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On the plane they supplied a 'Retail Therapy' magazine. It was actually called that. These are surely two of the modern world's most noxious inventions: retail and therapy. Retail therapy used to be a joke term, a way to ridicule both therapy and retail shopping. Now the dastardly forces of commercialism have appropriated the term for themselves.
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You can judge a country by its public lavatories. Upon landing in an American airport, the British traveller is invariably shocked by the 'restrooms'. The cubicle closes with a lock that seems barely secure, the door leaves nearly a foot gap underneath and is so short that one can almost see over the top, and the water level in the bowl is terrifyingly high, creating all sorts of hazards.
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It strikes me that holidays are a great swindle. The average working man spends his few weeks of holiday on a trip that is extremely costly, filled with the woes of airports, culminating in an end point that is usually less agreeable than his starting point. He begins his journey to a foreign country with a sense of nervousness; he returns home with a sense of gladness. But all this masked by his pretending to have had a marvellous time, which he feels is a social requirement. There are many exceptions, of course, but I can't help but feel that what I describe is probably the most common experience.
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Watching American television I am struck by how everything is sensationalist, exaggerated, insincere, thoughtless, shiny, superficial, fast, choppy, frenetic.... I thought I might find Tucker Carlson's programme more agreeable, but I found it no better for the fact that I agreed with half of it. In fact I think I preferred Chris Matthew's on the left-wing MSNBC. I enjoyed disagreeing with him, and found him older and calmer than Carlson.
The only channels that stood out as different were CSPAN and PBS. Though the latter had some appalling, low-budget programmes. There were also a couple of religious channels that were surprisingly good. Most were dreadful evangelical fare, but one Catholic channel and another more serious-minded evangelical channel stood out. I apologise for having forgotten their names. They were well produced, with long monologues, calmly and reflectively presented. The people who did not strike one as narcissists, hacks or people who loved the sound of their voices. The programmes were slick and polished but the presenters did not come across as insincere. They spoke seriously and moreover, unlike the immodest seriousness of the news channels, on subjects that really matter.
There were no particularly attractive churches where I was. There was an Anglican cathedral that looked like something out of Disneyland and a Catholic church that was a dreary redbrick. Some of the protestant churches had Greco-Roman aspirations, but like a lot of the grander buildings in the area they were at once very opulent and very cheap.
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There was a guitarist-singer who wore a sort of metal washboard vest and started banging on it semi-percussively. He did this while advertising some hot sauce. It is, as far as I'm concerned, a kind of hell, but at least it's an interesting kind of hell.
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Southern Americans are pathologically nice. One cannot escape their niceness. They will not leave you alone -- they are suspicious of reserve. I am suspicious of a lack of reserve. Americans are so nice one starts to think one cannot trust them. It is all superficiality -- one never can quite tell what they really think.
Although, coming back to our miserable little country, though I love our rudeness, our sarcasm, our irony, our miserabilism, our gentle insults, our cheekiness, I do thoroughly miss the politeness and decency that the southern Americans have cultivated. I think we could do with something similar, minus the 'have an amazing day!' comments which shop-workers all give you, and which I regard as unprofessionally colloquial and so excessively happy as to be depressing. Though sadly it seems that the only aspect of American politeness that we have inherited is this awful commercial rot.
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There is little sense of culture in this part, at least, of America. Towns have malls not high streets. You will find no butchers, for example. Cars have created urban landscapes without proper communal spaces or local commerce. All the shops are chain shops and low culture predominates. Though their low culture (I'm thinking of the music particularly) still has a very strong folk component. People play the music of their place, their home, and they play it often unamplified, with humility. The commercialism has not quite destroyed it. But they do not have the sort of high culture one readily finds in Europe. Even the violin I heard referred to as the 'classical violin'. I presume, like the guitar, the nonclassical version is now considered the norm.
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The city I visited was a very clean, fairly affluent, up-and-coming city. There was a very obvious gentrification effort by white liberals. I saw signs in shop windows saying 'diversity matters', exhibits of modern art, adoption of electric scooters, exotic restaurants with many vegan and vegetarian options. The diversity of restaurants I found particularly tiresome. We are always told that one of the benefits of immigration is that our towns culturally enriched -- made more colourful, more vibrant -- by foreign cuisines. I find it rather dull personally. Every city has the same array of restaurants -- an Italian, a tapas, a Meditarrianian, perhaps an Ethopian, a French, and so on... And so every city becomes like every other city. Diversity has a homogenising effect. The sense of local flavour was somewhat lost. It was remarkably hard to find Southern cuisine (except in a few chain restaurants usually outside the city).
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The same social and political problems in Britain you find in America. Towns and cities with rapidly ageing populations, coal and manufacturing plants closing, migration into the city, social mobility hollowing out communities. They have food banks too. Trump has not done what he promised, and even the most half-witted of observers has to find his economic boasts laughable.
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Returning home, I was shocked by how filthy London is. It's a terribly dirty city, worse than any other I know of. American streets were noticeably cleaner. The people were not merely more respectful of each other but of their environment. But most probably the two are related: ugly environments inspire ugly behaviour.
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