’t have dreamed a more awful place if I’d tried. I wish the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man would just sit on your country and squash you all into a seat cover. I can see the globules popping out at the edges, arcing into the Atlantic and Pacific, the waters rising with this new mass to accommodate.
Do it soon. Do it now.
Things I Like About Americans
Let’s get personal here
The greatest thing Americans have given to the world is rock ’n’ roll. I’m going to be very strict in this chapter. I will not point out the irony of the blues that came out of the South being born of black suffering. It’s a fact, but many people have suffered and they haven’t come up with anything that resonated with humans the way the blues do.
The blues were stolen by whites and in the beginning misused very badly. But the truth is that when I need music to set me on fire or to soothe my soul, I turn mainly to Americans. R.L. Burnside, Billie Holiday, black gospel choirs, Patsy Cline, Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes, Patti Scialfa, Carole King, Neil Diamond, the Four Tops, The 4 Seasons, Aretha Franklin, Steve Earle, Ray Charles, Carly Simon, Willie Nelson, Little Richard, The O’Jays, Roy Orbison, Elvis Presley, Kurt Cobain, Muddy Waters, Aerosmith, Louis Armstrong, Dionne Warwick, Emmylou Harris, James Taylor, The Supremes, Paul Simon, Talking Heads, Eric Carmen, Madonna, Buddy Holly, Pete Seeger, Macy Gray, Woody Guthrie, Dinah Washington, Linda Ronstadt, Lucinda Williams, Meat Loaf, Blondie, Etta James, Marvin Gaye, Otis Redding, Tracy Chapman, Bob Dylan, Boz Scaggs, R.E.M, Tina Turner, and you got it, Bruce Springsteen.
And of course there are writers to admire: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Edith Wharton, Anne Tyler, Erica Jong, Anne Sexton, Mark Twain, James Dickey, Jonathan Franzen, Peter Gent, Sue Kaufman, Irwin Shaw, Jean Kerr, Laurie Colwin, Larry McMurtry, Annie Proulx, Anne Lamott, Tom Wolfe, James Baldwin …
And the journalists—Barbara Ehrenreich, Seymour M. Hersh, Matthew Brady, Mary Ellen Mark, Susan Sontag, Martha Gellhorn, Barry Lopez, Hunter S. Thompson, E.F. Stone, Helen Thomas, W.E. DuBois, Lincoln Steffens …
But you see what is happening here. Not only am I merely compiling lists, but the lists are dwindling. A nation isn’t defined by its best people, it’s defined by how it treats its most unfortunate people.
Oh dear. We seem to be headed back into the previous essay.
Americans praise themselves, and were once praised, for their freedoms, but they seem to have given them up with little protest and even less noticing. That avenue is gone for me. If we’re talking freedom, I have found Europe most pleasant. I have had unfortunate encounters with French doctors and waiters, though never with their gendarmerie. But I am afraid even to try to cross the U.S. border. Forget freedom.
Americans dance well. By that I mean they’re not afraid to dance. And they like to drink. Although puzzlingly, not at Christmas. This may be because many of the relatives departed after their Thanksgiving holiday, held alarmingly close to Christmas, and so there is no need to drink heavily at Christmas. We don’t even want to discuss the Brits on drinking. So I will praise American good times. So many Hollywood movies take place at parties and gatherings, out at the lake or at baseball games, or around the family dinner table, a place where appetites go to die. For Americans are social, and I am social, although I don’t indulge that inclination. The instant friendliness of Americans is very attractive. I’ve always said there’s no better place to have a car accident. There you lie quietly bleeding by the side of the road. Someone is guaranteed to stop and help. It was certainly true in the case of Stephen King, forced to chat with the man who ran him over, but that doesn’t say good things about alcohol, so we’ll drop that anecdote.
Americans are friendly people. Even when you dislike them, as you frequently do when you’re on holiday (I don’t want to talk to people on holiday; that’s why I went on holiday), they don’t get your barbed remarks. A Canadian’s barbed remarks are so sheathed they’re almost ungettable, but even a blatant suggestion that the American should go away qui
etly will go right over an American’s head. They’re literal. Sometimes it’s annoying. Sometimes it charms the hell out of you.
