An American Portrait A British correspondents his hat to the country he once ridiculed
HARNDEN, TOBY
An.0 Ain p ribr •t A departing British correspondent tips his hat to the country and people he once ridiculed. BY TOBY HARNDEN E EUROPEANS ALL KNOW AMERICA, DON'T WE? It's the...
...Since 1999, I have reported from 47 states and visited two others, Utah and Maine...
...I had begun to see patriotism (a dirty word in Britain) and the conviction that anything is possible (which jars with the negativity I grew up experiencing) as signs of strength and self-reliance I had begun to see patriotism (a dirty word in Britain) and the conviction that anything is possible as signs of strength and self-reliance...
...in Utah, the remarkable variety of America constantly hit me...
...Was her peacenik statement condemned or ridiculed...
...This seems to be the formula for Crossfire in myself, I have become caught up in the marathon bug (my farewell to D.C...
...Brainwashing begins with the Pledge of Allegiance in kindergarten...
...Okay, maybe I should observe speed limits...
...the substance of policy...
...The belief that men or women who have little polDon't be stupid, I thought, we're all icy or life experience to important of us from somewhere else...
...28 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 2003/JANUARY 2004...
...I probably thought I was being clever at the time...
...My fellow Europeans need reminding of the Toby Hamden, formerly the London Daily Telegraph's self-evident truth that America is a force for tremen-Washington bureau chief is now the newspaper's dous good in the world...
...British diplomats at the United Nations would feel sorry for American diplomats because after marathon Security Council negotiations they had to go back and do the same thing all over again in Washington...
...And running has given me yet more snapshots of American variety...
...sniffily dismiss Americans as Most dangerous is an emerging "counter-crass and simplistic rather than attempt truly to Americanism," the doctrine that America is to be understand...
...No one who was here on September 11 sees the world in the same way...
...On the Virginia side of Key Bridge—on the return leg of a favorite route of mine—an American flag was painted after September 11...
...Either the insidious "Jewish lobby" or rapacious oil companies dictate foreign policy...
...was doing the Marine Corps Marathon...
...es close to the site where Flight 93, intended to hit the Capitol in Washington, was brought down by heroic passengers...
...BY TOBY HARNDEN E EUROPEANS ALL KNOW AMERICA, DON'T WE...
...I have also been shocked at how, in the land of the free, petty officials enforce the most ridiculous rules and citizens meekly obey...
...How could all this be compressed into a one-dimensional stereotype...
...the next it will be back to being just the stars and stripes...
...It had been put there by his wife, Wanda, who gave an interview to the Washington Post in which she said she was dead against the war...
...America, or their notion of it, is truly hated by a majority of opinion formers—and the vitriol filters down into their populaces...
...While I was visiting Mount Rushmore, a National Park ranger gave me a $50 ticket for leaving my dog Finn (an Irish-American mutt, soon to become, like Senator John Kerry, Irish-American-Jewish) tied up outside for half an hour...
...One week it is daubed with a peace symbol and doves instead of stars...
...girths of Americans...
...Hollywood bears much blame for exporting so much that emphasizes the bizarre, the extreme, the excessive, the unrepresen 24 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 2003/JANUARY 2004 AN AMERICAN PORTRAIT about the States—packaged, contrived, corny, expensive and mindless...
...A dozen years later I was in Washington watching television on deadline with tears streaming down my face, as office workers—male and female, black and white, many Americans, some not—leapt to their deaths from those tall buildings...
...humungous human tucked into a mountain of fries When I pointed out that many public opinion or stuffed their face with a three-scoop ice cream polls showed that ordinary Europeans, like with all the toppings...
...The preoccupation in the States with having the tallest building in the world seems to say so much," I sniffed...
...but most European leaders—Tony Blair is an honorable exception—have failed to grasp either how Americans were affected that day or what that meant in foreign policy terms...
...Even the World Trade Center provoked my ire...
...Working for a conservative newspaMontrose Park the other day, a bizarre per from America's staunchest ally gave me slaps woman berated me for letting the shaggy on the back from ordinary Americans but precious beast off the leash, as virtually every other dog little access to the Bush administration...
...Of course, not everything about America is wonderful and there is an element of truth in some of the most common accusations...
