America the Dutiful - Across the Pond: An Englishman's View of America - page 58

known to happen in Grand Rapids. Countries like the United States, which regard your
success as entirely your own doing, also tend to see your failure as your fault and nobody
else's, and to penalise you accordingly. To point out that you failed at being a world-class
concert pianist because you were born with no arms is a contemptible cop-out. It is a refus-
al to accept responsibility for your own actions, or lack of them. “We are all responsible for
everything that happens to us,” Oprah Winfrey once declared, a statement that might come
as a surprise to those who have landed up in intensive care because a drunken truck driver
ran them down.
Puritanical societies do not simply censure and rebuke, but sometimes appear to take a
grisly delight in doing so. Police officers who force detained Mexican immigrants to wear
pink underclothing in order to humiliate them are not being tough but just; they are rev-
elling in the obscene pleasures of the sadistic superego. Many Europeans find American
prison sentences grotesquely excessive, and are astonished by the way that twenty police
vehicles with all sirens blaring seem necessary to apprehend one seventy-year-old shoplift-
er. The country is plastered with prohibitions. “No Smoking Within 150 Yards of This
Store” strikes one as gratuitously vindictive, like putting prisoners in shackles and bright
orange suits when there is not a chance in hell of their escaping. One can imagine some
creative variants on such warnings: “No Sneezing Within Half a Mile of This Bus Stop,”
for example. There are signs at airports forbidding passengers to make jokes about security
matters, including, on occasion, jokes about the notice itself. But what about jokes about
jokes about the notice?
Law and religion are here at one. The stout Protestant assumption behind this battery of
signs is that human beings are corrupt; that they will therefore do anything outrageously
anti-social they can get away with; and that every conceivable kind of transgression,
however improbable or bizarre, must be assiduously anticipated and headed off. “Do Not
Feed These Cyanide Tablets to Your Toddler.” “Do Not Eat This Fire Hydrant.” “Do
Not Bite the Flight Attendant.” “All Passengers Must Be in Possession of a Dormouse.”
“This program contains images of naked geese: viewer discretion is advised.” “Eating this
chocolate can cause instant death, incurable bowel disease or make your legs fall off.”
There is a sign to be found in Britain which reads “Refuse to be Put in This Basket,” which
seems equally gratuitous until one realises that one is supposed to stress the first syllable of
“Refuse.” British flight attendants warn you not to tamper with the smoke detectors in the
aircraft toilets, whereas American flight attendants warn you not to tamper with, disable or
destroy them. If all angles were not covered in this paranoid fashion, some devious Amer-
ican lawyer might no doubt claim that you tampered with the device but did not disable it,
or disabled it but did not destroy it. It is no wonder that Henry James heard what he called
“the warning moral voice” in everything Emerson wrote.
Since 9/11, the United States has had good reason to worry about security. Even so, it
is hard not to feel that it has gone over the top, as it does on so many issues. America is