Look at El Salvador. It was a total shit hole (and I say it as a passionate advocate of the great Salvadoran literature). Crime rates worse than Chicago. OK, not that bad but still pretty sucky. Nobody had a good word to say about the country, least of all Salvadorans themselves.
But people got themselves together and elected a young president with fresh, innovative ideas. They didn’t get stuck on an old man who babbles incoherently like Putin, Biden or Trump. Now the crime rates have dropped dramatically, and things are looking up.
Or take Argentineans. They elected a 53-year-old dude who’s turning the country around.
Russians are used to worshipping the dead bodies of their politicians. They still queue up to stare at poor Lenin’s corpse. They’ll probably be rolling out a mummy of Putin to greet visitors a century from now. But what are we doing here in the US? Why did we embrace senility?
People keep saying there’s a cult of youth in this country. OK, where’s the youth? I’m not seeing any youth. Instead, we are caught between two Lenin-like products of taxidermy.
My Twitter thread is filled with guys yelling at each other, “No, your dude is more senile than my dude.” It’s embarrassing.
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“People keep saying there’s a cult of youth in this country. OK, where’s the youth? I’m not seeing any youth.”
What happened? Americans have become less American. America is predicated on the idea that anyone can become American. Well, guess what, this stopped a long time ago. I suppose it was good while it lasted, but the great melting pot is not melting any more.
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There’s a London version of this for you.
Met this guy on the Overground who told me about this little pub in North London where one of the musicians formerly with Dire Straits would play.
You may even know the place, it’s easier to reach from Liverpool Street and Overground than it is via the Tube.
So I go there, but I’m still in Yank Mode, having arrived back that morning, and haven’t mode shifted back to British English, and so I’m identified as American rather than multi-national.
One of the pub clientele says to me that all of the Americans he’s met are very nice.
So I ask whether he’s been to America …
No, it’s so far away, so pricey to go, so big, but all of the Americans he’s met primarily in London were so very nice.
Ah, but that’s just it, I told him.
At the time roughly 7% of US citizens had passports, and the UK would be closed to the rest without them.
So he hadn’t met any of the other 93% …
What if they’re right proper bastards? What if you have been meeting all of the better sort of Americans who aren’t?
And so I let him in on it …
Where’s my American passport? Back at my flat, in my carry-on still, don’t need it here, of course.
So you know how Cheltenham likes to sneer down its nose at people?
Well, they do that in Santa Barbara, California.
And do you know how it’s not safe for very specific reasons on the streets of Leytonstone late at night?
Well, it’s also like that in Dearborn, Michigan.
And did you know that there are people in the US who think highly of the English, the Welsh, the Scots …
So he finally got it: how could he have any kind of hard won opinion about Americans when he hadn’t met but the most self-selected of them?
And so to an extent it is with this, and if you have been gauging your pro-America sensibilities on the self-selecting ones you meet in London?
Or, more shockingly, ones like me?
A bit of a surprise then: that’s now six passports instead of merely three back then.
I’m not a globalist by any stretch of the imagination.
But certain places treat me considerably better when I’m travelling on a Caribbean Community passport, which was why I got one.
Must be those aggressive policies of minding their own business and not getting involved with other people’s policy decisions.
Plus it helps to not be a right proper bastard. :-)
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