In Limbo (1)

Recently, I’ve found myself becoming very anti-American. I suppose the reasons for this are obvious. Since it’s the limbo period — that weird bit of time in between Christmas and New Year’s Eve — and I have nothing better to do, I thought I’d pour out all of my thoughts about the USA and about Americans into one long blogpost.

• I was watching Grizzly Man the other day and I realised that how I see Timothy Treadwell is how I see the United States of America. Treadwell spent thirteen summers living with bears in Alaska, until one year the berry harvest wasn’t very good and Treadwell stayed too long after the end of summer, and a hungry bear killed and ate him and his girlfriend. Treadwell was good-natured, optimistic, enthusiastic, and open-hearted. He was also unworldly, overly theatrical, and naive to the point of delusion, and he was a danger to himself and others.
• It seems to me that the bubble over the USA is total and unidirectional; information exits but doesn’t enter. We see them and they don’t see us. That’s sad to me. I’ve always had a soft spot for the US, and I think it could be an almost utopian society if only they’d look outside occasionally for answers to their problems.
• It’s hard to look at a man in a trucker hat and Black Rifle Coffee Company hoodie driving an apartment-sized pickup truck to a megachurch and believe that we, over here in Eurasia, are part of fundamentally the same civilisation as him. That person is as alien to me as humans get.
• Before you say it: yes, I know that many Americans feel the same, or think they do. But if they talk to a man like that they may well find that they have a lot in common — some overlap in gastronomy or entertainment or sport or ways of talking and relating to people or something. I would not find that.
• Americans who have lived outside the US for a long time or have abundant experience of the world are different creatures entirely. I know lots of Americans like that, including my wife (who was born in the Soviet Union but still counts), and it’s hard to think of a better sort of person than a worldly American.
• It’s extraordinary to me how total the genocide of Indigenous North Americans was, or has been. There are about 340 million people in the USA; the most-spoken Indigenous language in the country is Navajo, with about 170,000 speakers. The loss of culture, language, and human life has been extreme, and most of it happened very recently, and we should think and talk about it more often than we do.
• I once saw a post on Threads, a site I no longer use (because I kept seeing ragebait like this), that claimed that the USA is obviously a more diverse place than Europe. I think about that post a lot.
• Let’s say that you live in Kansas City, Missouri, and you want to go away for the weekend, and you’re willing to fly for a couple of hours to get somewhere more interesting. Well: no matter where you land, the people there will be speaking English and a bit of Spanish. Most of them will be Christians of some kind. There will be a McDonald’s and a Chili’s Bar & Grill. The US Bill of Rights will apply. The most popular automobile will be a Ford F-150. A lot of the architecture (roads, road signs, strip malls, apartment buildings) will be literally identical. None of the places you could possibly end up in have ever been communist dictatorships. If you order a soft drink, you’ll get free refills and the cup will be full of ice.
• Try that in the middle of Europe. Start from Vienna. Within a two-hour radius of the city by plane there are more than a dozen national languages (German, Italian, French, Hungarian, Slovene, Czech, Slovakian, Polish, Serbo-Croatian, Romanian, Ukrainian, Albanian, Bulgarian, even Dutch) and several regional ones (Venetian, Romansh, Sorbian, etc.). Vienna is mostly non-religious but historically a centre of Catholicism; it has extremely high living standards and is often ranked №1 in the world for liveability; it’s been very peaceful since 1945; most residents speak a local dialect of German. A one-hour flight away is Sarajevo, a historically Muslim BCMS/Serbo-Croatian-speaking city once part of the Ottoman Empire, and later communist Yugoslavia, and now the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Thirty years ago, Sarajevo was being besieged by the Serbians. Living standards are still much lower than they are in Vienna. Food, architecture, and etiquette all differ greatly.
• I assume that when Americans say that Europe isn’t very diverse they mean that most Europeans are white, which I suppose they are. But that’s just one aspect of diversity, and, anyway, there are (and have long been) lots of people living in Europe who aren’t white. ‘White’ isn’t necessarily a relevant category either. I’m blond, my eyes are grey, and my skin is usually quite pale. I live in Portugal. People here can tell that I’m not Portuguese just by looking at me.
