A Love and Hate Letter to America

If there’s one thing Americans love, it’s foreign people — and especially British people — telling them about their country.

I’m kidding. Actually, I feel bad for Americans — as I’ve written — for having had to listen to James Corden, Piers Morgan and John Oliver. But that isn’t going to stop me from talking about the USA as we approach its 250th birthday.

Happy birthday, USA!

Like a lot of Europeans, I had a phase in my teenage years when I was mildly anti-American. At the time, the U.S. government had relapsed into launching catastrophic foreign wars — with, alas, Tony Blair puppyishly trailing in its wake. “Don’t wanna be an American idiot,” we sang, trying to forget that our soldiers were in Afghanistan and Iraq too.

The history of American dominance is, of course, splattered with blood. Its growth entailed ethnic cleansing and slavery (both inherited, to be fair, from Europeans). As the world’s preeminent superpower, it has launched stupid and destructive wars and propped up murderous tyrants. With its cultural and economic dominance, it has spread its ideological neuroses across the world.

So, it’s not as if the case against America is based on nothing. But it cannot be considered divorced from context. Firstly, the history of any powerful nation is going to involve bloodshed. A lot of the people who lambast US history have done so while admiring a rival superpower which launched similarly bloody wars and propped up even more murderous dictators. I suppose someone could be against superpowers in general, and I would be sympathetic, but the fact is that there are going to be superpowers however we feel about it. One might as well be against the weather. And where would you rather have lived — West Germany or the GDR? The GDR didn’t build the Berlin Wall to keep refugees out.

None of this is to defend American sins, of course. Trump’s war against Iran, for example, is not less stupid and immoral because of Putin’s war against Ukraine. But I think a lot of “anti-war” people really do think that the world was peaceful and cooperative before — KABOOM — the Americans arrived. That is pure fantasy. The imperialistic — indeed, evangelical — impulses of the USA are often lamentable and condemnable but more successful states pushing less successful states around is no American than frying food. It has just found more eye-catching ways of doing it.

Like a lot of Europeans, I’ve also had a tendency to think of the US as being a bit uncultured. On one level, this is massively unfair. You’d struggle to find a trio of European novelists — from the last 250 years, at least — to pit against Melville, Pynchon and McCarthy, or poets to pit against Stevens, Bishop and Frost, or directors to pit against Kubrick, Coppola and Lynch.

On another level, the US is the nation of Donald Trump, Joel Osteen and The Jersey Shore. It might not be fair for outside observers to associate it with that which is crass and thoughtless but it’s hardly inexplicable. Still, that’s what makes the USA so fascinating. It’s a travel writer’s cliché but it’s not unmerited here — the U.S. is a land of spectacular contradictions.

Me, I tend to love the US in its localities — the haunting folk music of Songs: Ohia, the small town weirdness of Twin Peaks and the rough and vivid tales of territory wrestling. I like that sort of cultural patchwork quality rather than the global brands in their corporate and human forms. I admire the America of Hulk Hogan but the America I love is that of Terry Funk. Yet I wouldn’t even know about all this if the US wasn’t the cultural giant that it is. (That’s glocalisation for you.) I love the small-scale humanness of the art — but what a distribution machine.

To the extent that we Europeans have suffered from Americanisation, we have to be less resentful and more inspired. We all know and love cultural products that achieve universal fame despite being distinctly and locally American, and we should aspire to achieve this ourselves. (The internet should have given us a real leg-up when it comes to distribution.)

The US might be a land of bizarre excesses and tremendous hubris — excuse my plugging of my recent piece on Hulk Hogan and America — but we could use some of its cultural confidence — not confidence in the sense of being naive or arrogant about what is achievable, of course, but confidence in the sense of at least trying to achieve something. The fact is that the optimism and innovation of the Apollo Program is not alien to the optimism and innovation that sent cruise missiles into Baghdad. This is not for one moment to excuse the latter. It is to say that to disdain the spirit of American dynamism, rather than its frequent failure to be allied with realism and respect, is to embrace stagnancy.

The US government is still doing a lot to make itself dislikeable. With White House officials reportedly preparing a $250 bill featuring the President’s face, it is easy to believe that the weekend’s celebrations will involve a great deal that is crass and thoughtless. But the USA, more than any other country, is home to great genius and great foolishness, and to great beauty and to great barbarism. To hate it, in other words, is to hate humanity — defensible, sometimes, but ultimately self-defeating.