"America I love you, but..."

As the US teeters between democracy and fascism, much of the world looks on fascinated, astonished, appalled. But does it really matter to the rest of us? And how much of the story of modern America is equally our own story? A few thoughts in my capacity as a broadly ignorant Englishman looking in..

I suppose America still has a certain clout for those of us born in the 1970s, a time when it dominated economics, industry, politics, statecraft, diplomacy, culture, philosophy, music, cinema, gadgets, jargon, entertainment, advertising, branding and much else. Entire Friday nights or Saturday mornings (at times they seemed to converge, especially when Kermit appeared on both) were given to imported tv shows: Sesame Street, The A Team, Fame, Airwolf, Dallas, Different Strokes, The Fall Guy, Magnum PI, Chips, The Monkees… each dramatic theme tune etched as earworm in perpetuity.

The shows might have been corny but they held court in your childlike consciousness, and at some level helped form a view of an alien country thousands of miles away, where they spoke like you and yet didn’t. You might not have lived in America (I didn’t visit until I was 40) but you didn’t really need to. You could vicariously live the American Dream from a sofa in Hammersmith.

You could wear Nike, play Cowboy ‘n’ Indians, drink Pepsi, dine at McDonalds or hang out at Toys “R” Us. If you were really lucky, in the summer, you might be driven around in my grandpa’s Ford. You would watch the daily bulletins, Reagan strutting the stage like a superstar, the man on the white horse saving the world from Commies. You would watch Madonna and Jacko and Prince and Bon Jovi and Carl Lewis and Mickey Mouse and Rambo, and be in awe at their seismic self-confidence. You would immerse yourself in ET or Star Wars or Aliens, and wonder if outer space was American too. You would listen to Billy Joel’s We didn’t start the fire and ask if that was the ultimate history lesson of everything that had ever happened.

And then came Kurt Cobain. The 90s, perhaps reflecting my own coming of age, seemed to hint at a change of direction for alternative (white) US culture, hinting at uncharacteristic introspection or vulnerability in kids estranged from MTV largesse. (A noticeable aesthetic split too from a UK yoof scene that now simply obliterated its own issues in increasingly hedonistic bliss).

Watching the Waco Siege, the LA riots, the Oklahoma and Atlanta terror attacks, the OJ chase, and bleak films such as Falling Down it seemed that all was not well across the pond. In the UK, on the nightly Channel 4 News, an outstanding foreign correspondent called David Smith documented and analysed everything that happened in Washington DC in the 90s. Intrigued, I immersed myself further in US politics and history, at sixth form and then in greater depth at university, studying all the presidential administrations since FDR, reading voraciously about every milestone in US Foreign Policy: the Tet Offensive, Detente, Cuba, Lockerbie, Noriega… or closer to home: Little Rock, Watergate, Willie Horton, Oliver North…

The more I read, the more I realised the industrial scale of deception in politics and culture, and the more I understood that America had been corrupted to its core, from the moment the Founding Fathers arrived, a people who may have fled from Europe but had no unifying culture to take with them, a people who believed in liberty but at the expense of those they evicted or enslaved. The brutality, the exclusion, the segregation, the assassinations, the gerrymandering, the gold rushes and human despair…. The awkward stories Hollywood for too long shied away from telling.

And how the UK cherished the Anglo-American ‘special relationship’, turning a blind eye to those awkward moments when the adoration wasn’t exactly reciprocated: NORAID, the Lend Lease debts, the Suez Crisis, The Beatles record burning in the Bible Belt which culminated in Lennon’s murder.. all pointing to a “We love Limey but ONLY on OUR terms.” America lost generations of European youth over the interventions in Vietnam, Chile and Iraq, brutal reminders of how elastic moral supremacism is but the Brits usually tailed at the back, still enthralled by those icons of mass entertainment.

And so different post-war generations of Brits clung on to the US like an errant relative, who deep down was still one of us, who embraced OUR (earlier) Beatles and Royal Family and drunken dilettantes, at a time when we British were insecure about our declining global role because I dunno, maybe we just loved the idea of being teacher’s pet, or having that linguistic headstart over other decidedly more uncool Europeans.

