In a Sense, Abroad

It's good to be abroad. Just ask Bea Arthur.

Kidding. I kid.

My family and I are taking a trip to Europe! Five weeks outside the crammed, sweaty air space of Fox News, talent shows, the steady, thick stream of pharmaceutical commercials and low-brow, presumptive nominee sniping.

From England, America's more verbally acute doppelgänger, the view of the states is much clearer than the one enjoyed by Americans themselves, whose faces are pressed into Old Glory like hostages' noses pressed up against a chloroform-saturated hanky. Distance allows one to see the plum jitteriness that animates the 300 million or so dots scrambling from the car to the curb to the McMall back to the car and finally to the couch. As you may have heard when it was carelessly leaked into our consciousnesses, the goings on in The Big A are maddening to the rest of the world and more so to this temporary defector. I have to say, there is so much to be gained from adopting an altered perspective, in this case being in a different longitude and latitude than George Bush, that international travel should be encouraged despite the prohibitive airline fares. The outright outlandishness of the ride the American people have been taken on is apparent in ways that might even awaken the heaviest cultural somnambulist. In England, once a most vocal supporter in Bush's cottage industry of a war, history, culture and independent thinking is not subsumed for political or capitalistic gain as blatantly as it is in America. Brits don't wear Union Jack lapel pins or resist reference to their historical leaders and policies either good or bad, for fear that Britons will stop consuming material goods. In fact, the news here (discounting, of course, the legendary scandal rags) is delivered more somberly, more soberly, with fewer slick animations and emotionally jolting stings to signal what kind of reaction the viewer should have in advance of any germinating, independent response to what is doled out. For England, bordered by the living, writhing world as opposed to being geographically separated from it, unfettered perspectives are pretty much available all the time. And there's a maturity and sophistication that goes beyond the preternaturally entrancing accent (My wife is from London. I rest my case.) to British culture that the preening upstart America lacks, wrought from its many years of having ruled unwisely, having wielded its imperial arrogance in much the same way corporate-controlled America does now except without having absorbed the bitter lessons of such self-defeating folly that England has.

At my most pessimistic, there's something that suggests America won't go the same way, that there's little or no chance of relatively humble introspection where its true identity will be found among the ruins of its failures and that its redemption will be thwarted by the same powers that visited her current miseries upon her in the first place.

Is there any irony in watching an entire country other than Sweden exhibiting Stockholm Syndrome? There would be, if Americans possessed a sense of irony, something that's been effectively amputated from them by the shrewd surgeons who have wielded their scalpels knowingly, by the corporate cabal that has purchased the complacency of its leaders and exploited the masses' pride in nation by creating a nation in which they would, if they were in their right minds, never be proud of.

Americans subsist on the echoes of its nation's greatness while Britons live amidst theirs, their history and all its lessons achieving relevance and retaining power from their reverence for monument and tradition and for knowing all too well what their place in the world once was and what is now.

England is spiritual yet secular, strong yet humble. It has its rogues and its rotters, its gossip and its greed. But it also has an abundance of self respect that is not hindered by hubris. England wasn't always this way. Finding itself took generations. So perhaps there is hope after all for its rowdy relation, born in rebellion, its distinction as a beacon of democracy hewn from the rich and fertile land it journeyed thousands of miles to settle, but who is now currently distracted, off course and at sea. It's possible if there's time. Distance, measured in years or nautical miles, can bring clarity. To see the USA, maybe you have to travel far away.