America

(Written in Washington Square Park, typed up in Paddington)

One thing I wanted to think about while I was here was my ideas about America. America in the way I've been thinking about it: Post Sept 11, post-Bush, mid-financial crisis.

My feeling about America from across the world was that it had grown fat, lazy and self-indulgent, over-confident and with an overstated sense of its own self-importance. I now feel that's only about half-true. The part that is true is its overstated sense of its own self-importance. The Americans \i've talked to, mostly college kids, show an amazing lack of curiousity about the rest of the world. Like the guy I met who said he was a student of WWII, then asked what Australia did during the war. 'Fought in Europe and Asia while the US waited for Pearl Harbor," I said (though not quite that pithily, in reality).

What isn't true is the idea of American laziness. The fabled American work ethic seems to be going strong, although not perhaps as a matter of choice. There is a man here who opens the door for you at Dunkin' Donuts. He doesn't work there - he does it for change. Subway stations and trains are full of buskers. Now I'm in Washington Square Park, and was just offered weed by a local businessman of the park.

But of course all these jobs, though self-motivated businesses in the American spirit, basically suck. I've found myself instead, since I've been here, thinking Marxist sorts-of-thoughts, which is very unusual for me. I'f I'd grown up here I might have been the sort who goes on a lot about the Capitalist Machine and how it oppresses workers. Those ideas have never appealed to me in Australia, but here they feel accurate.

America seems to me to be such a class-stratified society, which is interesting. There are the college-educated people - generally wealthy, that being the main requirement for a college degree here - and there are the immigrants and uneducated people, trapped by an appalling minimum wage, a lack of health-care, and the consumer dream which has been shoved down their throats (I've never encountered such miserable-seeming shop attendants as in the poor-area shops here - not the flashy Manhattan stores, which are staffed by perky white kids who are probably paid something livable).


But that indulgent, self-assured American arrogance, that sense of over-entitlement, does exist here in the college kids. They have this obnoxious insoucience - all of them.

Even the accent is different, American college girls in particular having the most grating accent, an over-loud, atonal sing-song that rises and descends a scale several times each sentence, and resembles in its worse form a duck's quack. Vowels whinily extended; 'like' used as a constant punctuation. I asked Bree why they spoke like that, when for the most part their elders don't, and nor do American actresses generally. She mentioned Jennifer Aniston and Natalie Portman as two who do; fair enough.

It does seem a society whose rules were created by the rich, for themselves. A little surprising that this should be my conclusion about the land of opportunity. I don't know what the solution is - but I can sure see why the proletariat (hahaha) whould take the financial crisis quite personally.