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A Foot Outside My Door

Traveling through Europe for the first time recently gave me a chance to get a new perspective on the world. I suppose that's what travel is for, but behind every great cliché there is a measure of both truth and untruth. I was afraid that my journey through Europe would leave me unchanged, that the world was really no different from one place to another or that if it was I would be too dense to sense the nuances.

I spent nearly two weeks in England, with a short detour to Wales and four days in France. England enabled me to read about the horrible foibles of my own country in my own language from the perspective of another country. Newspapers in Britain are much more well informed than newspapers in the US, but maybe that's because they don't all subscribe to the same AP news service but actually use (gasp) writers. The second most interesting thing about the "foreign" press is that, outside our borders, we are not nearly the super power we think we are. The 800 pound gorilla has lost a little weight, it seems.

People in England like to collect trivia about celebrities. I mean, this was a universal theme. Every Brit I talked to eventually got around to asking me if I knew some latest detail about this or that obscure American or British crossover star that they had some connection to by some sixth degree of separation. Sadly, I didn't know a one. Americans don't know nearly as much about their TV and movie personalities as the English apparently do.

I have a theory about this. People need a certain amount of psychological space, of territory to have mastery over, much as we may not realise it. Some people have large houses and large yards. Some people collect old cars or buy large boats. In American cities, like New York, where it isn't possible to own a large apartment or piece of land, establish psychological space by collecting things - baseball cards, coins, comic books, music - that represent a whole world to them, but can be stored in a tight space. Well, the cost of living in England is about 40% higher than it is even in New York, so people don't have a lot of disposable income to spend on collectable items - so they collect people. Or more specifically become experts at collecting trivia about people. It's a great device - their collections are ultimately very portable, and can be trotted out and shared at a moment's notice. Like baseball cards, trivia collectors can trade trivia - only the great thing is that it doesn't cost anything and they don't lose anything when they trade one juicy bit of gossip for another. Except for the money spent on tabloids, it's an almost expense free hobby.

The second thing I noticed about the British, for this was as true of the Welsh I met as it was of the English, is that they are not nearly so reserved as their reputation implies. Everywhere I went, people were warm and friendly and happy to talk to me about just about anything I wanted to talk about - the European Common Market, the American War in Afghanistan, The Royal Shakespeare Theater Company, -- and a few things I didn't want to talk about, like The "Americanisation" of English Society (really, these guys are far more different from us than they are like us - so I didn't see it. I mean, these people actually have health care.)

One of the things that is different about English people is that everybody calls you love, lovely, or lovey. That's really sweet. Another difference is that if England has a homeless population, it is so much lower than America's, that it was invisible. I gave money to one beggar and two buskers while I was in London. Does London hide it's homeless? Or do they take care of them?

The food is not so terrible as I was led to believe, just simple. Especially if you like fish or Indian food.

The traffic system baffles the mind. It's based on these little circular things that are the motor vehicle equivalent of merry-go-rounds. Round you go, until you jump off at the right moment. My hostess kept offering to let me drive. I'd sooner drive a tanker full of oil through the San Juan Islands.

Nobody bags your groceries. (I don't know what they do in Ireland, but in America, they offer to walk you and your groceries to your car.) In fact, in England, people don't really wait on you at all. Now this is a massive cultural difference between the US and the urban areas around London, at least. In the JFK airport, the first thing I noticed was that everybody was in a hurry, irritated, and upset about something. There were also guys standing around with machine guns patting everybody down for weapons, so it's not much wonder people were grumpy - but the airline folks behind the counter were almost uniformly heroic in their attempts to kindly, courteously and genuinely help these grumpy, surly customers on their way. In fact, I bought my husband a book about the European historical perspective on architecture, and in one of the chapters, one of the traveling architects marvelled at the level of service he got uniformly in American hotels - in the 1920's.

In our experience in England, the folks behind the counter could really barely be bothered to ring up our sales, let alone help us find what were trying to purchase. Well, there was one nice pharmacist who distinguished himself by being less surly than the person that preceded him - from whom we would not buy anything.

Anyway, it must be a cultural thing. It's as though, at a low wage job they have showed up, but by god - they don't have to like it. Mind you, Americans who work in the service industry endure a lot of stress, but they are expected to smile while they do it.

And it's hard not to notice that we work a lot. Maybe I was talking to the upper end, but all the English people I spoke to got five weeks of holiday per year. Americans get one to two weeks max - unless they're spending part of the year unemployed, which is a whole other problem. And I didn't see a lot of people doubling up, working two jobs or working small businesses. It was relaxing to see people needing less to make it through their day to day existence. Of course, decent public transportation, schools, and medical care will do that to a person.

I saw school boys drawing pictures at Westminster Abbey - and they were really good pictures. I met a man who taught stained glass in a public (state) school !! We barely have art programs in American schools. I couldn't imagine a curriculum that included stained glass. Oh, and the English tourist books say we won our independence in 1789, not 1776 when we celebrate the declaration of our independence. I thought that was an interesting perception of history.

