Cultural stereotyping: a licence to sneer

(First published in the Manawatu Standard, the Nelson Mail and Stuff.co.nz on October 3.)

A fellow columnist – one whose work I usually enjoy – recently wrote: “Americans are not like us. They don’t get irony, for one thing.”

Whoa, I thought – let’s hold it right there. If I had a dollar for every time I’ve heard it said that Americans don’t understand irony, I could have retired by now.

The statement is usually made in relation to humour. Somehow, it has become accepted wisdom that American humour is irony-free whereas English humour is rich with it.

But hang on. Think of a comedy series such as M*A*S*H, which ran for 11 seasons and became one of the highest-rating TV shows in history.

M*A*S*H was drenched in irony. Hawkeye Pierce probably delivered more ironic lines than any other character in television history.

That’s not surprising, given that the series was created by Larry Gelbart. Gelbart was Jewish. Jewish humour oozes irony; that’s its signature. And Jewish writers and performers are the beating heart of American humour – think Mel Brooks, Roseanne Barr, Lenny Bruce, Judd Apatow, Jerry Seinfeld, Bette Midler, Woody Allen, Ben Stiller, George Burns and Joan Rivers, to mention a few.

Seinfeld (nine seasons) and The Simpsons (29 seasons)? All about irony. Most of the talent behind both shows was Jewish.

Join the dots. Jewish humour depends heavily on irony and much American humour is Jewish. Ergo, the argument that Americans don’t “get” irony just doesn’t wash. 

But it persists because it plays to a sense of cultural superiority. Americans are supposedly loud, brash, boorish and unsubtle.

Donald Trump fits this stereotype perfectly. One of the tragedies of his presidency is that he reinforces the prejudices of people who think all Americans are stupid. These prigs look at Trump and say: “See – there’s a typical American for you.”

It’s a theme that fuels countless dinner-party conversations in New Zealand. “Look at what Trump’s done now,” someone will say. “Oh God, those ghastly Yanks.” And off they go, sniggering at what a godforsaken country America is and pausing only for gulps of Central Otago pinot noir.

In my experience, such people usually have minimal experience, if any at all, of America. It’s a country they fly over to get to supposedly more sophisticated places like Britain, France and Italy – although sharing horror stories about the supposed ordeal of a stopover in LA is always good parlour-game material too.

The reason they don’t want to spend time in the United States – unless it’s in New York or San Francisco or a tiny handful of other American cities that the cultural priesthood deems cool – is that they have convinced themselves America has no redeeming virtues.

Anyway, why spoil their fun? As long as they remain ignorant of America, they give themselves licence to go on sniggering at Americans and congratulating themselves on their infinitely greater sophistication.

Another manifestation of anti-American priggishness, besides the “Americans don’t get irony” myth, is the prejudice often shown toward country music – again, usually by people who condemn it from a standpoint of ignorance.

Because some country music is crass (which can’t be denied), they dismiss it all as tawdry and mawkishly sentimental. Essentially it’s the same mistake made by people who assume Trump is representative of all Americans.

Where does this sense of cultural superiority come from? I suspect it’s basically a British thing.

The Brits never entirely forgave the Americans for breaking away and going it alone. But they console themselves that while America might now be infinitely wealthier and more powerful, the Mother Country is distinguished by its rich history, the refinement of its educated classes, its monarchy, its glorious imperial past and its … well, its sheer Britishness.

New Zealand, having drawn most of its cultural inspiration from Britain, seems to have inherited that sense of inherent British supremacy. You might say it’s in our genes.

I’m not blind to American failings. I cringe at American excess and brashness and I’m repelled by the religious and political extremes of American society.

But while these traits confront us daily in the media, they don’t represent the totality of American society. Spend time in the United States and you quickly realise that most Americans are not brash, loud, ignorant or extreme.

Try listening to America’s National Public Radio. NPR leans to the left politically, as public broadcasters invariably do, but it’s the flip side to the America of Donald Trump: rational, civilised, low-key, informed and articulate.

And I shouldn’t have to point out that America is the source of much of the popular culture and technology that New Zealanders enjoy: the music we listen to, the films and TV we watch, the clothing we wear, the books we read and the digital devices we depend on.

So let’s ease off on the conceited and hypocritical anti-Americanism that flourishes in some New Zealand circles. And while we’re about it, let’s bury the myth that Americans don’t “get” irony.

Spare us the sanctimonious hyperbole, Nancy

Leading US Democrat Nancy Pelosi says the Trump administration’s migrant family separation policy, now hastily rescinded, “leaves a dark stain on our nation”.

Well, perhaps it does. But against the broad sweep of history, it pales into insignificance against other stains on the American soul. American history is littered with episodes the nation would doubtless prefer to forget, most of them involving appalling mistreatment of vulnerable minorities.

