The Homeland Security officer at Houston airport asked what we were going to do in the United States. I wanted to tell him that it was none of his business. I am a native born citizen. I have studied the Constitution. My family emigrated – or, more likely, were transported – three centuries ago to the North American colonies that are now colonising the world.
My daughter, Julia, and I had valid American passports. What the hell was it to him what we did when we came home? However, I did not did not want to spend the night in an airport slammer, as the son of a friend did recently when a Homeland Security officer took a dislike to him. I gave a coward’s reply by telling the truth. We were coming to see my father, her grandfather. He handed back our passports without a word.
“That’s nice,” Julia, who is twenty and inherited her American citizenship from me, said. “You come back to your country, and they treat you like a criminal.” I wondered whether it really was our country. The Italians used to say that, under Mussolini, the problem was not the big dictator. It was all the little dictators. And, Lord, does America have its share. Men with uniforms and weapons have, as they say, been empowered. Military hero worship, fuelled by derring-do tales from the badlands of Afghanistan and Iraq, has resurfaced after its premature burial in the killing fields and torture chambers of Vietnam. Citizens are reminded to respect the uniform – of the soldier, the private security guard and the cop. The cop, in the cause of security, can treat the citizen the way soldiers do Muslims in military captivity.
Julia and I flew onto California, where my father has lived all his life apart from five during and after the war. He votes, as all his forebears since the Civil War have, Republican – although Lincoln might not recognise his party today. A lawyer all his working life, my father still opposes the death penalty. He thinks the country could use some kind of national health service, an un-American beast he and every other American calls, “socialised medicine.” Despite his opposition to the war in Vietnam, he doesn’t mind the war in Iraq. That doesnt bother me as much as seeing him struggle to walk up and down stairs. We stopped arguing politics a long time ago, if only because he grew up in America while I’m growing old in the American empire. Anyway, he’s my father, and I understand through him how people at home accept an illegal war, a vicious plutocracy and the shame of being caught red-handed at torture. Life’s not bad for them, and they were raised on idealism rather than reality.
The land of the free and home of the brave is swapping freedom for packaged smoke called safety. The state has finally climbed off the backs of honest (that is, rich) businessmen and instead intrudes onto our telephone lines, mails and once-privileged relationships between doctors and patients, lawyers and clients and libraries and their readers. Is this our country? Its owners tell us it’s ours, in the way a brothel keeper tells you his house is your home. The deeds to USA, Inc., rest secure in the manicured hands of a few hundred friends and benefactors of George W. Bush. The great unwashed are left with television and dreams, perhaps including the elusive American Dream, until they die from the anxiety of meeting their medical bills in old age.
My father told Julia about the war, and his reality was not what Americans learned at school. When the Philippines were liberated from Japan, his ship landed in Manila Bay. He remembered two things: banners and placards everywhere saying, “Yankee, go home”; and an American-owned brewery that was the only building in a large area to survive US bombardment. Nothing startling, just not part of the official record. When did you see a Hollywood film whose liberated natives didn’t welcome the Americans? (I look forward to “Iraq: The Movie” by DreamWorks, whose wonderfully Freudian name refers to the process of making a terrible dream bearable.) My mother’s brother, who died a few years ago, had horror stories about his army unit’s treatment of Japanese prisoners of war in Guadalcanal. Julia was too young before he died to hear them, just as most Americans will always be too young to listen to them.
I left America thirty-three years ago, and it gets harder every year to go back. Julia and the rest of the children were born in London, although they love visiting family in California. Mainly, I go to my father’s house and my mother’s grave. If they were in Kathmandu, I’d go there. I am American in my bones nonetheless, if only because of my first twenty-one years of expensive indoctrination. I left in 1972 to see the world for a year or two, but what I came to see was America from afar. I understood at last why Vietnamese peasants put on black pyjamas, lived in underground tunnels and risked their lives to remain Vietnamese rather than let an American impose his idea of freedom on them.
The problem with leaving America is that you can’t. It follows you everywhere. If the Marines don’t invade your new home, some chain of coffee shops or burger bars opens round the corner. The clothes, the canned music, the corporations, the logos, the movies, the food, the cars, the shopping malls, the advertisements, the weltenschauung – the sell, sell, sell of Babbit-booster culture – find you wherever you hide. There is no point in leaving America, because America will not leave you. Sometimes, you want a rest from everything you grew up with. The salesman’s babble – subsidised by the multi-billion dollar bullshit business called Advertising – is relentless. (“A salesman is an it/that stinks excuse,” wrote e. e. cummings.) A few years ago Norman and Norris Mailer and George Plimpton did a reading of George’s play, Zelda, Scott & Ernest, at the American Church in Paris. Afterwards, a woman in the audience asked Norman why so many American writers – like Hemingway and Fitzgerald – had moved to Paris. Mailer shrugged and said, “They probably got tired of being around a lot of stupid people.”
Even other Americans think California is made, but what happens there travels here. So, get ready for this. We read in the Los Angeles Times the story, “Hoping Canines Will Lap It Up.” A company called K-9 Water of Valencia, California, that sells its product in all fifty states is looking for export markets. As its name hints, it peddles “flavored and enriched bottled water for dogs.” The water comes in four flavours: hose water, gutter water, puddle water and toilet water. Suzanne Goldberg of K-9 Water said, “The doggie business is just exploding, with dog resorts and dog spas.” She said a friend of hers was opening a chain of “dog-friendly coffee shops” to be called Pawbucks. (I am not making this up.) The paper added that forty-three per cent of America’s dog owners celebrate Fido’s birthday. Perhaps the other fifty-seven per cent make do with Christmas presents from a doggy toy manufacturer called Paws ‘n More.
My brother-in-law, at whose house we were staying, told me that dog food has overtaken the sales of baby food. An old English professor of mine predicted back in 1968 that human beings would die out and only dogs would be left. It seems to be going that way. K-9 Water comes from the people who are exporting democracy to an Arab world that regards dogs as “unclean” and won’t allow them indoors. Those American dogs may have to blast their way in.