So at this point, Americans are drinking and saying friendly things and dancing to the best rock ’n’ roll on the planet. We are doing well in our quest to define our love of Americans.
Americans are tall. This is said to be good. I don’t really care how short or tall anyone is, but you know, a long tall drink of water of a human being is an attractive thing. I’m not sure it’s good for the planet, though. I bought a Montauk armchair. It never occurred to me that furniture designed for Americans might not fit into the small ecologically friendly house I live in. The chair is so massive it has to have its own room. We even placed a beautifully embroidered wall hanging behind it to create a sense of occasion, as opposed to a sense of “they shoved this armchair into the front hallway because it was the only empty space they had.” I enjoy sitting in the chair, but am a little lost in it. It’s too far from the TV to be useful, and I always feel as though I am waiting for an uninvited guest, one of those friendly Americans possibly, who will show up with a pie still warm from the oven.
When I bake a pie
For the apple of my eye
I bake it with a crust
I know I can trust.
Tastes so good you can
Smell it from the yard.
Tell you what my secret is
My secret is my lard.
This is my memory of what Loretta Lynn sang in Crisco commercials in the seventies (I must have the lyrics wrong, surely). I suppose the Crisco people were desperate to shift the Crisco image away from its use as a lubricant, but I’m not sure that was necessary. For one thing, any unguent will do. But also, Canadians don’t use lard in their pies. They use butter or margarine.
Anyway, I had this image of a nation of madly happy pie-bakers. This image finally came true in the nineties with the great Martha Stewart, who I defend to this day as a woman who brought good looks and good taste to the home. She restored domesticity, which had had a bad rap since the Second World War. American dining had been deteriorating thanks to the machinations of what I call Big Food (it accompanies Big Pharma in my list of evil cartels). When I say good taste, I mean mouth taste.
That woman’s food tastes good. Her homes look good and are cared for with a precision I admire. You can bet her white picket fences aren’t made of plastic. When she does a domestic task, she does it right. When she cheats on the stock market, she does it wrong. Still.
I said earlier that Americans are tall. They like bigness in all respects, and no, this is not a dig at their weight. They like life on a large scale. The Grand Central Oyster Bar in New York City is a marvellous place. The problem is, the oysters are terrible. All the food at this huge gorgeous gigantesque luncheonette is horrible, except for the tea biscuits. I gobble those tea biscuits. Anything but the sole à la meunière. How do you ruin a sole? You leave it around dead for quite a while, I’m thinking.
So America is good at grand gestures. On the details, not so much. This makes Martha Stewart un-American, but I suspect she is. She has a sternness to her, such a high bar of accomplishment, which blocks her from the world of foodies. Julia Child was highly skeptical of Stewart perfectionism. On Stewart’s Christmas special on which Child was a guest, Stewart’s dessert was a gingerbread house of her own house, of all things. Stewart did that sugar-spinning thing and Child marvelled. “Aren’t we terrific?” she said. Snicker from the audience. Child was a sensualist, Stewart an overachiever.
Nevertheless, Stewart set a standard in a country that makes its own standards, low and heading lower. It can only be a good thing. I could watch Martha all day, doing the things I’ll never do. I’ve been planning to paint my interior window frames in semi-gloss white for a decade now. One day it might happen.
I’m not listing again, am I? Martha Stewart is something of a list all her own.
Americans are generous. I suppose that may be because they have money, but fewer Americans have money now and they’re still generous. The British upper classes are stingy as hell. Canadians cannot begin to understand the concept of the lagniappe, the unexpected gift. The Japanese prefer the expected gift … Look, I’m descending into racial stereotypes here. Americans are generous, easygoing people. I’ve said enough.
They’re also a clean people, or were, and this mattered a great deal to me. I cannot tell you how much I admired it. Now that I have my own house, and probably since I reached the age where my sweat began to smell, I’ve been aware of genuine cleanliness and how hard it is to achieve. Americans once had gleaming vitreous china in their bathrooms, their dining room serving platters sparkled and their laundry was a national fetish.