I was amazed at how urban the population was and how cultivated the land was. We Americans tend to think too much of our land is cultivated, but in Seattle, for example, there are huge swaths of natural rain forest ravine that run right through the city. And from the hilly vantage points you can see yourself surrounded by relatively wild mountains. I don't know how long it has been since England has seen wild landscape, but it has been a very long time. England is architecturally beautiful, London and the surrounding area anyway, but I have been all over America and I don't think I appreciated before how geographically diverse and beautiful my own country is.

I did not miss America. I could have stayed overseas a very long time, soaking up as much of the world as I could absorb. England is a part of the world in a way that America is not. For all their disagreements with the EU, England at least has an ongoing conversation with other countries in Europe and the rest of the world. By comparison, I felt America's profound isolation. I don't know if it is the two oceans that separate us from the world at large or our own isolationism, but I suspect it's parts of each.

Before September 11th, George Bush's foreign policy could be best described by the phrase "if we ignore it, maybe it will go away". Nonetheless, even with the War on Terror, even with great diplomats like Jimmy Carter representing us to the rest of the world, America remains this huge island.

We are a market unto ourselves. We are a people, talking to ourselves, about ourselves. We look at the world without communicating with the world, when we even bother to look. We are vast and varied, inert and monolithic - in short, we have our hands full with a country that crosses a continent. We are barely able to govern what we have. When we look outward, it seems as though we are looking down from a great height - democracy and free markets and all that rot - but more accurately we are looking from a great distance.

We look from across one or another ocean. We listen through language barriers, without any experience with other languages. We see through our cultural experiences, not even able to recognise that we have adopted our own way of being as some kind of "normal" standard, and other ways of being as somehow on their way to being like us. We see the world from the gulf of our youth, and our perception and participation in world affairs is predictably naïve.

And what surprises me about the foreign press is how much this is not obvious to them. They expect us to understand ourselves as they see us - when most of us never get far enough outside our borders to get any kind of perspective. We swim in an "American" world, not in a "global" world - no matter what we say. It's like a fishbowl we can't get out of. We're in the water, so we can't see the water.

We know less about what our country does abroad than the rest of the world does. This isn't because we want to be ignorant, American newspapers don't report on certain things. Sometimes this is because of economic censorship by the newspaper owners or advertisers. Sometimes it is because of what the news thinks Americans want to hear. We have a "Freedom of Information Act" that requires government agencies to respond to citizens' request for information within 10 days - but current turn around time for documents from the federal government and federal agencies is 1-2 years. And that's for the ones that haven't been declared "classified". There is a program called "Project Censored" which I highly recommend you check out, they have a website at www.projectcensored.org. It covers the ten most under reported stories of the year. There is also a book called "The People's Almanac Presents the 20th Century" which follows trends more closely.

Perhaps the biggest thing that keeps Americans from hearing what's going on in the world around them is that most newspapers use one of three news sources: The AP: UPI: or Reuters. They use these news wire services because they can no longer afford to maintain a staff of writers to cover the world. So we get our news from a small handful of news people whose stories short, "to the point" and "without identifiable style".

I mean, another of the biggest differences between England and America is that in America a newspaper costs between 25-35 cents, or it's a free weekly. In England, it's around a pound - which is a dollar fifty. Part of the willingness to collect information about people also includes the willingness to pay for that information. Somehow in America, we expect information to be free. It is as though freedom of speech includes freedom from cost. But it doesn't. Free libraries rarely have new books anymore, but we still think of them as up-to-date. Free television rarely reports balanced news, because it is paid for by advertising. And we don't tax ourselves to produce very much public television, so PBS must be underwritten by corporate dollars as well. And as for free radio, there is perhaps one major radio station in the whole US, Pacifica - KPFA - out of the San Francisco Bay Area, that is supported mostly by its listeners and receives almost no government funding. So we are bombarded with information - I mean, there was much less advertising to contend with in Europe - but all of it is paid for by somebody with an agenda, including our politicians.

It would be naïve of me to think that in other countries this is not also the case, but in the US, it is a very small group of people, often with the same agenda. And so it happens that one of the largest, supposedly most influential countries in the world looks at the world through a spy glass with a lens the size of pin hole. We do not seek to be ignorant, but have ignorance thrust upon us.

Which is why I hold out such hope for the internet. I know people who are addicted to it for their daily news source - and once you've read the same AP story three times, you start looking for alternative sources of information. And unlike the paper news, on the internet, you can skip over to a British or Irish or Canadian or Australian or any other English language news site in order to get at least that much of a widening of your perspective. There is a site called www.cluetrain.com, which lists something called the Cluetain Manifesto -it's about the shift in public awareness brought about by the internet. It's listed in ten languages While it is geared towards a review of the policies of corporations, everything it has to say, also applies to news and information. Check it out. And while you're at it, keep on passing on those cool news sites when you find them.

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