There were massacres of Native Americans, of which Wounded Knee is the most infamous example. There was the Trail of Tears – the forced relocation of American Indian tribes from their ancestral homelands, which resulted in thousands of deaths from exposure, disease and starvation. There was slavery, and later the institutionalised oppression of the descendants of those slaves. There were mob lynchings of black Americans – too many to count, and often accompanied by acts of unimaginably sadistic cruelty. There was the Ku Klux Klan, whose brutal enforcement of white supremacy was often condoned and even encouraged by politicians. There was organised crime and corruption on a massive scale, its perpetrators secure in the knowledge that the people charged with enforcing the law could easily be bought off. In foreign affairs, the US government has repeatedly propped up repressive totalitarian regimes - another stain. And even on the battlefield there has been at least one act of unfathomable American savagery, the My Lai massacre.

America remains a fundamentally decent society, its people genuinely committed to doing the right thing. That’s apparent from the widespread revulsion at the forced separation of migrant children from their parents. But there’s something distasteful about Pelosi making political capital out of the migrant crisis and indulging in sanctimonious, hand-wringing hyperbole by calling it a dark stain on the nation, when she must know that far, far worse things have been done in and by America – many of them, moreover, perpetrated by Democratic Party governments.

Trump gives us a new reason to parade anti-Americanism as virtue

(First published in The Dominion Post, April 6.)

This column comes to you from America. Yes, that’s right, the America of Donald Trump.

The current occupant of the Oval Office has given us a whole lot of new reasons to make condescending jokes about America and Americans. But the America of Donald Trump is also the America of Abraham Lincoln, Emily Dickinson, Franklin D and Eleanor Roosevelt, John Steinbeck, Benjamin Franklin, Charlie Chaplin, Martin Luther King Jr, Francis Ford Coppola, Cesar Chavez, Ernest Hemingway, Rosa Parks, Bob Dylan, Frank Capra, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mark Twain, Meryl Streep, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Ella Fitzgerald, Bruce Springsteen …

I could go on, but you get my drift.

New Zealanders are conflicted about America. It sometimes seems as if the people mentioned above, who are widely admired and even worshipped, come from a different country than the America we sneer at over dinner tables.

But of course they don’t. America comes as a package deal, the good and the bad all bundled up together.

It’s fashionable to regard the US as a country to be avoided. When I told a colleague that my wife and I were going to California for a few weeks, she mentioned that she had once lived in San Francisco for a year and loved it.

She thought Californians were a unique breed of Americans, “in a good way”.

Perhaps I misunderstood her, but she seemed to be saying that Californians were OK but other Americans might not be.

This would not be an uncommon view in New Zealand. Generally, among sophisticated metropolitan types, America is considered, at best, a place to fly over on the way to somewhere more civilised.

Even then, many people try to avoid it. Conventional wisdom has it that LA Airport is the worst airport in the world, although I’ve had far worse experiences in Heathrow and Sydney.

A few American cities are considered hip – San Francisco, for example. Portland, Austin and New York are considered fashionable too. It’s permissible in sophisticated circles to visit these places and say you love them.

Stockton, Amarillo, Duluth or Flint? Not so much. But while it might suit people to divide America into the good bits and the bad, it’s all the same country from sea to shining sea.

Where do we get this aversion to America? I can offer a few suggestions.

The Americans have done some bad things. They treated Native Americans appallingly, dispossessing them of their lands and putting them on reservations where they almost lost the will to live. 

America has propped up corrupt, totalitarian regimes from Asia to Latin America and was despised for what it did in the Vietnam War (although we should remember that it was the American people who eventually demanded US forces withdraw from that conflict).

America is also the home of the Ku Klux Klan – a country where until the 1930s, a black man could be hanged if a white woman didn’t like the way he looked at her.

It has a deeply flawed justice system and a gratuitously harsh and vindictive way of dealing with people accused of crime. Many states still administer capital punishment, often by grotesquely cruel methods, long after the civilised world abandoned it.

In addition to all this, distaste for American ways is almost embedded in our cultural DNA. New Zealanders inherited British reserve and are uncomfortable with America’s fervent, hand-on-heart nationalism. We balk at American exuberance and exhibitionism.

We were grateful to them when they were here during World War II but we also resented them. American soldiers had more money than our boys and wore much smarter uniforms. Our women couldn’t help but be attracted to them, which touched a very vulnerable spot in the national psyche.

But this same America is the source of much of our popular culture. The same people who despise Trump will queue for tickets to a Springsteen concert, use an iPhone, communicate with their friends using Facebook, wear Levi jeans, read the New Yorker, watch the latest Martin Scorsese film and admire the wit of American late-night TV talk shows.

And the Americans I’ve met over the past six weeks, as on past visits, have been unfailingly warm, friendly, open and almost embarrassingly courteous. They strike me as fundamentally decent people who want to do the right thing.

