All My Life...Trouble in America

THis morning while getting up, I checked my email and there was a notification from Quora. The question was something like: what assumptions to foreigners abroad make about Americans that are laughably untrue.

I had to think about it. First of all, I think what most foreigners fail to grasp about America is its size. Not only geographically but especially in terms of population. No, it's not the most populous country on Earth--it doesn't even approach China or India. But it might be the third most. I'm not sure. Brazil is big, too.

 On top of that there is the fact that it's made up of lots of immigrants or the sons of immigrants...willing and unwilling. It is by no means homogenous. In fact, I would say that is probably the most common assumption that foreigners make that is the most untrue is that American society is as homogenous as theirs.

When I point this out, it's almost unbelievable at how much resistance there is to this idea. I think it's not due to malice or stupidity; it's just that the concept is really hard for people in a relatively small, relatively homogenous country like the Czech Republic to get their heads around.

(Relatively homogenous: I want to stress the relatively part of that. It's easy to oversimplify things. No country is truly homogenous. Maybe the Vatican is.)

The fact is, (and this is something that people can grasp is that no matter what you say about Americans,) no matter how ridiculously good or bad the extreme stereotype you hold is...IT'S ABSOLUTELY true. You can say anything about Americans and then find literally millions of Americans about whom it's true.

So what I've heard:

all Americans are rich! Not all Americans...but(bearing in mind that 'rich' is a relative term: a Czech's sense  of wealth is different than a West German's or a Thai's) millions and millions of them are.

All Americans are poor! Millions upon millions of them are.

American schools are the best! Some of them are.

American schools are the worst! Some of them are.

Americans are fat and lazy! You can find tons of examples of this.

 Americans are unhealthily obsessed with their health. Tons of those, too. Though presumably less tonnage.

Americans are really friendly! That's true.

 Americans pretend to be friendly but hate you underneath! That's true too.

 Americans are racist! Yeah.

 Americans are open to other kinds of people. True.

 Americans are nationalistic. Well, I've known a lot who are and they scare me, too but not everybody is; in fact, I think being American often means bitching about your government 24/7.

The list goes on and on. The fact that so many examples can be found coupled with the fact that American media permeates most countries in the world means that all our best sides and worst sides are constantly being shown to people. *

When I watch the news about America in the Czech Republic, it's very rare that I watch footage shot by a Czech crew . Nearly always it's footage that's been taken from an American news source, edited and translated and then broadcast here. Nearly always when I read the news in Czech,it's come from an American source. It's quite telling what details they edit out of the story.  They usually serve to make America seem much worse than the story I read in American or British sources. I assume this phenomenon is worldwide or at least EU-wide. I also assume that prior to EU acession(is that the right word? Opoosite of secession) the exact opposite happened: Czech news sources turned a blind eye to the darker side of the USA.)

I try to avoid conversations about America too much. Because the truth is always way more complicated than what the listener wants to hear. the thing is, I don't think that people want America to be complicated. But it is. I get frustrated by it because it's really tiring to try to explain this simple fact all the time.

 A case in point is recently a British teacher, Catherine, that works for me was asking questions about why Americans are so anti-immigrant.(As if the British aren't?) Another teacher who works for me, Peter, who is from Oakland CA, was arguing that you can't believe the media: that Americans don't hate immigrants. I was listening.

 I saw his Peter's point. I feel the same way he does: I honestly have never had a class...or lived in an apartment building...or had a job...which did not have foreigners in it. And not only Mexicans. Chinese, Indians, Koreans, Phillipinos, Irish, English, German, Pacific Islanders from god knows where, Thais, Japanese, Czechs, Slovaks, Poles, Italians, new Zealanders,Russians, French...I've run into all of them several times in the US. Some of them were there to stay; others were only there for a time.

