How I Went From Idolising America to Pitying Her 😞
My journey from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to Trump Derangement Syndrome and out the other side.
When I was kid, during what we in the UK call junior school, if you had listened in to me and my mates playing in the garden, at the playground, in my room you might be surprised at what you heard. Not the twee tones of little Englishmen but the transatlantic twang of aspirational Americans.
Every generation thinks their cartoons were the best but, respectfully, you’re wrong. Allow me to list my favourites in no particular order as evidence:
He-Man and the Masters of The Universe
She-Ra: Princes of Power
Thundercats
Dungeons & Dragons
Transformers
M.A.S.K
The Mysterious Cities of Gold
The Amazing Spiderman
The Real Ghostbusters
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
Duck Tales
And yeah, occasionally even the Gummi Bears (for the awesome theme tune you understand?).
Not all of these series were made in America but, for the English speaking audience, they were all voiced by Americans hence, whenever we played at He-Man or Transformers or Turtles we all opted for American accents and ensured the action went down on the 'sidewalk' (pavement), or in the 'parking lot' (carpark).
As we matured our heroes became flesh and bone; I remember asking for a skateboard one birthday because of how cool Marty McFly looked letting a Ford Ranger pull him along on his in Back to The Future. And going out for full days on my bike in search of pirate treasure like The Goonies - two amongst scores of generation-defining films for Gen X kids and teens.
Before Britpop blew up I remember being blown away by Nirvana aged 11 years old, which opened the door to a lifelong love of Seattle Grunge, So-Cal Punk, DC Hardcore and Midwestern Emo. I mean, do you remember the first time you heard this banger?
California Dreaming
My first long haul travel experience, following a couple of failed 'lads' holidays in Magaluf and Ayia Napa, was to San Francisco en route to Los Angeles via Lake Tahoe, Yosemite and San Diego. I wanted to experience first hand the real life sets where my favourite films had been shot and my favourite bands had been formed and it was everything I could hope for and more. It was bigger and sunnier, scarier and louder, stranger and more familiar than I could ever have imagined. I met my hero and she didn’t disappoint, in fact I fell head over heels in love with her.
From that point forth all I wanted was to get back. In 1999 I began working in London’s media industry, not as a conscious stop on the road to Hollywood but, still, somewhere in the back of my mind I was always scheming for a return ticket.
When I went to work for a digital video startup in a Bloomsbury basement in 2005 they asked me what my goals were and I told them: I want to work in America. They told me that if I could find clients there I could go, all expenses paid, to see them so I worked 9am to 5pm pitching the UK market, went for a pint and a bite, then would come back to my desk emboldened by Dutch courage and work the phones from East Coast to West in the US between 6pm and 10pm each night.
I learned quite quickly that American women wanted me to be Prince William and the men wanted me to be Ray Winstone so I would class my accent up and down depending on who answered and eventually secured enough hot prospects to justify a trip stateside on my bosses' dime (another adopted Americanism).
Surfing USA
For four years from 2005 to 2009 I would travel to the continent every other month for a two-and-a-half week tour drawing a giant U for USA across the country as I huddled onto domestic flights from Boston down the East coast to New York, Washington DC and Dallas then back up the other side via San Diego, San Francisco, Portland and finally Seattle. These trips always included three weekends; the first in Boston or New York, the second in Dallas or San Diego, and the third always in Seattle. I would unfailingly fill those weekends with local gigs at local dives, huge hotdogs in vast cineplexes, and college girls with exotic names like Ashley, Amber, Brittany & Meghan (I guess I mainly went to fairly white places!).
Every time I arrived I was intoxicated by the positivity and sense of possibility, which spurred me on as a traveling salesman in a land that seems to actually respect the art of good salesmanship - quite the opposite of the rolled eyes and pursed lips I was used to back in Blighty!
Then, quite unexpectedly, in February 2007 I met the woman who was to become my wife, in a bar in Barcelona of all places. She was Chinese from Singapore. We dated long distance for two years, me still making my regular trips to America, but eventually one of us had to move and she, quite correctly, found London to be too depressing. My plan to open an office for my boss in the US soon became a plan to open an office for him in Singapore instead.
Now, don’t go blaming my wife! My new life was and is a dream. I live on a tropical island for goodness sake, in one of the safest and most prosperous countries on earth and yet, when I first arrived, my heart still ached for the wide open space of Springsteen's mythical USA so in May 2013 I packed my bags once more to meet my brother and his best friend, both musicians, in Atlanta for a road trip to New Orleans, Memphis and Nashville.
It was a spectacular trip but, I cannot deny, something had changed since my last visit four-years prior. Some of that optimism seemed to be missing; the poverty seemed more apparent. Or maybe I had simply been looking at it through rose tinted spectacles before, having come from grey London not sunny Singapore?