...Many of his staff treat all members of the press HEN I WAS WALKING MY DOG in Georgetown's as the enemy...
...Pickup trucks with Klansmen at the wheel and gun racks in the back fill the roads...
...This must be dent days behind me, should work both ways...
...Yet no black Briton has risen to the rank of ties as a president but he has needlessly antagonized Secretary of State or National Security Adviser...
...has, perhaps inevitably, stirred the Mr...
...VEN BEFORE SEPTEMBER 11, my view of America had altered .4 fundamentally...
...American society whereas in The diplomacy that accompaBritain the insidious influence of permeates nied the Iraq war and its afterclass holds people back like invisi-math has been sometimes woefulble threads...
...My apologies to Rhode Island, though I did spend several days with you during a port visit with the Royal Navy a decade ago...
...Across the Potomac, the Pentagon, unbelievably, was hit...
...Despite the College (the British equivalent of huge achievement of toppling Annapolis) and Oxford, can be Saddam Hussein, aspects of the society wherelooked down on as a pleb in certain post-war phase have been mudcompany in England...
...Driving from Ground Zero, through the Amish Country of Pennsylvania, by Graceland in Tennessee, where Elvis look-alikes had gathered to commemorate the 27th anniversary of the death of the King, and into the majestic landscape of Valley of the Dead When I finally went for "lunch" at 8 p.m., 11 hours after the first plane hit New York, the face of Barbara Olson, the first member of the public to be named as a victim, flashed up on ABC television...
...In the U.S...
...Bush, almost daily...
...A place where blacks are represented by sleeping lawyers before being condemned to death and elections are stolen or rigged...
...America is routinely condemned as being a racist President George W. Bush has many fine qualisociety...
...This can result in a brake on anything is The belief that anything is pos-creativity that does not, ultimatesible permeates every sector of possible ly, serve the president well...
...stopped at all costs...
...The encounter astonished me because this was Because loyalty to Mr...
...ber one attribute of an administration official, Everyone here is an immigrant or a there is a tendency to appoint yesgeneration or two from being one...
...Within the Bush administration, an ongoing debate over the fundamental conduct of foreign policy has raged for nearly three years...
...It reads: "United We Stand"—a statement of fact rather than an exhortation...
...His fondness again...
...The roadside ubiquity of McDonald's, Applebees, Cracker Barrel and Arby's notwithstanding, this was not a place of homogeneity but a mosaic of extraordinary intricacy...
...None of this, however, justiAmerica had little choice but the insidious fies the tendency of so much of the to rise to the challenge September rest of the world to define itself by 11 presented...
...Among the reasons she cited was her fears for the camels (how did the camels fare, I wonder...
...Even takowner in the area does every day of the week...
...Cell phone reception is appalling, road signs are awful, telemarketers and automated phones drive me to distraction...
...A ludicrous caricature...
...Opposing America means Middle East correspondent based in Jerusalem...
...Bush once said that he embers of anti-Americanism once didn't "do nuance...
...The day before her untimely death, I had put off writing a thank you note for a small kindness she had shown me...
...More than two years on, there is still an electronic sign above the Pennsylvania Turnpike, which pass with a CIA man wearing a dress and black lipstick, and smuggled a toilet into North Dakota...
...It's the land of the ignorant, cowboy president and shopping malls inhabited by the morbidly obese...
...of A., criticism of the White House is considered treasonous...
...The attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon turned Americans into combatants in the war on terror...
...Rabid Christian fundamentalists control the government and much of the country...
...Until recently, there was a warrant for my arrest in the Lone Star State, which has never been easy on lawbreakers...
...ly inept (though it is always some every sector Even I, as the son of an archi-how Donald Rumsfeld rather than tect and educated privately before the saintly Colin Powell who gets attending Dartmouth Naval of American the blame for this...
...would have been isolationism...
...Bush is seen as the numnot the kind of sentiment Americans express...
...I have interviewed steel workers in West Virginia, chased cactus rustlers in Arizona, attended black church services in Alabama, eaten whale in Alaska, discussed the capture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammad rather than arrogance and shallowness...
...across nothing like this in the U.S...