Can you admire America and despise it at the same time? Maybe, at a stretch, but I think we should admit that Trump has given us an excuse to parade a lot of blind anti-American bigotry as if it were some sort of virtue.

My brush with the music publishing industry

(First published in the Manawatu Standard and Nelson Mail, July 13.)

It would probably come as a surprise to most people to discover that the song Happy Birthday was not, until recently, public property – not in the United States, at least.

As well as being reputedly the most recognised song in the English language, Happy Birthday is claimed to be one of the most profitable songs ever written, with estimated earnings of $US50 million. Not bad for a simple tune whose composers appear to have made no money from it.

According to Wikipedia, the tune was composed by American sisters Patty and Mildred Hill in 1893, but they never claimed copyright. The Happy Birthday lyrics first appeared in print in 1912 and copyright was eventually registered in 1935 by someone unconnected with the Hill sisters.

Since then the music publishing firm that owns the rights – initially an outfit called the Summy Company, but since 1988 Warner/Chappell Music – has clipped the ticket every time Happy Birthday was performed in public.

Not a bad little earner, by any measurement. The music publishers just sat back and watched the money come in.

The only effort expended would have been in enforcing their rights. You can bet they would have come down heavily on anyone who dared perform Happy Birthday in public without coughing up. Music publishers have a justified reputation for defending their interests ferociously.

But I’m pleased to report this racket has finally been brought to a halt. The makers of a TV documentary about the song sued Warner/Chappell for falsely claiming copyright and won the case.  

I felt a slight tingle of pleasure when I read about the resolution of the Happy Birthday dispute, because I recently had my own little brush with the music publishing industry.

My book A Road Tour of American Song Titles: From Mendocino to Memphis is being launched this week. In it, I visit 24 American towns and cities that are named in the titles of hit songs (By the Time I Get to Phoenix, Is This the Way to Amarillo, Twenty Four Hours from Tulsa – you get the drift).

I write about the towns and about the songs they inspired – who wrote them, who sang them, how well they did in the charts, that sort of thing.

It was always my intention to quote some of the song lyrics. Ha! More fool me. I didn’t allow for the hard-nosed nature of the music copyright business and I certainly didn’t allow for the fees demanded by music publishers.

The companies I dealt with were courteous and obliging, but it soon became clear that I was navigating a minefield.

In some cases, ownership of the songs was disputed and I was warned I would risk dire consequences by quoting as much as a line of the lyrics. In other instances, ownership was shared between multiple companies claiming varying percentages of any royalties, and the process of obtaining permission seemed hellishly complicated.

Even where ownership of songs was straightforward and permission from the publishers would have been forthcoming, their exorbitant royalty demands ruled out quoting any of the lyrics. This applied even if I wanted to quote only a few words.

And the more books I sold, the more money I would have to pay. The music publishers would probably have made more from the book than I would.

Yes, I could have risked quoting the lyrics anyway, but song publishers have a history of mercilessly pursuing transgressors.  

The irony is that anyone can go online and find the lyrics of these songs within seconds without paying a cent. But the moment you put them in a book you become an identifiable target. If you haven’t paid up, the publishers are likely to come after you.

That my book is a celebration of the songs, and might even revive interest in some that were in danger of being forgotten (like Saginaw, Michigan), didn’t seem to count in my favour. It’s all about the “ka-ching!” of the cash register.

In the end I agreed to pay for the right to quote one line from one song – a Creedence Clearwater Revival song about the city of Lodi, California. The chapter about Lodi hinged on that one line and would have made no sense without it.

For the rest, I suggested to my readers that they look the lyrics up online. In any case, many of the songs will be familiar to most pop fans of a certain age.  

Even with Lodi, there was more to it than simply paying up. The music publishers insisted on vetting the relevant pages of my manuscript and demanded three free copies of the book which I imagine will never be opened, still less read.

The whole experience left me with a sour taste. It doesn't seem right that wonderful, timeless songs should end up in the hands of grasping corporates that contribute nothing to the creative process and measure the worth of everything in terms of the dollars generated. But there it is.

Trump v. Clinton: a democratic malfunction?

(First published in The Dominion Post, April 29.)

You have to say this much for Donald Trump: no aspirant for political office in America has created so much interest in distant New Zealand.

In fact you’d probably have to go as far back as 1964, to the contest between Lyndon Johnson and his arch-conservative Republican rival Barry Goldwater, to find a US presidential election that aroused more interest worldwide. Trump can take credit for that, if nothing else.

The difference with 1964, of course, is that he isn’t even the candidate yet. The Republican convention that will choose the party’s nominee is still three months away, but already Trump is the subject of conversation around the water coolers (or would be, if our workplaces had water coolers).

New Zealanders have watched the rise and rise of Trump with fascinated loathing and horrified disbelief. Distaste for him cuts across the usual political boundaries.