 I never had a problem with them. Nor did anybody I personally knew. In fact, oddly, I remember saying the same thing to the Catheirne in September. I told her the exact same words: Don't believe everything the media says. I tried to explain to her that the real prejudice in America lies amoung perceived lines of race. Because I think in Europe it's more about ethno-linguistic nationalism(which sometimes overlaps with race but not always). In America it's not. Ethnnic nationalism is kind of a bizarre concept to Americans because the idea of 'nation' is actually very very different to the European idea of nationalism which is more tied to ethnicity and language. I tried to explain that: In America the intolerance is largely about race; in Europe it's about ethno-linguistic nationalism.**

But on the other hand, I read the media too. Obviously there is anti-immigrant sentiment in America. Some of it, a lot of it, in fact, is probably racial prejudice since so many immigrants are Mexican. And those people seem to have no valid arguments about how to solve the problem of illegal immigration. In fact, sometimes it seems to me that they'd be most happy with just rounding up the 12 million or so and putting them in concentration camp and letting them rot. (this alarms me to no end, but it's the subject of another post.) But whatever the base root of it is, it's there.

So when I overheard the conversation I butted in and pointed out that, while maybe most people Oakland Peter knew felt that, in fact, not everybody did. "I'm sure Melinda"(another teacher
 from Arizona who was in on this conversation) "knows people who feel differently." And of course, being that Arizona is a border state, she did. Apparently some border-crossers commit crimes(especially theft) in parts of Arizona and indeed many people regard immigrants(especially 'illegal immigrants') as being a problem. And maybe they are there. who knows. As a leftist I feel it's my duty to say that she's wrong, but that's just the politicization speaking, not my rational mind.

And then I realized the problem. It's not only foreigners who tend to oversimplify America. It's actually Americans themselves.

Media that comes from America is framed in terms of American debate. Which is nearly always over-dramatic and extreme.(Americans are overdramatic: there's a stereotype about Americans that is actually true but which I never hear from foreigners .) I mean, take the health care debate. For Christ's sake to hear the left talk about it, 20 million Americans are dying on the streets. And if you listen to the right you hear horrible horror stories about long waits in hospitals in 'socialist' countries and dying from the wait. Yeah. Well, anybody can google examples of these things happening. But neither of them is the norm.

But sadly, these debates, which are loud and overdramatic(and this fact, by the way, keeps anything from ever changing in any meaningful way) and politicized to the max reach the ears of the rest of the world who take what essentially is high sense of drama as gospel truth. Because it is, after all, easy to grasp.

It's Americans' own oversimplification of America, perhaps that leads(or at least contributes) to the oversimplification of America by non-Americans.

In the end, America is like the fable of the elephant and the five blind men. One blind man feels the elephant's tail and says its a snake, another blind man a leg of the elephant and says it's a tree, another feels the the flank and thinks it's a wall, another the trunk and thinks it's...a really big snake(or something.) None of them are right. It's an elephant. You can't see the forest for the trees; and you can't see America for the Americans.

In fact, most things in the world are like that.

What got me thinking about this is hearing this song on the radio. It's about ten years old but such is the extent of my disconnection with popular culture that I don't remember ever hearing it. It was a huge hit in most of Europe, apparently.
 It's pretty cool and I think says a lot:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V9NhncU5_CE

(I have no idea how to embed a link. I guess you'll just have to cut and paste it. If you listen to it at all. If you read this at all.)

*There are two stereotypes that I hold about Americans that I honestly think do apply to a great majority of Americans: a) they are ignorant about the rest of the world. and b) they are nearly all incredibly wasteful.

**The idea of last year's secession referendum in Scotland is something I think is alien to most Americans. Some Americans might support it because of Scottish nationalist myths as exemplified in Braveheart, but in reality it's hard to imagine an American state taking something like that serious. Oh, yes, I know that Texas had several thousand people sign a secession petition when Obama won the second time, but in my honest opinion it wasn't serious and was just an example of how overdramatic Americans can be.

Purpose for blog/The Grail WAr

My initial plan was to write a blog entry every other week, on Wednesdays, on my 'not-busy week.'