• When Americans say ‘Irish’ and ‘Italian’ (etc.), they’re talking about abstract ethnicities; when Europeans say ‘Irish’ and ‘Italian’, they’re talking about concrete nationalities. Americans mostly talk to other Americans, and the differences between abstract ethnicities seem real over there. But most people in Europe see Americans as Americans regardless of where their great-grandparents came from, and frankly they’re right to do so. Being American trumps everything else.
• If you live in Belgium, you can drive to the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Germany, or France for breakfast and plausibly be home by lunch. I grew up in the south of England and we used to go to France (and sometimes Belgium) on day trips. If you grow up in a place like that, the idea that other countries can have different languages, architecture, foodstuffs, shops, and manners is intuitively obvious, and you won’t be shocked by minor differences between countries, or even quite major ones. If you grow up in the US, that realisation will usually come later if it comes at all. The variation within the US is just much less dramatic, and you’ll only be casually aware of international differences if you live very near Mexico or Canada or have parents who love travelling. American tourists often seem wide-eyed and easily impressed by small things. Wow, that’s a real Greek sauce. The label’s actually in Greek. (I don’t know why Americans are so afraid of coming across as Ugly Americans abroad because American tourists are usually quite sweet.)
• I did once meet a Belgian adult who had visited Thailand (a very popular holiday destination for Europeans) but had never travelled to another European country outside Belgium. So. There are always oddities and exceptions.
• It’s been interesting getting to know Brazilian culture at a more-than-superficial level while living here. I increasingly believe that Brazil and the USA are the same country — brothers from different mothers — one, poorer and in the Southern Hemisphere, the other, richer and in the North, but fundamentally the same sort of place.
• Brazil and the USA both have higher rates of murder than you’d expect based on other factors (income, inequality, etc.). The murder rate in the USA is six times higher than the murder rate in the UK, and no major US city is as safe as London. The UK doesn’t even have a particularly low murder rate by Eurasian standards (0.88 in 100,000 for the year 2024, compared with about 0.54 in Italy [in 2022], 0.23 in Japan [2023], and 5.76 in 100,000 in the USA [2023]). The Americas are more murderous in general than any other similarly sized patches of land on the planet, and even the Canadian rate (2.27) is higher than you’d predict. I assume this is a legacy of settler colonialism — but Australia has a very low murder rate (0.85 in 100,000), so I’m not sure.
• A lot of Brazilian names were invented recently. A fairly common name for boys in Brazil is Edmilson, which was popularised by a football player of that name, and it certainly sounds like a name — like an English name, along the lines of Nelson, Milton, Edward, Edwin, etc. Really, it’s just a combination of syllables that sound sort of name-ish. It has no prior history; it was made up in Brazil. An example of Brazilian creativity.
• American names can be like this too. Jayden sounds like a name, like Aidan (from Old Irish) and Jason (from Ancient Greek), but it isn’t like those names because it doesn’t have a deep past. It just sounds name-ish. It was invented as a name-ish name for modern American boys. Braden is similar, except that an Old English etymology has been proposed for it (even though it seems to have first been used as a given name in the 1940s).
• I’m using ‘American’ here to mean ‘of or pertaining to the United States of America’, because that’s what it means in English. I understand that it’s different in Spanish and Portuguese, but in English ‘America’ refers to the country. I’m sorry. Don’t shoot the messenger.
• A lot of US women have given names like Madison and Mackenzie, which a) are traditionally surnames and b) have masculine etymologies. ‘Mackenzie’ means ‘son of Kenneth’; ‘Madison’ means ‘son of Maud’. The surname thing stands out as a general trend: a lot of Americans have given names that would be considered surnames elsewhere in the English-speaking world, like Blake, Carson, Carter, Colton, Hunter, Tanner, Piper, Mallory, etc. You won’t meet very many British or Irish men named Carter, although some characteristically American names have been borrowed in recent years.
• I think this is part of a broader trend, not just in the USA but in the Americas generally, of forgetting, or not caring about, the origins of things. Recency bias at a continental level. Alexander von Humboldt described this phenomenon in his Personal Narrative almost two centuries ago and it seems to me that it still applies:

