COLUMN: A Year With Yanks

Let's face it - America is the subject of worldwide mockery. I intend the word "mockery" here to be taken in its double sense: both as "derision or ridicule" and as "mimicry or imitation". What is fascinating about the U.S. is exactly this double effect. Why is it that a nation which is globally despised should be globally imitated? A crude capitalist response would probably be that a free market simply produces the goods that people desire: although I must admit to being curious as to how desires (beyond those of biological need) can be formulated independently of those of society at large. Indeed, surely the purpose of advertising - a pervasive element of this society - is not merely to reflect desires, but to create them. (Could a desire for Bud Light, or baseball caps, be anythingbut constructed?) It is not sufficient to defend a capitalist economy by recourse to the argument that it merely promotes the satisfaction of pre-existing desires; any serious attempt at such a defense must explain also why such desires should be desired. However, Marxist analyses (such as Berger's otherwise perceptive account in Ways of Seeing) seem to miss what I hold to be the other side of the coin (a significant metaphor) of desire - a fact that everyone who has had a crush, for instance, will appreciate - that desire itself, regardless of the object, can be inherently pleasureable. The spectre of communism might still be haunting Europe, but the ghosts in America's closet are not of this kind... However, I am not about to naively relativize the situation. (For to adopt a culturally relativistic stance is merely to relativize that very relativism.) Having lived and studied in the U.S. for a year on exchange from Edinburgh University (in Britain), I was asked to write this short piece on my experience here. Obviously I can't speak about America as a whole (if it is a whole - although it might be a hole), nor can I speak about Europe as a whole (which it certainly isn't - "up yours, Delors"), there are some general tendencies which deserve consideration. What I would hope to convey, if nothing else, is the basis for what I can only call my "love-hate" relationship with the U.S. (If America was a lover it would be a sodomizer...) A young man told me recently that he was Scottish royalty. I must admit to having been a little sceptical: it is unusual for European royalty to wear baseball hats and speak with New Jersey accents. Yet more puzzling was the fact that there has been no Scottish royalty for the last three centuries. It soon transpired, however, that I had no need to inform the Summer Pennsylvanian about a worrying rip in the time-space continuum in the region of 40th and Baltimore - for the budding Bonnie Prince Charlie was actually claiming only to be descended from Scottish royalty. (Some descent!) Whilst this too might be a little spurious, it is an extreme case of a system of American ontology. No-one, I have come to realize, actually considers themselves primarily American. They are African, Asian, Irish, Scottish, Italian, Jewish, English, Indian. The predominant identification is with ancestors - sometimes ancestors many generations back. America is still a young country in global terms - 1776 is only just over two centuries ago - and an urge to align oneself with a history and tradition is understandable. Yet to identify with the nationality of ancestors rather than one's own is implicitly to privilege the genetic aspect of identity. Within this context, the racial tensions that characterize the U.S. are not so surprising. What is surprising in this context, however, is that the interest shown in alien cultures is a purely academic interest: few Americans really spend time in the places that they romanticize. (The Edinburgh-Penn exchange is itself in jeopardy due to the lack of interest at Penn: only three students wanted to study there this year.) Travel doesn't "improve" anyone, but it does allow one to see more clearly the ideological structures of one's own culture. The British and American situation is particularly revealing, since both nations seem to define themselves oppositionally. The British opposition to things American is more conscious - "American" is synonymous with "crass" to many Brits, a not altogether fair equation - yet American prejudice is perhaps the more worrying on account that it is a unacknowledged. We do wash, we do work (sometimes), we are no more racist than dear ole Uncle Sam, we aren't all like Huge Grant. And we don't live in castles, unless you build them in the air for us... Perhaps the primary ideological difference between American and Europe is that which derives from the basic differences in economic structure. I think it was Raymond Williams who developed the typology of residual, dominant, and emergent cultures in order to account for tensions within a larger cultural group. Whilst the U.S. is a straight capitalist nation, western Europe contains within it varying degrees of a residual feudal culture which, despite the now-capitalist base, persists in the superstructure. It is this residual feudal ideology which I believe to be the essential difference. It is permutated in many ways, but perhaps the most obvious manifestation is in the concept of human worth. The residual feudal ideology insists that you are born into your position. If you are born working class, no amount of work or wealth will change that; if you are born aristocracy, no amount of dissipation or poverty will make a difference. Indeed, it is almost considered "bad taste" to try to be anything different. (The ideal university student - even in the eyes of the staff - is he or she who is idle or dissipatedyet intelligent.) It is a static model - one wants to be, not to become. The reverse seems to be true in the dynamic model of he U.S., where you are defined by what you try ro become. In some respects the European model is more attractive: you are not forced to strive after some elusive vision of success; but it does create a painfully static community. So what do I love about America? Not the work ethic; not the crassness; not the prejudice. What attracts me to America is the sense(and it might only be a sense) of freedom, of potential movement. Even if he objects of desire in the U.S. are of questionable worth, the desire itself can be invigorating. I think I've been sodomized. Andrew Lynn. Senior exchange student from edinburough scotland major in english