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This is the introduction to an interesting series of essays in a recent issue of the magazine. Granta. The essays aren't anti-American or pro-American, but largely slices of life about how non-Americans view/interact with America. It's interesting, and you ought to try and read some of the xcerpts that are provided online.
Granta 77: What We Think of America
'Introduction'
Ian Jack
America shapes the way non-Americans live and think. Before the Cold War ended, that had been true of half the world for several decades. Now, with the possible exceptions of North Korea and Burma, it is true of all of it. American cultural, economic and political influence is potent almost everywhere, in every life. What do we think of when we think of America? Fear, resentment, envy, anger, wonder, hope? And when did we start to think it?
By way of introducing the twenty-four writers in this collection of personal story and opinion, I offer two scenes from my own boyhood in Scotland in the 1950s.
The first: a lovely ship at anchor in the firth, perhaps half a mile from our village in Fife. This is the liner Caronia on its annual cruise to northern Europe from New York. Little black launches are coming and going from its pale-green hull to take tourists back and forth to Edinburgh on the further shore. At our feet, strewn along the beach's tideline and soggy with salt water, lie hundreds of half-eaten half-grapefruits. These have been tossed overboard by the Caronia's kitchen crew. This is what Americans have had for breakfast—often neglecting (unbelievably, or so it seems to us) to eat the decoration of glacé cherries, which now also lie so abundantly on the sand. Where have I seen so many decorative cherries before? It must be in the back-page full-colour ad of National Geographic magazine, where they are spiked across something called a York Ham. Possibly some kind of pudding? All these luxuries are coming to us, or to some of us, but not quite yet.
The second: a crowd of boys on another beach, not far away from the first. In the middle is an American boy, who has somehow landed up in Fife. The crowd is taunting him, 'Hank the Yank! Hank the Yank!', and he is red-faced, bewildered and crying. Why are we being so awful to him? Possibly because of some boastfulness on his part, or some argument over whether Britain or the US has the largest number of warships. Impossibly, we insist that Britain has; as a country, we are already living historically (a fact which is illustrated a summer or two later when the USS Wisconsin sails up the firth and drops anchor at the same spot as the Caronia usually does; the Wisconsin is one of a whole fleet of battleships, and Britain by now has none).
I remembered 'Hank the Yank' in the weeks after September 11, when so much anti-American feeling suddenly rose to the surface of newspaper columns and ordinary conversation—and not only in Hebron or Cairo or Lahore. Throughout Europe, even at the supper tables and bars of America's most loyal ally, you could hear (and, let's face it, speak) twin sentiments joined by that dangerous conjunction, but. What has happened is terrible, but it's…hardly surprising or hubris surely or, the most extreme, they had it coming to them. Two months later, the International Herald Tribune reported that in a poll of 275 'opinion leaders' throughout the world—a poll, as it were, of pollsters—more than two-thirds of the non-American respondents agreed with the proposition that it was 'good that Americans now know what it's like to be vulnerable'. More than half of these 'opinion leaders' outside the US also agreed to the idea that many or most people believed that 'American policies or actions in the world were a major cause of the September 11 attacks'.
The pieces that follow are not about that day, nor are they excuses for it. They are about how America has entered non-American lives, and to what effect, for good and bad and both.
Ian Jack
America shapes the way non-Americans live and think. Before the Cold War ended, that had been true of half the world for several decades. Now, with the possible exceptions of North Korea and Burma, it is true of all of it. American cultural, economic and political influence is potent almost everywhere, in every life. What do we think of when we think of America? Fear, resentment, envy, anger, wonder, hope? And when did we start to think it?
By way of introducing the twenty-four writers in this collection of personal story and opinion, I offer two scenes from my own boyhood in Scotland in the 1950s.
The first: a lovely ship at anchor in the firth, perhaps half a mile from our village in Fife. This is the liner Caronia on its annual cruise to northern Europe from New York. Little black launches are coming and going from its pale-green hull to take tourists back and forth to Edinburgh on the further shore. At our feet, strewn along the beach's tideline and soggy with salt water, lie hundreds of half-eaten half-grapefruits. These have been tossed overboard by the Caronia's kitchen crew. This is what Americans have had for breakfast—often neglecting (unbelievably, or so it seems to us) to eat the decoration of glacé cherries, which now also lie so abundantly on the sand. Where have I seen so many decorative cherries before? It must be in the back-page full-colour ad of National Geographic magazine, where they are spiked across something called a York Ham. Possibly some kind of pudding? All these luxuries are coming to us, or to some of us, but not quite yet.
The second: a crowd of boys on another beach, not far away from the first. In the middle is an American boy, who has somehow landed up in Fife. The crowd is taunting him, 'Hank the Yank! Hank the Yank!', and he is red-faced, bewildered and crying. Why are we being so awful to him? Possibly because of some boastfulness on his part, or some argument over whether Britain or the US has the largest number of warships. Impossibly, we insist that Britain has; as a country, we are already living historically (a fact which is illustrated a summer or two later when the USS Wisconsin sails up the firth and drops anchor at the same spot as the Caronia usually does; the Wisconsin is one of a whole fleet of battleships, and Britain by now has none).
I remembered 'Hank the Yank' in the weeks after September 11, when so much anti-American feeling suddenly rose to the surface of newspaper columns and ordinary conversation—and not only in Hebron or Cairo or Lahore. Throughout Europe, even at the supper tables and bars of America's most loyal ally, you could hear (and, let's face it, speak) twin sentiments joined by that dangerous conjunction, but. What has happened is terrible, but it's…hardly surprising or hubris surely or, the most extreme, they had it coming to them. Two months later, the International Herald Tribune reported that in a poll of 275 'opinion leaders' throughout the world—a poll, as it were, of pollsters—more than two-thirds of the non-American respondents agreed with the proposition that it was 'good that Americans now know what it's like to be vulnerable'. More than half of these 'opinion leaders' outside the US also agreed to the idea that many or most people believed that 'American policies or actions in the world were a major cause of the September 11 attacks'.
The pieces that follow are not about that day, nor are they excuses for it. They are about how America has entered non-American lives, and to what effect, for good and bad and both.
Granta 77: What We Think of America
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