A recent UMR poll found that 82 per cent of National Party voters would back Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton over Trump. Even if it came down to a choice between Trump and Clinton’s “socialist” rival Bernie Sanders, National voters would support Sanders by a margin of 76 to 13 per cent.

New Zealanders can’t understand why so many Americans seem to love an uncouth sideshow barker. It tends to reinforce the common perception that all Americans are crass and ignorant. But America wouldn’t be the world’s strongest economic power, and the pacesetter in every field from technology through to art and entertainment, if it were populated by idiots.

We tend to forget that voting in the presidential primaries involves a relatively small number of people, and that Trump’s backing comes from a disillusioned faction within that minority. Far more Americans dislike him than like him.

A better picture of his standing among Americans generally is provided by an NBC-WSJ poll earlier this month that showed only 24 per cent of respondents gave him a positive rating compared with 65 per cent who saw him in a negative light.

So Americans don’t want Trump. They don’t want Clinton either, judging by the same poll which gave her a 56 per cent negative rating. Only 32 per cent liked her.

That leaves us with a puzzling question: how can a country so rich in human capital deliver such a dispiriting set of candidates for the most powerful office in the world?

You have to wonder whether we’re witnessing a failure of democracy. It’s not working the way it’s supposed to.

Trump and Clinton are polar opposites politically, but in their own way, each represents a democratic malfunction.

Clinton is the consummate political insider – a cold, calculating, slippery, artful schmoozer. Polls show that Americans don’t trust her, and neither should they. She can barely shut her closet door for all the skeletons rattling around inside.

Trump, on the other hand, makes a virtue of being an outsider. He feeds off a deep and widespread sense of alienation.

By posing as a man of the people, which he demonstrably is not, he has harnessed resentment of the political elite. Unfortunately, not being part of the political establishment doesn’t, by itself, give him presidential credentials.

And what of the other contenders? There’s Sanders, whose pitiful ignorance on crucial policy issues was shockingly exposed in a recent newspaper interview. And then there’s Ted Cruz, a repugnant Texan fundamentalist who manages, against the odds, to be even less attractive than Trump.

How has it come to this? How could American voters be faced with a choice between candidates so few of them want?

And what happened to the legacy of Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and John F Kennedy? All articulated noble visions for their country, even if their personal lives – especially in the case of the alley-cat JFK – didn’t always bear close scrutiny. But we’ve heard little in this presidential campaign that has been either noble or visionary.

Democracy seems to be on its knees in Australia, too, where the brazenly opportunistic Malcolm Turnbull seized power last year from a wounded Tony Abbott and is now floundering in the polls himself, raising the prospect of yet more political convulsions in a country that’s starting to make Italy look like a model of stability.

There are common factors here. Democracy, supposedly the property of the people, has been hijacked. Power now resides with elites, factions, spin merchants, wealthy donors, lobbyists and politically partisan media outlets.

It hasn’t happened here, at least not on the same scale – but that’s not to say it won’t.

A few thoughts about America

(First published in The Dominion Post, November 27.)

My wife and I just returned from a month in the United States.  These are some of my observations:

■ New York has a reputation as a pushy, every-man-for-himself sort of place. In fact it’s anything but. We lost count of the number of New Yorkers – young and old, male and female, black and white – who noticed us peering at maps and offered assistance. If anything distinguishes Americans from New Zealanders, it’s their readiness to engage with strangers. New Zealanders might have the same impulse to help, but our British reserve holds us back.

■ There can be few more magnificent sights than the Manhattan skyline, viewed from Brooklyn Heights on a still, clear autumn evening. But Brooklyn “Heights”? Come on. It’s just high enough to see over the East River, no more.

■ I can understand, at a stretch, why American switches are upside-down. The rationale is that it’s harder to turn things on by accident. But can there be any plausible explanation as to why American plumbing is so primitive and downright contrary?

■ Americans have an extraordinary tolerance of noise. They talk loudly, they shout a lot (in a friendly way) and they have an ongoing love affair with noisy V8s and those potato-potato-potato Harley-Davidsons. In the Californian town where our son lives, each new day is announced by a symphony of rumbling V8s as people head to work. Manhattan must be one of the noisiest places on earth; those sirens you hear constantly in TV drama series are not some scriptwriter’s invention – they really are part of the city’s soundtrack.

■ You can tell which part of the US you’re in by the vehicles on the roads. In the south and west, the pickup truck is ubiquitous; the Ford F150 has been the best-selling vehicle in the US for 32 years. But you’d be hard-pressed to see any F150s in the cities of northeast, where bikes are more popular these days than Detroit iron.

