America the Weird

BACKGROUND. I wrote this piece in response to something somebody said on a yoga message board on the internet. There had been a certain amount of, er, discussion going on between the Americans and Europeans, in the course of which I said: “America … been there loads of times … love visiting the place, but the culture is far too wierd for me ever to consider living there”. Somebody asked me to explain myself, which seemed fair enough so I sat down to do so. I fairly quickly had something that was too long to post on a message board and cried out for a few illustrations. So here it is.

Michael,

I should have expected to get called out on that one. It's a legitimate question, and deserves a considered response. So:

Here's a small illustration of something I perceive as a big cultural difference between Europe and America. Just over the Austrian border, in a little mountain village a couple of hours' drive from Munich where I sometimes go for weekends, there is an inn about a mile up the mountain. People go up there on a winter evening, get drunk and then - get this - the only way down is a toboggan run which is sometimes pretty icy and fast. I love this - not so much the un-yogic getting drunk part, but the hurtling downhill in the snow, through the trees, in the dark.

It's probably much less dangerous than it feels, but my point is this: I grew up with the fundamental assumption that if somebody wants to go and have fun risking their own life and limb, then that is their right and nobody's concern but their own (having duly considered their responsibilities to their friends and loved ones, as long as they don't endanger any innocent bystanders, etc. etc.) And isn't that supposed to be a quintessentially “American” assumption? But can you imagine something like this anywhere in the US? I can't, because of your litigation- and liability-craze. Imagine the fate of an innkeeper in, say, Vermont, if he opened one of these and somebody broke their leg. But in Austria, a country that even other Europeans tend to perceive as a heavily policed and regulated Germanic society, the attitude to people's inalienable right to throw themselves down mountains any way they feel like is completely laid back.

Exhibit B. The hideous disneyfication and over-regulation of your national parks, which are (or should be) some of the most amazing and sacred wilderness landscape on earth, to which very little in Europe compares. (Anybody who cares about such things should read Edward Abbey's wonderful Desert Solitaire.) The fact that so many of you somehow imagine you can have a meaningful experience of these places by driving up in a car, taking a few bad photographs and driving away again.

Some more things I find weird. The grotesque oversized ugliness of so much of your everyday design - your cars, much of your architecture. (Pet theory - I sometimes wonder if your domination of the computer industry means that's where nearly all your talented engineers and designers end up, with sad results for everything else). The squeezing out of so much of the small, the local, the distinctive by anonymous mall-and-chainstore culture, a rot which I think has progressed further than it has in Europe.

The way you use your huge ugly inefficient cars to drive around carrying enough firepower to equip a small third world army, which is supposed to be some kind of demonstration of “freedom” except you're only allowed to do it at half the speed the average over-regulated, repressed German drives at.

The way your attitudes often seem so parochial, reflected in the way so many of your writers and broadcasters talk about your country as if it were the world, or as if they assume all of their audience comes from the same country and shares the same assumptions and concerns. This is somewhat understandable, since there are so many of you, and for the last century you've had an influence on world culture and events even out of proportion to your numbers … but it's still persistently irritating to the other 95 percent of us. Or possibly just to Brits with similar but less justified national delusions of grandeur.

There are wonderful things too. San Francisco isn't anywhere near as interesting as it was when I first went there ten years ago - rendered bland and complacent by too much software money - but it still has to be one of the most downright beautiful cities on earth. New York is so huge and diverse and exciting, like a little world in its own right. Makes London feel like a village.

And there are little hidden jewels among all the ugliness and strangeness. A case in point: the town of Hurricane, Utah. At first sight it's just a couple of miles of nasty strip development on the very doorstep of Zion national park. I passed through there a couple of years ago, having flown in to Las Vegas on my way to meet some friends at the Grand Canyon for the start of a big hiking trip in the desert. I needed somewhere to stop for lunch, but Hurricane looked so hideous I didn't want anything to do with it. I stopped anyway, and went into the general store to pick up some camping supplies. They had a big counter of guns and ammunition in there - I think this might have been the first time I had ever even seen a gun close up - and then by the checkout, a couple of shelves of herbal and homeopathic remedies, new age books and stuff. This was so incongruous to me I started to think there was perhaps more to this place than met the eye. I went to look for a vegetarian café that was listed in the Lonely Planet guide only to find that it had closed down - but just down the street there was another wonderful little café - decent food, interesting magazines to read, excellent music, really good local pottery on sale, a garden with cottonwood trees where you could sit comfortably in the shade in the desert at midday. I got talking to the owner and her boyfriend - really friendly people who were happy to share desert hiking stories with a passing English tourist. (The Garden Café, 138 South Main St.) I'll definitely stop off in Hurricane if I'm ever in the vicinity again.

Or Moab. Another ugly blot in the middle of one of what has to be some of the most weirdly beautiful landscape on earth, just as nasty to look at as Hurricane. But also a hotbed of mountain biking, whitewater rafting and hardcore environmentalism, with a couple of the best small independent book and record shops I've ever been in anywhere. Also the home of the Canyon Country Zephyr, which is about the most feisty, quirky, interesting and real local newspaper I've ever read.

There are even some surviving examples of things being the way they should be in US national parks. If you ever have a chance you should check out the remoter parts of Canyonlands, north of the Colorado and west of the Green River. It's seriously remote wilderness, kept that way by a fifty mile approach on dirt roads across the desert. The rangers are nice guys too. I went there to look at the “Great Gallery”, according to the guidebook the most impressive prehistoric rock art site in North America. The official BLM archaeologist for the state of Arizona, who I met and spent a week hiking with on my desert travels, agreed with this. According to the visitors' book, when I got there nobody else had been for four days.

(Southern Utah is one of my favourite places. I'd love to go there again one day. For more information and some inspiring photos, check out the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance's website)

So don't get offended. If I just out-and-out despised America and Americans, would I care enough to think about this stuff or make the effort to write it down? I have the highest respect for lot of the American yogis who write stuff here, and the ones I've done workshops with like David Swenson, Annie Pace, Danny Paradise (or is he Canadian? I think he is) I think America is a fascinating, vibrant place and I love going there. I have American friends (or did until I wrote this and put it on the Web) But part of the fascination is that after almost forty years of reading American books, seeing American films, hearing American music, and six visits, I can still feel so foreign there. That comes as a surprise - the rest of the world is so saturated with images of America that we think we understand you. Especially those of us who speak the same language. And then to go there and feel so alien and different …

The experience of living in Germany has put a lot of this in perspective for me. I came here two years ago on a six month contract, knowing very little about the country and with only a very rudimentary grasp of the language, and felt completely at home almost immediately. I feel like I have a basically similar outlook as my contemporaries here, when I didn't expect to. Whereas in America I expected not to feel foreign, but actually did. I think we Brits don't realise that there is such a thing as a distinctively European culture and outlook that we are part of, and it's different from yours.

Alan Little
26th February 2001