Me Three

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Pond Scum: Mutatis Mutandis

By Steve Finbow

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Two weeks ago, at a wedding in the Neo-Tudor splendour of Girton College, Cambridge, I found myself – amidst vegan entrees and carnivorous main courses, scowled down upon by an obscure Stanley Spencer androgyne – sitting opposite a philosophy lecturer – an American philosophy lecturer. Out of the mouths of babes into the lap of good fortune. Actually, it wasn't that fortuitous. My friend lectures in morals and ethics (strange – my ex-girlfriend comes from Essex), and his wife lectures in philosophy of the mind, with a special interest in qualia (strangerer – my present girlfriend comes from the land of the koala). Anyway, I found myself on a table full of philosophy lecturers, some British but the majority American.

Conversation started as it does at many weddings, "So, how do you know the bride/groom?" We moved on to an interesting discussion about accents. I don't have an apple-and-pears-me-old-china-rub-a-dub-gor-blimey-guvnor Cockney accent, but I do have a London twang. The Americans at the table insisted I spoke Standard English. I said I didn’t. They said I did. I said I didn’t. They said I did. This must be the Logical Pantomimist school of philosophy. I said I couldn’t tell where they were from by their accents. They explained that, coming from California, their accent is what Brits (and the world) understood to be 'American'. It's what we hear on TV. That's true. OK, we know New York (well, Brooklyn), the Texas drawl, the cartoon-like backwoods ‘hyuck’, but that's it. The rest is Californian.

That's not where it stopped. There are, apparently, subtle differences in Californian accents – Southern Californian and Northern Californian, San Francisco and Los Angeles, city and valley. It dawned on me that these people were talking about America as if it were some dusty thorp or dorp in the Gobi desert, untroubled by humankind for tens of thousands of years, with its own language, its own customs, with a host of secret signs and mysterious places. 'The Grand Canyon is a must-see. Have you heard of it?' 'Me? No. Where is it?' Irony. 'Arizona.’ 'Really?' Irony. 'The Colorado River runs through it.' 'It's in Arizona but the Colorado River runs through it?' Irony. I know this. Why were they telling me this? It's not as if I hadn't heard of the biggest hole in the world. The conversation continued and I was bombarded with little known facts about the USA – the capital is Washington, 9/11 happened, George Bush Jr. is the president, Chicago is windy, New Jersey is the new Brooklyn (Is it?).

“No place to go but inward” (Perelman) – and that's not a metaphor for the American pioneering spirit. America is becoming insular. Where once the Coca-Cola/McDonald/Microsoft diaspora went unchecked, it's now herding in, enclosing. America no longer wants to be understood. America wants to be left alone. It’s as if your formative years have passed and you've turned into a surly teenager, sulking in your fizzing sack, staring at your yeasty sock, explaining your version of the world to anyone who will listen.

Insularity is a British trait. Or was. Britain is not European, it’s not open to new ideas; it has its village greens, pubs, cricket, bowler hats, and fog. I believe America is becoming as insular. America is no longer hermeneutical, it’s hermetical – its outlook is parochial and its politics circumscribed. Before George Bush, before 9/11, before Afghanistan, before Iraq, the world viewed America as progressive, sanguine, and indulgent, it is now benighted, diffident, and illiberal. It is as if events have left the USA with retrograde amnesia. You can’t remember who you were as a country before the trauma.

The USA has fragmented into 294 million pieces, each with no understanding of its neighbour, no understanding of a world outside its own experience – I’m back to solipsism and memoir here – see Salon 08/27/04: Paris Hilton to publish 198-page memoir – nuff said. So, is Britain outward looking? Is Britain becoming extrinsic? Are we finally becoming European?

In literature, I would point to Coe’s The Closed Circle and Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty. Both novels question Britain’s near past, question Britain’s role in Europe and the world, and how changes in social perception affect the British. Delillo’s Underworld and Franzen’s The Corrections, although apparently social in outlook, are actually inward looking; they create a sort of instant paranoid historiography, which includes the social and the self but only as narrative checkpoints, the political and the personal are not consanguineous. The subject bears no relation to the predicate. The problem? The subject is always I. Always I, never we.

To return to the American philosophers at the wedding - I see the history of the USA as an embodiment of "dasein," or "being there" (and I was, and I wish you were, it was a great wedding). Factuality: the reality of being or actuality – the Pilgrim Fathers, American Revolution, and the Constitution. Existentiality: the purpose in life – to make the world democratic – and to make authentic that purpose and to establish a unique identity – World Wars I & II, the Cold War, and the space race. And, finally, fallenness: a move into inauthenticity, simulacra, actions without purpose – Afghanistan and Iraq – a hidden being; habituated, living in a prefabricated world of forgotten guilt, forgotten origins, in the world of the occult.

I’m driving through a strange country, a strange landscape, on a strange road. The inhabitants hide from me, hide from each other. Signs point to a larger conurbation, but I cannot quite read them – some words are obscured, others shimmer like faulty neon lights, yet more are written in a foreign language. I reach the settlement. Tumbleweeds, made from the shredded remnants of Old Glory, roll across the empty streets. Bald eagles and Californian condors circle on hot air thermals, searching for scraps of buffalo meat and discarded cheeseburgers. I see a sign. I can read this one. It reads… United States of America – Population: 1.

Click here to read previous Pond Scum Columns.

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Steve Finbow writes out of London, England. He has worked for the poet Allen Ginsberg, the writer Victor Bockris, and the artist Richard Long. His fiction, essays, and short plays appear, or will appear, in Eyeshot, 3am Magazine, Yankee Pot Roast, uber, Locus Novus, InkPot, Dicey Brown, The Guardian Online, and Pindeldyboz. He is currently working on a novel (Yeah, right). He can be contacted here.