■ In Washington we stayed in the charming, historic neighbourhood of Georgetown. Henry Kissinger lives here, as did Jackie Kennedy after she was widowed. It’s said that Kissinger once went out to buy some household items and couldn’t find his way home again. When a cop asked him how he could not know where he lived, Kissinger explained that normally his driver took him home. Even if not true, it’s a nice story.

■ Walking through the grounds of Harvard University, I heard a man mention the word “quantum” in conversation as he passed. That’s one stereotype obligingly confirmed.

■ Sometimes the serendipitous discoveries are the most enjoyable. So it was with New York’s Old Town Bar, which we stumbled on in East 18^th Street. It gives the impression of being little changed since it opened in 1892, and I wondered whether some of our fellow drinkers were original fixtures too.

■ American food is a problem. It’s not that it’s uniformly awful – far from it. There’s just far too much of it. We all hear about American obesity, but considering the size of the meals served, the marvel is that they’re not even fatter. The other issue is variety, or lack of it. Americans seem to exist on a diet of burgers, chicken, pizza and fries. Oh, and copious quantities of cheese with everything. We have a far wider choice of cuisine here.

■ Best meal? No contest. At Mario Batali’s Eataly in New York (think Petone’s La Bella Italia, then multiply by10) I had a simple lunch of ravioli stuffed with spinach and ricotta and served with a lemon sauce and pistachios. Superb, and not expensive.

■ On the other hand, you can fall in love with the idea of something and find the reality doesn’t quite match. That was the case with the famous Oyster Bar at Grand Central Station, through whose closed doors we had gazed longingly on a previous visit to New York. Our long-anticipated lunch there was just so-so.

■ Tipping can be a tricky issue when you’re not accustomed to it. Do you tip regardless of how good the service is? If so, how much? I generally tipped about 15 per cent, but I noticed that not all Americans automatically tip, and I was reassured to hear a Boston radio host complaining that he was never entirely sure whether to tip either.

■ Viewed from a passing train, some of the once-great cities of the northeast – Philadelphia, Baltimore, Wilmington – look wretched and moribund. Only the gleaming high-rises of the CBDs give any hint of prosperity. Elsewhere, though, America gives the impression of being one giant construction site. And you can’t repress that natural American optimism, even where buildings are boarded up. It seems to be in their DNA.

 

We don't know how lucky we are

(First published in the Nelson Mail and Manawatu Standard, November 18.)

I spent much of the weekend mowing lawns and raking up leaves and other garden debris that had accumulated while my wife and I were on holiday in the United States. The only thing disturbing the peace – that is, once I’d turned the mower off – was the barking of a neighbour’s dog.

Meanwhile, a world away, the residents of Paris were locked indoors, reluctant to venture outside for fear of another terrorist attack. There could hardly have been a more striking reminder of how blessed we are, living in this remote and serene corner of the globe.

We can only hope that people who migrate to New Zealand value and respect the fact that ours is a liberal, humane, inclusive and relatively safe society, and that they commit themselves to helping keep it that way. After all, it’s presumably a key reason why they come here.

Not that we can afford to be smug. We are part of a connected, global society and it’s impossible not to share the anguish and anxiety that the people of France are going through right now. Neither can we disconnect ourselves from international efforts to confront and conquer the menace that is Islamist terrorism.

The Islamic State is a uniquely challenging adversary, especially given that its followers appear to have no fear of death – in fact, embrace the prospect of martyrdom. But the fight against them is our fight too.

The Islamist assault on liberal democratic values – freedom of speech, freedom of religion, women’s equality, the rights of minorities generally – is a threat to us all. We can’t pretend it’s not our concern simply because it hasn’t (yet) directly affected us.

Recent events have sharpened my awareness of other things besides our comfortable isolation in the southwest Pacific. Four weeks in the US reminded me once again how insignificant we are in world affairs.

I heard New Zealand mentioned once in the news media. That was when I was listening to National Public Radio late at night and heard a BBC news bulletin that referred briefly to the pending Rugby World Cup final between the All Blacks and Australia.

Small reminders of home intruded on us in unexpected, random ways. In Boston’s North Side, my wife spied a delivery man wheeling a trolley laden with Yealands Estate wine from Marlborough.

In the same city, I heard Weather With You by Crowded House being played as the background to a radio weather forecast. And twice in public places we heard Lorde’s hit song Royals – once in a Subway outlet in the small town of Tejon, in California’s Central Valley, and again in the same state when we were eating halibut and chips on the deck of a seaside café at Morro Bay (a charming spot, by the way).

People have asked me whether the RWC got any coverage in the US media. Fat chance. Rugby may be the fastest-growing sport in America (albeit off a very low base), but the media were interested only in American football, basketball and baseball.

Even universal sports such as golf and tennis rated barely a mention amid the swathes of coverage devoted to domestic sport, including college (i.e. university) football, which has a huge following. In most of the bars we drank in, massive TV screens were permanently tuned to sports channels showing the three popular codes.