Estranged from the unchallenging mass entertainment of the 80s, I instead turned to a grittier comedian or commentator such as George Carlin or Rich Hall, who were able to succinctly and humorously diagnose what was going on in their homeland in a way that might appeal to cynical Brits but which was alien to anyone seduced by American exceptionalism. I think both are superb in extrapolating reality from myth and in understanding how wedded millions of people still are to the past and identifying why ‘we’ (ie much of the democratic world) still want to believe in America because of the photogenic Kennedys or the 1971 idealism of Marvin Gaye, or going back to WW2 the unashamed heroism of Casablanca, a superb film that pointed the way to a fantasy US, the beacon of the free world, eternally immune to Nazism.

And some historians would argue it worked. NATO held. The USSR collapsed. For a few years in the 90s, cue Fukuyama and all the other prophets, it felt like the ‘world’ had finally been sorted out. A new ‘humble’ America had emerged, the nonsense of the Monica Lewinsky circus exposing the intellectual weakness of a right wing that had no arguments anymore. The World Wide Web would bring the planet together in one communal act of collective virtual love. And to some extent it did.

Thanks to the Internet I got immersed in endless musical subcultures, from filmscores to west coast rock to funk to disco to Chicago House to Detroit Techno and kissed the sky that it was now so easy to access all this musical history. America offers this glorious a la carte menu of musical delights that has appealed to generations of enthusiasts worldwide, and which continues to inspire the hiphop I hear or skate culture I see every day in Barcelona. I know people who have travelled to New York or Memphis purely for their musical legacy. With the emergence of the Internet, it was suddenly possible to talk to nerds and other kindred spirits all over the world. What could possibly go wrong? But then Bin Laden and planes and stuff. Baddies could use the internet too.

Some people found the film Forrest Gump too obvious and twee, but even more so than Billy Joel, it tells the story of post-war America that the wider world could easily digest, captivated by its charm but ambivalent towards its morally dicey backdrops. And now in middle age, having visited California on multiple occasions I’ve come to experience that messy reality first hand. We met people of all descriptions and degrees of friendliness on our campground trip up the Big Sur in a van adorned in psychedelic mariachi mushrooms.

California could never be a barometer for wider America, but still, you might happen across ageing hippies in Pismo Beach’s blues bar or growling rednecks loitering around Huntington Beach. You are wowed by the vast aisles of food at Ralphs, Gelson’s and Trader Joe’s, whilst outside, yards away, some poor bastard is strung out on fentanyl in a dirty tent, the sort of scene occasionally replicated in Europe, but never nearly on the same scale.

It is impossible to vicariously live US politics from Europe because so much is related to the unique experience of daily life in America, far away from the camera lens. We Europeans think we understand America but actually we don’t. We don’t understand the religious piety or rural backwaters or the rodeos or lawyer commercials or overtly biased tv networks, because those of my age are still used to singular psyches, officially neutral broadcasters and, above all, shared national moments that everyone could talk about the next day in the playground or in the office.

Living in Spain, you realise that despite the mutual political loathing, most people are still somehow bound together, if not by history, then certainly by common institutions, close knit networks and workplaces, shared lifestyles, formal fiestas, public hospitals, schools, transport and other social spheres we share and a broad consensus that recognises rights and opportunities for all. I’m not sure that necessarily all exists in a vast geographical and hyper individualistic space where psychological divides are aggravated by huge physical distances.

Looking in from afar, it feels to me that The United States of America, as a country - or concept - is probably experiencing a much-delayed correction as history is not only recontextualised but taught in FULL to a younger generation, which is why reactionary forces, emotionally and materially invested in the myth, will do everything they can to thwart progress in this election. The world is ever more complex and population movements will surely have to meet the demands of declining local birthrates. All the pressing social, scientific and economic issues of our time will probably not be resolved reciting fairytales in a church. The remaining question now though is which will triumph: the future OR the past?