Let me explain.

I have a busy week and a not-busy week.

My busy weeks are well...busy.
 Monday's not so bad, but I use the time between classes to do administrative work and there's little time to do anything really constructive. Tuesdays on my busy week's are insane. I leave the house at 6 in the morning and get home at about 8.45 at night. During the day, there is literally a total of ten minutes of time where I'm not working:  teaching, planning, checking homework, making copies or driving to the factories where I teach or the town I'm teaching. I spend two hours in the car, and the rest of the time I've got my nose to the EFL grindstone: except from 11.30 to 11.35 when I choke down my  lunch(hastily chopped fruit with fat-free white yogurt--it's' better than you think); and 1135 to 1140 when I take a much-needed, and, by this point, almost orgasmic, break on the toilet.
WEdnesday is a little less hectic; I have time for a leisurely lunch at home and I get home early enough to go for my near-daily 6.5 km fastwalk(I don't call it a power walk due to the fact that, in my opinion, for it to be called a powerwalk one's arms must swing a little more robustly--you gotta get your shoulders into it...--but I do walk pretty fast and I do have a swing in my arms that let's people to know that, yes, I am exercising.).
Thursdays I dont go in until noon for our weekly meeting and work til 8 and, while Friday morning is pretty busy, I am usually finished at about 1.30, barring any meetings with teachers or would-be teachers.

But on my  non-busy weeks, I have plenty more time.
 On Wednesdays, for example, I don't leave for work until two, and I usually leave work for home at 6.30 pm. So I decided to write a blog, because a) I like typing and b) It keeps me away from Facebook, which is marvellously entertaining and a great way to feel 'in touch' with people you really aren't in touch with; but which eats into time like nothing I've ever experienced. I mean, you sit down, click on an article: ('11 Ways Cannibal Puppies Are Awesome', say, or ''Beyonce Took a Dump in a Cancer Ward and It Was Amazing') and the next thing you know, it's time to have lunch, take a shower and go to work.  I needed something productive to do on my rare mornings off...

Maybe I should talk about what I'm going to write about on this blog.
 You see, I'm not going to write about anything. Or, rather, I'm not going to specialize in anything.

I read somewhere that it was advisable to "specialize" in a blog. Apparently that is a strategy for bringing readers in...you know...there are cooking blogs...and travel blogs...and medical blogs and sex blogs, etc.

But...I don't care.

I'm not looking for a big readership. I figure my brothers and sister and a handful of friends and acquaintances will check it out, and I'm cool with that. I'm under no delusion that this is going to somehow be compiled in a best selling book; I'm not going to fuss to much about re-writing and trimming; I'm not going to fret about whether my subject matter is cheery or interesting or appropriate...I don't have the time to be a professional writer, anymore. The days of writing 4 or hours a day because, damn it, I had to! are more than a decade behind me. Now, I'm just writing for the sheer joy of writing and the sheer of joy of not being in Facebook's thrall. Oh, and there will be book reviews, because I read a lot of books.

This week is technically my busy week, but it's 'Spring Break' week in Zlinsky Kraj(the 'district' of the Czech Republic I live in.) Instead of my usual 34 hours of teaching in two towns and 3 factories, I'm only teaching 12 hours--and I'm not working at all on Wednesday and Thursday! In fact, this afternoon, Jana is packing up all three kids and going with her brother to the Jaseniky Mountains for three days, about 120 miles away, for a short, last 'ski holiday' of the season. I don't ski, which means on Thursday, not only do I not have to work; but I also am going to be girlfriend- and children- free...which means...PARTY TIME!!!! For one day And 'party time'  means...well, staying home and reading all day.

So that's why I'm writing my blog on my busy week. Because it's not really busy this week.

 Which is OK because I couldn't write last week, anyway, due to  a long power-point translation from a big client in the medical industry which I had to proofread. It took 4 and a half hours and a good dose of concentration to get through because it was hardly interesting stuff. 

