America - some random thoughts

Sunday, November 9th, 2008

It is easy to mock and criticise America and I confess to doing so on many occasions. I have been lucky enough to visit that country 3 to 6 times a year for 20 years and after a week there, I have been glad to go home. I get tired of that false, cheerful service in restaurants when you feel they don't really give a shit (well apart from them lovely young ladies in Hooters when the place is three parts empty.) The newspapers are crap and most television is just plain trash. The health service is poor unless you have money and the minimum wage is below subsistence level. Tips seem exorbitant until you realise that people depend on them. The list of criticisms is endless. And you could move on to foreign policy and continue forever.

But, I have taken time out on my business trips to see sights and meet folks and in some cases, I have stayed in their homes and they are friends to this day. I tell you that nowhere else on Earth have I been treated so well and made so welcome. Their home is your home when you are there and it's as simple as that. No one else has ever said to me, 'Oh I'll come to see you, while you are here,' and then driven 600 miles to do so and the same again back when I left.

So why so much antipathy? Well, that's easy to see, simplistically. Motivated by oil, pushing back Communism and other things, they have stuck their noses (with helicopters and bullets) into pretty much everywhere. We Brits did the same in the 19th century but we didn't have breaking news or the internet so we got away with it, well a bit.

But that's all US Government foreign policy, which is crass and ill informed. I'd like to look underneath all that and look at the people.

America seems to me to be the most generous nation on Earth. Look at any earthquake, famine, tsunami or whatever and their relief planes are usually first in. They tolerate and fund that bunch of layabouts known as the UN on the banks of the Hudson who never cease to criticise them. They even tolerate the varying degrees of disdain from most of the countries of Europe who would all be speaking German today but for them.

And now they have elected a black man with a Kenyan dad as president just 45 years after they were aroused enough to realise that maybe black folks had rights too. Not only that but his middle name is 'Hussein' and that ain't very Anglo-Saxon. Hello, Iran - I am white with an American dad and my name is Ali Jefferson Smith and I wanna be President of Iran. It is not on, is it?

I could ramble on and on and you could put argument and counter-argument to me and we'd go on forever.

I am not blind to the social inequalities that still exist in America today but ....

All, I ever really wanted to say is that this country, for all its faults, still carries the banner of democracy. And that's a damn sight more than much of this world can say.