America!

Have just returned from spending the inter-semester break in central Florida, staying with Gary (old chum from my early days in Lódz), who descends from there, and teaches high school there now. Nevertheless he is nostalgic for Poland, and recently bought some land near Sokolniki and had a wooden highlandsman-style house built there. His summer palace, he says. Anyway, it will be (slightly) more pleasant to spend summers there than in the brutal heat of Florida.

It was nice when I went there though; clear blue skies, temperatures in the late teens to mid-20s the whole time I was there. Mostly clear, although some rainy bits (and even a tornado warning, one day! but nothing came of it); certainly a world away from grey, wet old Poland. When I left Tampa airport on a Thursday morning it was 24°C; when I returned to the Fatherland (on Friday afternoon, time travel gets weirder coming from west to east), Warsaw welcomed me with -7°C. :D

Yes, it's a seductive lifestyle. It's all so cheap! Especially with the dollar now being worth less than what we wipe our bums with in European toilets. Gary told me, 'Bring two empty suitcases, you'll fill them up,' and he jested not. I bought cheap books (wonderful things; histories, anthropology, linguistics, travel, and 'economics for freaks') and cheap clothing; as Gary comes from a family of teachers, his parents know where to shop for discarded goods - factory rejects which to the untrained eye appear perfect, but are not deemed good enough for regular sales - and so I got suitcases full of Ralph Lauren & Calvin Klein shirts and trousers for two or three bucks each. I also went to the legendary WalMart and stocked up on cheap underwear and towels, while I could. I even treated myself to a mini-computer (not yet available in Europe) for several hundred dollars less than the price I wd have paid in a British shop.

And of course, it's all flat and clean and relatively well-organised. We travelled around four states (heading from central Florida northwards, nipping into Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi while heading along the coastline of the Gulf of Mexico - the 'redneck riviera', they call it), and I don't think there was a hill or dale you could justify with the name of 'geography'. Very swampy in places though; supposedly the area is crawling with alligators, but I never saw one. Not the season, I suppose; also, I didn't have the number to their agents, and you know those people never do anything local. ;)

But it's all built on credit, of course. Wiser Americans are counting their pennies and making care they haven't invested in anything, making sure they have land, gold or other long-term assets carefully hidden under the bed. Which, of course, they protect with their guns. I shot a gun! It was a specific request of mine, to do that when I came over. Gary got a small handgun (basically a pistol) from his mother :D, bought some ammo at WalMart (yes, you can buy rifles and ammunition and all of that over the counter, just down from the tyre centre and across from the furniture section), and while we were in a wood in Mississippi, I mercilessly and brutally killed some plastic bottles. (adopts deep voice: I AM A MAN NOW. :D) I can see why they like shooting things, it's such fun!

But driving along the flat roads (heading north to the South, as they joke there), listening to the radio - with country music's endless messages reinforcing a sense of defensive, aggressive pride in being a 'plain-speakin' God-fearin' man who does like his daddy done and don't take no crap from nobody', and then the talk-show presenters whose nationalist simplicities echo the same concepts, and the religious broadcasters who take four words from a Biblical text and flog them to death like horses in a Roman amphitheatre - seeing the fat people shop at WalMart and eat 'all they can eat' at the roadhouse diners (but some of the food is genuinely yummy, such as a local fish called pollock which is like a delicate kind of cod), seeing the black people's ill-repaired wooden houses quite literally on 'the wrong side of the (railway) tracks' from the white sections of town, you know that there is still something at the heart of this country which isn't as it should be.

I talked to Gary's high-schoolers a couple of times; they were reassuring in their normality, not ignorant future-murderer Christalibans as we might think, but perfectly recognisable types; some quite intelligent for their age (17ish - a strange feeling for me, to now be talking to people born in the 1990s) and most friendly and curious about the outside world. Gary is bringing them over to Europe for a trip this summer, and I might run into them in Kraków. :) But most of them have never left the US, often because their families can't afford to - or if they did, it's because their fathers are military personnel. So Iraq and Afghanistan are very relevant topics; the 'support our troops' and 'proud parent of a soldier' stickers you see everywhere are not braggadocio, but genuine expressions of love and concern. And the concern is real for a couple of the boys whose SATs (Student Aptitude Test scores, the end-of-school exams they take to determine where they'll study) aren't so good, and have decided to join the Army and the Marines, following in family traditions.

I think that for the English, the dissonance, the culture shock we encounter when going over there is always much greater than it would be for a European. They don't expect it to be a culture similar to theirs, because they are conscious of speaking a foreign language when they go there, or have anything to do with it. But we English, perhaps, somewhere in our heart of hearts, think that Americans should be more like us because of the (more or less) shared language. (But it wasn't that shared when the owner of an Alabama diner was saying something benevolent to me as I left his fine establishment; I couldn't understand a blind word the man was saying for the best part of a minute.) The truth is, of course, that England is much more a part of the European cultural continuum. The USA has evolved along very different lines, and even though I'd like to visit again (and buy its cheap products and admire its overly-bosomed women - do they all get implants at birth, or what?), I am still sure that it would be far too different a psychic landscape for me to ever inhabit comfortably. I think. :)