(I love American bars all the same. I like the way people sit at the bar and strike up conversations with their neighbours. And American beer is superb. Thanks to the craft beer revolution, the days when the only options were ghastly mass-produced beers such as Miller and Budweiser – the beers they serve in Hell – are now but a grim memory.)

Americans are equally parochial when it comes to general news. Only the most sensational international events, such as the explosion that brought down a Russian airliner over Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, elbowed their way into news bulletins. Mostly it was wall-to-wall coverage of the race for the presidency, with endless commentary and analysis of the main contenders.

I was reminded of a comment I heard years ago from a New Zealand educationist who had lived for several years in the US. Many Americans had no interest in the outside world, he said, because America was their world. 

This view is supported by passport statistics. As recently as 1989, only 3 per cent of Americans held passports, although the number has increased greatly over the past 20 years (it’s now closer to 40 per cent, compared to roughly 75 per cent for New Zealanders).

New Zealanders are certainly far more aware than Americans of the outside world. We have to be, because we’re at its mercy in a way bigger, more powerful countries are not.

Our isolation makes us compulsive travellers, hungry for experience of other places. Yet our concerns are often just as parochial as those of the Americans.

After four weeks away, my wife and I returned to a country that was still agonising over the same issue that dominated political debate when we left: the incarceration of people who are technically New Zealand citizens (although they regard themselves as Australians, in many cases having been brought up there) in what Peter Dunne rightly labelled concentration camps.

Australia’s treatment of New Zealand detainees is a disgrace, to be sure, and provides further proof that the supposed Anzac bond is a fallacy. It also demonstrates that by comparison with ours, Australia's penal and judicial processes are harsh and vindictive. They learned well from their former colonial masters.

But to put things in perspective, on a scale of one to 10 Australia's treatment of detainees is a two, or at most a three, compared with what the French were subjected to last weekend.

The American paradox

(First published in the Nelson Mail and Manawatu Standard, July 16.)

I have to smile when I think of my one visit to New York City.

My wife and I arrived late on a Saturday night in October 2002. I remember it well because on the drive in from Kennedy Airport our cab driver told us of the terrorist bombings that had just killed 202 people in Bali.

But that’s incidental. What amuses me is the recollection of how apprehensive I was – quite unnecessarily, as it turned out – when we ventured out into the city the following morning.

It being early on a Sunday, the streets around our Greenwich Village hotel were virtually deserted. I’m not a timid person but I admit feeling uneasy as we descended the steps of the nearest subway station to catch a train to Battery Park, from where we intended to take a ferry to the Statue of Liberty.

I’m not sure what I expected, but for the previous few decades I had been conditioned by Hollywood movies to believe that New York – and the subway especially – was infested with armed muggers and crazed drug addicts.

Of course we didn’t encounter any; not even a beggar, though they’re usually everywhere in urban America. As the day progressed and we roamed the city, we gradually relaxed. There were no drive-by shootings, no car chases, no police with loudhailers telling holed-up serial killers to come out with their hands up. I was almost disappointed.

By the time we left New York several days later, we felt entirely at ease moving around. And contrary to legend, we found New Yorkers friendly and approachable.

Since then we’ve been back to America several times. We’ve driven through 20 states, including some that most Americans admit they wouldn’t dream of visiting. We’ve stayed in big, glamorous cities and forgotten towns in the middle in nowhere. And we’ve grown to like the country so much that we almost suffer withdrawal symptoms if we stay away too long.

Almost everywhere we’ve been, people have been gracious, welcoming and interested in where we come from and what we’re doing. And although we’ve seen countless movies about terrible things happening to people on lonely American highways or in sinister small towns, at no time have we felt remotely at risk.

All this makes it doubly hard to comprehend the hideous events that regularly cause America to convulse.

Hardly a week seems to pass without a report of someone running amok with a gun. Some of these incidents happen in incongruously pleasant settings, such as the affluent, laid-back Californian town of Isla Vista, where young Elliott Rodger recently recorded a chilling video before coolly killing six people because he was resentful at not being able to get a girlfriend.

More recently there was an even more quintessentially American killing spree in Las Vegas by a strange young couple who shot dead two policemen before turning their guns on themselves. It seemed they had a grudge against the government – a recurring theme in such crimes.

How does one account for such bizarre acts? It’s not enough to say that a country of more than 300 million people is bound to produce extremes of good and bad. While that’s certainly true, there’s more to it than that.

Some of America’s weirdness is built in; hard-wired, as it were. There seems to be a rogue gene in the country’s DNA that periodically manifests itself in outbursts of homicidal craziness on a scale that New Zealanders can’t comprehend.

Among a tiny, cranky minority of Americans there’s a seething, irrational, inarticulate rage that, when combined with the availability of guns, can have lethal consequences. Religious fundamentalism, right-wing extremism, anti-government paranoia and the constitutional right to bear firearms (which some Americans regard as if it were ordained by God) make a toxic brew.

