The Null Device

Kevin Connolly's guide to American culture

The BBC's outgoing America correspondent, Kevin Connolly, has written a valedictory essay summing up his experience of the US today:
And there is something beguiling in that easy familiarity, but something misleading about it, too. It tends to blind Europeans, and the British in particular, to any sense of just how foreign a place America can be.
The theme of the essay is that America is quite different from Europe, and if anything, getting more, rather than less, different. As a society, it is getting more religious (you will be wished to "have a blessed day" by shopkeepers in the Red States, and half of the country wouldn't tolerate an atheist marrying their children, let alone holding any public office), a significant proportion of Americans think that a president who'd be well to the right of David Cameron is a dangerous socialist, and America considers itself at war and/or under siege, which has added a curious militaristic/nationalistic tinge to life:
Because it is a country at war, young men and women in uniform are a common sight on internal flights around the country. It is curiously moving to see them sitting looking a little embarrassed as a pilot or flight attendant calls on their fellow passengers to give their service and sacrifice a standing ovation.
And, of course, guns and the death penalty, the two things usually standing in for apple pie in any European discussion of America.

Connolly does mention other aspects of America: a pithily pragmatic way with the English language, a generous culture of hospitality, and the irritating habit of holding lift doors open for stragglers, "as though it was one of the last helicopters leaving the roof of the Saigon embassy in 1975".

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