Share this Digg Del.icio.us Reddit Slashdot Furl Yahoo Blogmarks Technorati Newsvine Googlize this Facebook Wikio Tags that’s home place there’s

by James McEnteer

Returning to the United States after an absence of a month or more, you notice aspects of American life that those who never leave take for granted. The longer you’re away, the more sharply defined these cultural traits appear.

I have spent about a third of my adult life outside the United States, sometimes for prolonged periods. Inevitably, I bring the values and beliefs of my country with me wherever I go, evaluating everything I see through my American cultural filter. But when I return to the USA, I feel like a foreigner too, at first, despite my intimate familiarity with the land where I was born and raised. For a brief period I can actually observe it as an outsider, in all its exotic strangeness, before I resume its assumptions.

“No one should ever have to go to the United States for the first time,” Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru reportedly said after his 1956 visit. And he was a VIP, received at the White House. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad got a hostile “welcome” last year at Columbia University, a haven for free speech, as long your opinions don’t offend the prevailing orthodoxy. One can only pity the average unsuspecting first-time visitors who touch down at MIA, JFK or LAX with no friends or family to buffer the assault.

Traditionally considered “wretched refuse,” foreigners are under more intense suspicion in these days of terrorism and Homeland Security. Even as an American citizen, I’m under suspicion for having chosen to spend time in places ourside The Greatest Country on Earth. There’s racial profiling, religious profiling, national profiling and linguistic profiling too, if you don’t pick up fast enough on the quasi-military interrogation designed to put you on the defensive. Are you here to work illegally? Stay indefinitely? Blow something up? Despite the stated ideals of the United States, intolerance is now the aggressive, offensive, U.S. government policy.

Of course immigration officials are not hired for their pleasing personalities. But even after you emerge from the bureaucratic gauntlet, the sense of hostility does not cease. You can feel the taut, high-strung vibe of the USA in the airport and far beyond. Many people are moving at high speeds and they look tense, even frantic. If you accidentally impede someone’s trajectory, either walking or more crucially, driving, you invite an incendiary road rage: curses, rude gestures, threats of violence. It’s stunning and scary.

What’s that frenzied hurry about? Why all the anger? Compared to many places on the planet, the United States has well-marked user-friendly highways. But when did driving become a competition? Where is everyone going at such a mad velocity? And why do citizens of a country with such a high standard of living – well beyond most of the world, even in this economic downturn – have such short fuses? The slightest unscripted bump or wobble upsets many Americans. Why should trivialities enrage us?

Speed I understand partly as a cultural addiction, an end in itself. You don’t have to have a crucial appointment to want to whip and weave down the freeway in a life-threatening rush. The rush itself is the point. But while Americans are richer by far than most cultures in their material possessions, they are more impoverished than most in their lack of time. Chronically over-scheduled and running behind, many Americans race through their days like gerbils on an endless wheel. Where is the pleasure in that?

Americans famously work longer hours than Europeans, even though studies show that efficiency tends to wane beyond a certain point. Overworking is just more gerbil spinning, as compulsively pointless as Donald Trump trying to make more money. Americans also consume more television than other cultures. It’s very odd. Americans work too hard and drive too fast, then go home and watch too much TV. And what’s on? Murders and car chases. And that’s just the local news.

Landing in the U.S., especially from the so-called developing world, you also notice the large number of large people. Fast food, like fast driving, holds its own poisonous promise of saving time. And certain trans fats seem to be as addictive as TV. Obesity is an outward and visible sign of an inward depressive disgrace. Part of this unhappiness must be the knowledge, however deeply denied, that the U.S. government has been acting in extreme bad faith in many ways in many parts of our planet. That’s harder to swallow than a quarter pounder with cheese.

Prosperous but not at peace with itself. That’s the America I see when I come back. Instead of savoring their fortunate lives, Americans move too fast, anger too easily, work too hard, watch too much TV and eat too much lousy food. There’s a lot more to say about all this, but I don’t have time right now. I need to grab a bite, make some calls and get down the road, like, yesterday. Don’t even think about getting in my way.

James McEnteer is the author of Shooting the Truth: the Rise of American Political Documentaries (Praeger 2006). He lives in Cochabamba, Bolivia and blogs at http://weatherincochabamba.blogspot.com/

---

Add this page to your favorite Social Bookmarking websites