All countries have their own weirdness, some more than others. Japan and India impress me as being wonderfully weird, albeit in different ways. But on the international weirdness scale, it’s hard to imagine any country topping the USA.

It’s hard to explain, for example, how a country that’s so overtly Christian – a country where the biggest and most opulent buildings in many poor rural towns are churches – can also be the Western world’s most enthusiastic executioner. It doesn’t seem to occur to many Americans that putting people to death, often in the most cold-blooded way, might be contrary to God’s will.

But there remains that perplexing paradox. On the one hand there’s the friendly, charming America that my wife and I experience in our travels; on the other, a society where grotesquely strange and evil things happen.

Winston Churchill famously described Russia as a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. I wonder what he made of America, which seems a far more bewildering mess of contradictions.

It's the same language, only different

(First published in the Nelson Mail and Manawatu Standard, November 6.)

George Bernard Shaw famously described England and America as two countries divided by a common language. It’s only when you spend time in the United States that you realise how true that is.

It soon becomes apparent that while Americans use the same words as we do, they can mean quite different things.

I have to remind myself of this every time I go there. It’s a bit like having to remember that in America, the driver’s seat is on the left-hand side of the car (my wife always spends the first few days going to the wrong side, out of habit) and to look left, rather than right, when you’re about to cross the street.

New Zealanders are brought up to speak the version of English used by the British. And although that’s gradually changing as we succumb to the increasing American influence on popular culture worldwide, linguistic differences can still create misunderstandings – or at the very least, provoke blank looks.

Take a simple word like “holiday”. We talk about going away for the holidays or enjoying a holiday – meaning a few days or longer – at the beach. But to an American, “holiday” refers to a specific day of celebration such as July 4 or Thanksgiving. What we call a holiday, they call a vacation. When you think about it, it’s a sensible distinction.

Ask an American if you can borrow a torch, and they’ll wonder why on earth you’d want to wrap flammable cloth around a piece of wood and set it alight. To them, a torch is something associated with Ku Klux Klan rallies or the Statue of Liberty. What you want is actually a flashlight.

Cars are a prime source of confusion. Ask for directions to a petrol station and you’ll cause bewilderment. In America, you fill up with gas.

You don’t put things in the boot; you put them in the trunk. And the engine isn’t under the bonnet; it’s under the hood (which is in front of the windshield). 

When I tell American friends that we own a caravan, I have to remember to call it a travel trailer. To them, the word caravan is likely to conjure up romantic images of a camel train wending its way through the desert toward Samarkand.

Our six-month old American granddaughter doesn’t wear nappies; she wears diapers. Her parents keep their clothes in a closet, not a wardrobe, and they get their water from a faucet. And so on.

Of course, none of these differences should be too problematical. But things can get tricky, for those unfamiliar with the vagaries of American English, when you come to order a meal in a restaurant.

Here it pays to understand the nomenclature.  First, don’t request tomato sauce to go with your chips. In America, tomato sauce is what spaghetti and other pasta dishes are served with. We’d call it pasta sauce. (In Mafia movies, there’s always a huge pot of it cooking on the stove.) What you want is ketchup – a word that can be traced back to the Chinese ke-tsiap, which was a spicy condiment made from pickled fish.

Chips, meanwhile, are always referred to in America as fries, or French fries. Order chips and you’ll be given what we call chippies, or what the English call crisps.

And don’t make the mistake of asking for a white coffee, because Americans don’t recognise the term; ask for coffee with milk. (And don’t confuse them by trying to order a flat white or a latte, because most of America hasn’t succumbed to coffee culture as we know it. In a Starbucks café they might know what you’re talking about, but even there you’d be taking a punt.)

Most perplexing of all is the American habit of referring to the main course as the entrée, which can create real confusion for people unfamiliar with American menus.

Americans proceed from appetiser to entrée to dessert. It doesn’t make sense, but there it is; it’s their country, and their right to use whatever terminology they choose.

At worst, these linguistic differences might cause mild embarrassment or temporary puzzlement, on one or both sides. Fortunately, scope for a potentially serious social faux-pas is limited – but it does exist.

An example is the verb to “hook up”, which in New Zealand is usually regarded as meaning to make contact with someone or spend time with them. In America the phrase has an overtly sexual connotation – so an innocent suggestion that you hook up with someone could lead to quite the wrong impression.

Conversely, “fanny” is a word that causes no offence in America. Americans talk about patting someone on the fanny, which would have an altogether different meaning here.

What Americans call the fanny we call the bum, which simply compounds the confusion. In America a bum is a hobo or a no-hoper; the good old Kiwi phrase “a kick in the bum” would make no sense at all.

