So what have I learnt from this 4000+ mile excursion across the USA? A multitude of things, to be sure, but one in particular keeps begging for attention, and now we’re settled I’ve had time to reflect on it properly.
Regional stereotypes in Europe and the UK are disproved by the people you meet often as they are reaffirmed. There’s the man from Edinburgh who can’t stand whisky and the Man Utd. fan who doesn’t live in Surrey. In America I’ve found this not to be the case; people conform to the stereotypes more often than not. While England is a small cameo piece, delicately and minutely detailed, America is painted in bold colours and broad strokes on a wide canvas.
I think much of this has to do with the way America communicates with itself. TV and film, especially, have formed as well as informed the public consciousness, and more than anywhere else. Hollywood has its ready stereotypes of each state: the elderly Kentucky gentlewoman, the crunchy Californian, the Texan Cowboys fan, and astonishingly, these people exist in real life as if formed by the silver screen. In many ways they have been. In America more than anywhere else I’ve been, the TV is a mirror. This is not to say American TV is realistic, because it’s not. American program making conforms to none of the conventions of documentary realism; it’s pure fantasy which seeps out of the tube and takes hold of American reality.
How is this possible? I think mostly because of the sheer distances involved. Outside the major cities there are large patches of isolation, and isolation breeds differences, in some cases huge differences. The TV negates some of this distance, brings a far larger circle of acquaintances into the living room than would normally come visiting. Imagine, for example, the culture clash that would occur between a Bostonian banker and a Texas farmhand.
In the UK we have a centuries old class system, antagonisms and alliances which define us as part of the same lump of people. Whether we love or hate another group we are inextricably bound to them. America does not have this socio-historical mesh; instead it has a powerful national myth. It’s there in the endlessly repeated fluttering stars and stripes, and it’s there in Hollywood movies and on TV. Its message is “We are all Americans.” So what if you’re a Boston office worker and wear $800 designer Italian shoes? So what if you’re a Texas rancher with a ten-gallon hat and work-roughened hands? So what if you can’t agree on politics, sports, or religion? There is always one thing you can agree on. You are an American, and so is he. The myth, the stars and stripes, and all that go with it are a mental cement to unite the people of these diverse and remote states.
If Europe were ever to unite to the same extent a huge amount of time and money would need to be expended in creating a unifying myth strong enough to convince Sicilian olive-growers, Dusseldorf brewers, London bankers, Cork farmers, Parisian chefs and Marbellan hotel managers that they are all citizens of the same country. It would need to be strong enough to conquer the smaller national myths and also to conquer a history of rivalry, squabbling, feuds and wars. Before I saw America I would have said it wasn’t possible to brew a myth that strong. Now I’m not so sure.