So...I have a number of ideas to write about in my blog that occupy my mind, but first I'm going to clear the cache with book reviews.

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The Grail War by Richard Monaco

A few months ago, I wrote a longish book review on Facebook(and amazon.co.uk) of Parsival, or a Knight's Tale, the vaguely Arthurian novel by Richard Monaco from 1977. I really liked the book and it has acquired meaning and depth for me over time. So recently I ordered all four sequels(two of them out of print, used, from an English bookseller, the other two on Kindle.)

First of all, although it was clear he was setting up for a sequel in a couple of the final chapters, I don't think they was really necessary. The first book was a complete work of art. This isn't a criticism. I'm glad he wrote sequels. I enjoyed this book a lot.

As before, the real star for me here is Monaco's writing, which is relentlessly physical. This is a story told almost purely from the sights, sounds, smells, tastes and physical sensations of the characters as well as their inner thoughts. Occasionally, Monaco breaks the fourth wall to inform the reader of something (an old-fashioned device I usually don't care for, but I think it's old-fashioned-ness is part of the point. More about this later.) I enjoy this physicality so much. It's not like watching a movie: it's better.

I had the impression while reading Parsival that the author was exploring and discovering the story; each page had the whiff of divine inspiration about it. And I accepted it as that, even as the characters(main characters: Broaditch, the earthy, cynical but good-hearted peasant and Parsival, the philosophical super-knight) went on various detours that ended in dead ends, plot-wise. It was all part of the overall tapestry and I liked it. 

THis book, by contrast, seems to be slightly more tightly plotted than Parsival, as Monaco gathers the characters (the two mentioned above and the new character Lohengrin, Parsival's bitter, angry, nearly villainous son) together for a final climactic battle.) 

As before, I don't think the plot is really not that important or complex, but I realized that both books(and the other sequels as well) are actually quite medieval in plot. you know, reading Malory, Tale of Sir Gareth, for example...I mean, he basically just rides his horse and fights people he meets on his knightly quest. These books are similar: a lot of wandering, a lot of fights. They are much more true to the spirit of medieval romances  than other Arthurian retellings, I think. I'm sure this is a self-conscious choice on the author's part. But anyway,. I sort of see these books more as ways for Monaco to hang his philosophical and poetic observations of life than as amazing stories. In fact, I would almost call them prose poems because the writing is intensely poetic...almost to point where it obscures all else. Again, this is a positive thing. (Normally I'd count this as negative, but these books are strange and break all rules for me. He's really writing about every life experience that's relevant to him: birth, death, marriage, sex, love, parents, children, war, spirituality...and writing pretty profoundly about it, I think.)

An interesting thing... the supporting character Gawain(a fine, complex creation) realizes it first, that he is literally unkillable because he has some 'part to play'. Broaditch also forces himself, quite against his nature, to surrender to fate because it's clearly moving him somewhere and he has no control of it; and Parsival, after a suicide attempt, also realizes his essential...unkillibility? Of course in story they are in the hands of fate, or of God's or the Devil's(again, like medieval stories, there really does seem to be both a Christian God and Devil at work--and again, it's a very medieval concept of God and Devil); but of course it's also just that the author himself doesn't want to kill him because he needs him for the plot. I can't think of another story where the characters become aware of their own plot armor.

As for the War in the title itself...well...such is the nature of his writing that I can honestly say I have never read such well-written battle scenes. I mean, they are horrifically violent. (these books are the most violent books I've ever read, by a long shot) but so graphically descriptive...it's just beautiful. 

It's clear that despite wallowing in violence and blood a bit, the author despises war and I suppose I would categorize these books' depictions of war both as 'Post-Vietnam' and 'Post-Holocaust. There are very few heroic deeds taking place  as the war takes on a terrifying life of its own and everyone, villain and hero, is irresistibly swept up in an incredible, bloody climax that has to be read to be believed.