So Shaw was right. Nominally we speak the same language, but there are enough points of difference to create plenty of scope for misunderstanding and misinterpretation.

And that’s without even beginning to consider the additional complications posed by accents, which range from the lazy Southern drawl of Louisiana and Texas to the “Valley Girl” babble that originated in the Los Angeles suburbs but now seems common among young American women everywhere. Factor these into the mix and you have a formula for mutual incomprehension.

At a service station (sorry, gas station) in a small Mississippi Delta town a couple of years ago, I asked for directions to a local point of interest. The woman serving me said she’d never heard of the place, but an elderly black gentleman sitting nearby pricked up his ears. He knew where it was and went to some lengths to explain exactly how I could find my way there.

I was grateful for his help and listened intently, nodding as he carefully gave me the directions. I didn’t have the heart to tell him I didn’t understand a single word.

A visit to John Steinbeck country

(First published in The Dominion Post, September 6.)

A FEW DAYS ago I visited the John Steinbeck museum in the town of Salinas, California. The Grapes of Wrath was the first “serious” novel I read. I would have been 12 or 13 at the time, and Steinbeck’s heartbreaking tale of the hardship and injustice endured by refugees from the Oklahoma Dustbowl during the Great Depression had a powerful impact on me.

The National Steinbeck Center, to give it its proper name, is a fittingly low-key tribute to a writer who would have recoiled in disgust from today’s celebrity culture. A shy man, Steinbeck was horrified at being recognised in the streets of San Francisco after the success of his 1935 novel Tortilla Flat. It probably wouldn’t haven’t have bothered him in the slightest that he has escaped the cult-like attention lavished on his contemporaries F Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway.

A sense of place is central to much of Steinbeck’s writing. What was previously Ocean View Avenue in the charming old fishing port of Monterey is still recogniseable as the setting for Cannery Row, while the Mexican labourers toiling in the fields of the Salinas Valley in the late summer heat probably look much as they did when Steinbeck wrote Of Mice and Men.

Walking around Salinas, you get the sense that not much has changed since Steinbeck grew up there. It’s still unmistakeably an agricultural town – a Californian Masterton, if you like – but the main street has a decidedly moribund look. You get the feeling that, like many once-busy rural towns in America, its fate was sealed when it was bypassed by the freeways that began springing up in the 1950s.

One of the places Steinbeck would still recognise is Sang’s Cafe, just a couple of doors from the National Steinbeck Center. It looks pretty much as it would have when Steinbeck ate there.

Even the menu has a nostalgic look. Anyone for chicken sausage scramble ($7.95)?

* * *

IF AMERICA has a single defining characteristic, it’s noise. Americans find an infinite variety of ways to create noise and seem to have developed a remarkable tolerance toward it.

Much of the aural pollution is of automotive origins, due to their inexplicable attachment to rowdy V8s and Harley-Davidsons.

In New Zealand I wake to the sound of birds. But in the Californian town where my wife and I have been staying with our son and daughter-in-law, dawn is announced by the rumble of V8s as the neighbours fire up their pickup trucks and head off to work.

The Ford F150 pickup, in particular, is ubiquitous. It has been produced continuously since 1948, was the best-selling vehicle in the US for several decades and is rivalled only by the Toyota Corolla for total sales worldwide.

America has long since grown out of its love affair with the grotesquely large and ostentatious cars that Detroit used to build. Generally speaking, the cars you see on US roads now are not so different in size and appearance from those in New Zealand.

But the fondness for pickup trucks persists, especially away from the big cities. Every major car company produces its own equivalent of the F150 – even Japanese manufacturers such as Toyota and Nissan, which have cashed in by making their own V8-powered F150 lookalikes, just for the US market.

Then there’s that other uniquely American creation, the Harley: the only motorbike in the world that assaults the aural senses even when it’s merely idling. (Incidentally, someone has analysed the lazy throb of an idling Harley and decided it most sounds like the words “potato potato potato.”)

I suspect that exhibitionism is the key to the Harley’s popularity. It’s a “look at me” bike – or perhaps I should say a “listen to me” bike, since it insists on being noticed simply by virtue of the appalling din it creates.

* * *

OBSERVE any group of Americans over the age of, say, 50 and you can’t help but notice that a significant number appear to have difficulty walking. The degree of lameness and infirmity among older Americans is striking.

Doubtless this is partly due to the fact that many carry excess weight. Their hips, knees and ankles have failed under the strain.

But there’s another factor. You don’t have to be Marcus Welby MD to deduce that their limbs have seized up through lack of use.

America is such a car-focused society that it has almost forgotten how to walk. You can do virtually anything from the seat of your car, from banking to picking up your prescriptions from the pharmacy.

Try pushing a stroller to the local supermarket and you quickly realise that pedestrians are an afterthought. This is not something New Zealand wants to emulate.