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‘This absence of memories, which characterizes these new people in the United States of America and in the Spanish and Portuguese possessions, is worthy of attention. […] Most of these modern colonies are founded in a zone where the climate, the produce, the sky and landscape, all differ completely from Europe. The settler vainly tries to name the mountains, rivers and valleys with names that recall his motherland; these names soon lose their charm, and mean nothing to later generations. Under the influence of an exotic nature new habits are born for new needs; national memories are slowly effaced, and those remembered, like ghosts of our imaginations, are not attached to any time or place. The glories of Don Pelayo or the Cid Campeador have penetrated the forests and mountains of America; people sometimes pronounce these famous names, but they seem to come from an ideal world, from vague, fabulous times.’ (translated by Jason Wilson — p.85–6 in the Everyman’s Library edition)

• I feel this especially strongly when talking with Americans about the Middle Ages. If they aren’t actually medieval historians, Americans seem to associate medieval times with goblins and wizards (or with a chain of restaurants). It’s all D&D and Tolkien and other fictional things. It’s undoubtedly easier to picture the medieval past as real when you grow up surrounded by actual, tangible medieval architecture.
• I suppose this is why American fantasy literature is so imaginative: it isn’t necessarily tethered to anything around the writer. I’ve been reading some of Clark Ashton Smith’s short stories lately and they’re really mad — synthesised from all sorts of ideas from all over the place. Compare Tolkien and Robert Howard, or M. R. James and H. P. Lovecraft (a possible exception?).
• I imagine this has an effect on personality too. The presence of really old things forces you to reflect on life, to realise that your life is just one of many lives going all the way back, that you’re no more important than the people who designed and built the stuff around you — and also that those people were both very different from and very similar to you. Old things give perspective. And it seems to me that that’s something Americans often lack — more so, I think, than Europeans, who are generally less proactive and more grounded.
• These are generalisations but I stand by them.
• Coming back to names: a lot of Americans seem to believe that Wesley is a common name for British men. There are British Wesleys all over American media. There’s one in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. There’s a Westley, spelled slightly differently, in The Princess Bride, played by British actor Cary Elwes. There’s even an English character named Wesley Snipes in the sitcom 30 Rock. When the series lead, played by Tina Fey, comments on this, and says that it is ‘insane’ that he shares a name with the actor Wesley Snipes, the character Wesley Snipes (played by noted Welshman Michael Sheen) responds:

You know what’s insane? That the actor is named Wesley Snipes! If you were shown a picture of him and a picture of me, and were asked “who should be named Wesley Snipes”, you’d pick the pale Englishman every time!

• Wesley is actually an extremely uncommon first name in the UK. I lived in England for about 25 years and I visit now and then, and I’ve never met any Britons named Wesley. The only Wesley I can think of off the top of my head is transphobic Labour politician Wes Streeting, but he goes by Wes, not Wesley, and he was born in the late twentieth century. He was a teenager when Buffy first aired. Wikipedia says that there’s another British Wesley — television personality Wes Nelson, born in 1998 — but there are as many Dutch people on Wiki’s list of famous Wesleys as there are Britons, and there are seventeen times as many Brazilians. Almost all the Anglophone world’s Wesleys were born in the United States or Canada. British Wesley is a stereotype based on absolutely nothing.
• If you asked the average British person about typical American men’s names, by contrast, they’d probably list a few actual names that actual Americans have but which are vanishingly rare in the UK — names like Hank, Carter, or Braden. The only British person on Wikipedia’s long list of Hanks is Hank Wangford, an English country-and-western singer whose real name is Samuel Hutt and who adopted the name Hank because it sounded American. (‘Hank’ is therefore almost as British a name as ‘Wesley’ is.)
• Of all the countries of the world, Britain should be the easiest for Americans to find out about. There are about 70 million Britons, roughly as many people as the populations of Texas and California combined. The flight between JFK and Heathrow isn’t particularly long. London is a big city — bigger than any city in the US, with about half-a-million more inhabitants than New York — and an influential one globally. The Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings franchises are very popular in America. Everyone knows James Bond and Agatha Christie. The language is similar at the very least. But the average American doesn’t seem to know anything of substance about the UK itself — about British food, landscape, accents, politics, anything. Just a load of old and misinformed stereotypes, if that.
• If they don’t know the first thing about Britain, how can they be expected to know anything about Indonesia or Malawi? Or about the countries to which their government is actively hostile?
• The ancient proverb: Travel to America and watch your own country disappear.
• Conversely: I don’t think Americans realise how much we hear about them, or how annoying that can be.
• I’m hopeful that social media will be able to change this. Online, you get what you’re given, not what the national media environment forces you to see. That could be a good thing in the long run. It might help to break the Yanks out of their bubble. Only time will tell.

And that’s all I’ve got. These are all of my thoughts about the United States of America. Don’t shoot me.