The One and the Many - Across the Pond: An Englishman's View of America - page 79

SIX
The One and the Many
Uniting the Nation
The United States of America is a peculiarly self-involved society, and outside the State De-
partment is too little aware of other nations. It is a cosmopolitan power which can some-
times display the parochial outlook of a medieval peasant. In fact, much of its acquaintance
with other countries has been down the barrel of a gun. Americans say quaint things like
“Bangkok, Thailand,” which nobody else in the world does, no doubt because their more
untutored compatriots might imagine that Bangkok is in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Perhaps the United States invades other countries as a way of giving its citizens a much-
needed geography lesson. Deciding to flatten Baghdad is a great incentive to finding out
where it is.
The States also has a country too much like it directly to the north, and one too little like
it directly to the south. It is true that Canadians see themselves as different from Americans,
and so they are, but they are not always as different as they like to imagine.
“Americans have no neighbours,” observed Alexis de Tocqueville. This is not literally
true, of course, as one who was once arrested on the Mexican-American border can testify.
Even so, it is interesting to speculate on how different the United States might be if it was
cheek by jowl with a nation whose culture differed sharply from its own, yet with which it
felt it had equal status. France and Germany are a case in point. Perhaps then it might be less
self-preoccupied and more self-critical. To see yourself from the outside, it is inadvisable to
have an enormous ocean stretching on either side of you.
The only other nations which never stop brooding on themselves are small ones. They are
countries too much under the heel of a more powerful state, or too recently escaped from its
shadow, to be completely assured of their identities. Whereas the English talk unceasingly
of the weather, the Welsh speak incessantly of Wales. This is because the English conquered