This has changed. Corporations changed it with their mania for the lowest possible price. I don’t necessarily think the lowest possible price is the best possible price, not if the hotel room no longer offers facecloths, the coffee maker is in the bathroom, of all places, and the whole set-up looks a bit … worn. I remember seeing a large chip of plastic sealant/paint that had come off the frame of an airline seat on Northwest Airlines ten years ago and thinking, no decent international airline would do that. They would and they did. Now Air Canada offers me hard, chipped seats, junk food for a price, blankets covered with human hair and, worst of all, no heavy-duty paper towelling on the headrests. I’m amazed we don’t all have lice.
The theme is, I suspect, that the things I love about Americans are being betrayed. That nation has lost so much to the corporation. That’s why it’s pleasing to see American corporations sag, to the benefit of everyone including its citizenry. Here’s the most pathetic example.
A proposed merger is in the works involving General Motors and Renault and Renault’s affiliate Nissan. David Olive, an accomplished Canadian business writer, explained what that meant. GM, he said, the people who created Chevrolet, Pontiac, Buick and Cadillac, now sees its Chevrolet division valued at the same amount as America’s second-ranked mouthwash. That’s Listerine.
The great American journalist David Halberstam wrote a book about GM’s humiliating decline. It was called The Reckoning. The problem is, it was published in 1986. This means GM had twenty years to fix itself and it didn’t. While Toyota was making well-designed and hard-wearing cars at low prices, GM was looking to the short-term, turning out cheapo gas-guzzling SUVs at zero-percent financing. They were paying Americans to buy their cars. No one else was going to buy crap like that.
Once again, I name something about America I like and it turns out to be a pale shadow of its former self. In this case, it’s a fine, albeit belated, blessing for the environment. But still …
So I ask an American friend living here with her Canadian husband what she loves about her country. She responds by e-mail after several days’ thought. “I love that American quarters are big enough so that I can differentiate quarters and nickels.”
I can’t even give her name. She works for the U.S. federal government and Homeland Security is already keeping an eye on me. Let’s just call her Valerie Plame.
She adds the standard qualifier: “Right now, I like that I don’t have to live in America … just visit sometimes.”
Thanks, Val.
Pieces of Cake
Yes, there are consolations
Your home is your nest. It’s your Howards End. Stay inside it when you feel small. Venture out when you’re feeling tall, knowing you can always flit back to the nest.
Be a perfect aunt. There are no perfect mothers, but aunts can manage it. The pleasures of being a magnificent aunt, a giver of gifts, a praiser of nieces, cannot be quantified. But I know that the heart expands. If you are an imperfect niece, I congratulate you. Your aunts will still adore you.
Everything that has gone wrong in the Western nations was caused by Rupert Murdoch, the introduction of air conditioning into the American South and the triumph of plastic over metal, wood and stone. This will end, perhaps not in time, but it will
end.
In 1998, the famously self-effacing British writer Alan Bennett was offered an honorary doctorate at Oxford University. He turned it down, telling Oxford that if the university thought it was appropriate to establish the Rupert Murdoch Chair in Communications, why not approach Saddam Hussein to found a chair in Peace Studies. Bad money for good ends is all very well, Bennett wrote, but there’s a limit. Reading this, I found it noble and wonderful by any measure. And such gestures are easy to make. Yet almost no one makes them.
Ferragamo court shoes are excellent and will last. There is much goodness in buying well-made shoes. Cheap shoes are false economy.
Not so with purses. A big well-designed lightweight nylon purse with a central zippered compartment and flat shoulder straps is all you need. If you ever find such a purse, buy five. It took me decades to learn this; you have it for the price of a book.
Venice is overrated. Paris is not. Many will disagree but it is the weight of tourists that is making Venice sink and perhaps this judgment will help a little with that. Also, Venice is a stage set. People actually live in Paris. They’re quite disciplined about it.
Men look best in dark suits, white (or pink) shirts with spread collars and elaborately patterned ties. All else is dross. You know this is true. Mmm, baby. How glorious is a man in a good-looking suit.
The most soothing thing in the world is to give all your extra money to Amnesty International. Somewhere, somehow, while you are doing the dishes or going on with your doggy life, your money is offering balm to a thin, frightened bleeding person you will never know of and never meet.
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