...The calmness and bravery she displayed in the last moments of her life still inspire many Americans...
...land me an interview...
...Go back to wherever you're from...
...I confess that my brother and I He seemed unaware that only a minority of had shared what we called "fat American states resort to capital punishment and that it usualmoments"—a look from one was all that was needed ly takes more than a decade of appeals before sento provoke stifled giggles from the other as some tence is carried out...
...After the obligatory period of mourning, they reverted to type...
...There are justifiable doubts in Europe about the fairness and efficacy of the death penalty...
...What unites the country is so much stronger than what divides it...
...Crossing the country, I 26 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 2003/JANUARY 2004 TOBY HARNDEN was accosted by people expressing their views, many highly critical of Mr...
...An.0 Ain p ribr •t A departing British correspondent tips his hat to the country and people he once ridiculed...
...But acting decisively influence of the ways it is against America...
...jobs...
...I sometimes think the American view of balance is having two nutcases from opposite extremes screaming at each other...
...It passed virtually without remark...
...Along the way, I picked up speeding tickets in Kentucky, Ohio, Colorado, New Mexico, Minnesota and Texas...
...But the issue is seldom examined in depth...
...Talk radio—what Dick Armey once described to me as "the voice of freedom"—and Fox News compete with the liberal-hued networks and big-city newspapers for the minds of citizens...
...During the Army Ten Miler—a "hoo aah" event if ever there was one—I ran behind one competitor with a shirt proclaiming "Peace Not War" while another had "Bring Our Troops Home Now" emblazoned on his back...
...America is condemned as an class holds for seeing things in terms of black imperialist power—if she had done and white or good and evil nothing, of course, the charge encourages those who want to people back...
...but they were treated with nothing but politeness...
...were exported from Europe...
...On that day, I had little doubt Americans would cope, principally because they loved their country...
...Shortly afterwards, a sign declaring "Peace is Patriotic" appeared in his window...
...marathoner who voted for the Iraq war...
...Americans cannot place Europe on a map and most don't have passports...
...Everything must be the biggest and the best...
...The "problem," therefore, with physical exercise...
...The Drive Thru window and All I sometimes thirk the AL lean of balance having t r^u Ises op r ite extremes screamin t each other...
...As I ing the extreme step of trying to date Vice waved her idiocy aside, she screamed at me: "Where President Dick Cheney's press secretary failed to are you from...
...in reality I was parroting the comfortable old cliches that are a substitute for real thought...
...Bloggers fill in the gaps...
...But during four years of living in America, I have heard each of these charges leveled by European sophisticates anxious to demonstrate their understanding of the Great Satan...
...Formerly a bit of a porker is an excess of democracy and devolved power in DECEMBER 2003/JANUARY 2004 AMERICAN SPECTATOR 27 AN AMERICAN PORTRAIT America (many of the 2000 election difficulties opposing the universal values, the seeds of which flowed from this...
...Pretty brave considering half the competitors were active duty military...
...Despite their many differences, and the split over the 2000 election that still remains today, they believed in the idea, the ideal, almost the emotion, that is the United States...
...A short distance from the Telegraph bureau, White House aides were being told to run for their lives after reports of an inbound aircraft...
...Of America, certainly...
...stopped, its goals frustrated and a counter-balance But nuance, as I realized after I put my stuto the unipolar superpower created...
...Despite the conventional wisdom in Britain that debate in America has been suppressed, in fact it has seldom been more vibrant...
...The discussions can be frustrating...
...Americans, were in favor of the death penalty he simEqually, though, many Americans are obsessed ply refused to believe me...
...I have come as in Britain dled and uncertain...
...I knew her, initially from American Spectator dinners...
...A Georgetown runner I pass occasionally is Senator Max Baucus (D -MT), an accomplished any case...
...Even a Conservative member of Parliament and Shadow Cabinet member told me over a gin and tonic in the bar of the Willard that executions stemmed from a "redU Can Eat buffet have indeed taken their toll on the neck mentality" in the U.S...
...The allies, often as much by his dismissive manner as by United Kingdom has no black generals or admirals...
...Workplace gripes are routinely settled by shooting sprees...
Vol. 36 • December 2003 • No. 7