My last trip to the US came in September 2015. I visited a customer in San Francisco, then flew to a conference in Cleveland, taking in the Rock n' Roll Hall of Fame of course, and finally drove to New York and right into Manhattan (one of the scariest experience of my life!); the vibe shift was undeniable, the poverty overt. After over 35 years of obsession my American love affair ended, the flame burned out and right now, I'm not really bothered if I ever visit again. It seems such a violent, angry place these days, and it's spreading.
Thinking Of The USA
I live on the literal other side of the world to America in a completely different time zone and society and yet, somehow, I still have to hear everything that's going on there in the news and on the Internet. Nearly all the platforms are American-owned (including this one - natch!), and thus dominated by American voices exporting their rage to the rest of the world. I have attended countless conferences in Singapore and across Southeast Asia about issues that weren't issues here until American news and Internet platforms and corporations made them so, and when Trump won the first time the situation got so much worse.
From 2017 - 2021 I would wake up every morning to a barrage of news alert and reports from every app, channel, platform and station about Trump’s troubling overnight antics. It was a relief when Biden got in, not because I think he's better or worse but simply because he was quieter, he didn't dominate the global news cycle the way Trump did - I actually had room room in brain and my feeds for local stories and local issues. But, as we now know, it didn’t last.
Return of The Mack
Trump is back, risen from the dead by the MAGA faithful, more powerful and deranged than ever before. I'm not even blaming them, I honestly blame the divisiveness of the left everywhere who ditched class politics, which unites us, in a favour of identity politics, which divides is all into little self-interested cliques that fuel the culture wars from which the right make so much hay. As left-wing American comedian Neal Brennan says, tell a Republican you're a Republican and they'll welcome you with open arms but tell a liberal you're a liberal and they'll narrow their eyes and say, "we'll see". But that's a post for another time. Right now barely two months into Trump II I no longer idolize America, I pity her.
This Is America
The formerly united states of America, back in the 1980s and ‘90s, were an inspiration to me, all my friends and even my family (my sister did a degree in American Studies!). I’m not saying it was perfect but it seemed, at least to my child’s eyes, youthful, glamorous and, on the whole, good. Maybe the world was simpler then, the goodies and baddies easier to tell apart, and the communications infrastructure less pervasive - the news didn't live in your pocket. But America, and its gerontocracy, now reminds of Grandpa Simpson shouting at the clouds.
The scale of its problems are dumbfounding; the rest of the world looks on aghast at how it has allowed its own corporations to kill hundreds of thousands of Americans with opioids, how it fails time and again to do anything to stop children shooting other children with weapons of war, how it sides with a dictator that invaded an ally and how it recently voted with that dictator and the dictators of North Korea, Belarus and Hungary against all of its allies.
Maybe we expect too much of America, maybe I do, but watching it from this distance makes me incredibly sad. America, like most countries, is filled with good, honest, hard working humans on the left AND the right but the government that is supposed to protect them and the media that is supposed to inform them seems intent on dividing them and dragging the rest of us into the grand canyon of their despair, to what end I have no clue.
Good luck America, we miss you. Nx
P.S. Each segment heading of this post is a song; huge props and maybe even a prize to the first person who can name all five original artists 😉
To Do List
My recommendations for new things to read, watch, look at, listen to and do:
Just gonna leave this here in case it’s useful to any readers for no particular reason 😏 ‘The big idea: how do you get rid of a dictator?’
Idiosyncratic British actor Bill Nighy (‘Love, Actually’, ‘Sean of The Dead’, ‘Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy’), is launching a podcast and based on this anti-trailer I’m going to love it!
Bill Nighy is a British national treasure but here’s another cut from a very different cloth. Danny ‘The Geezer’ Dyer is the thinking man’s working man and he’s back in his fifth collaboration with British director Nick Love called ‘Marching Powder’. Watch the trailer then launch yourself down a rabbit hole of promo interviews to see the true voice of the people tell it like it is.
Right, that’ll do ya! Cheers, Nx
We've certainly taken a turn but it's by no means unique to the U.S.; the U.K., Canada, France and other Western outposts have also seen a similar shattering of spirit, the ungluing of social cohesion, loss of faith in tomorrow's promise and dearth of confidence in their own inherent goodness.
But beneath the wreckage are many individuals on a path back to their own light, who will be the wayshowers and help rebuild this rock brick by brick. The numbers of these people are growing, but you wouldn't necessarily see it because they don't engage in the toxicity of social media drama.
The ship will turn around.
You might be interested in reading An American Tragedy, by Theodore Dreiser. Sure, the book has some narrative faux pas, but he was on to something about what a troubled road America was on. And it was written 100 years ago….