In a Sense, Abroad

Steven Weber, HuffPost
 It's good to be abroad. Just ask Bea Arthur.
Kidding. I kid.
My family and I are taking a trip to Europe!
Five weeks outside the crammed, sweaty air space of Fox News, talent shows, the
steady, thick stream of pharmaceutical commercials and low-brow, presumptive
nominee sniping.
From England, America's more
verbally acute doppelgänger, the view of the states is much clearer than the
one enjoyed by Americans themselves, whose faces are pressed into Old Glory
like hostages' noses pressed up against a chloroform-saturated hanky. Distance
allows one to see the plum jitteriness that animates the 300 million or so dots
scrambling from the car to the curb to the McMall back to the car and finally
to the couch. As you may have heard when it was carelessly leaked into our
consciousnesses, the goings on in The Big A are maddening to the rest of the
world and more so to this temporary defector. I have to say, there is so much
to be gained from adopting an altered perspective, in this case being in a
different longitude and latitude than George Bush, that international travel
should be encouraged despite the prohibitive airline fares. The outright
outlandishness of the ride the American people have been taken on is apparent
in ways that might even awaken the heaviest cultural somnambulist. In England, once a most vocal supporter in Bush's
cottage industry of a war, history, culture and independent thinking is not
subsumed for political or capitalistic gain as blatantly as it is in America. Brits
don't wear Union Jack lapel pins or resist reference to their historical
leaders and policies either good or bad, for fear that Britons will stop
consuming material goods. In fact, the news here (discounting, of course, the
legendary scandal rags) is delivered more somberly, more soberly, with fewer
slick animations and emotionally jolting stings to signal what kind of reaction
the viewer should have in advance of any germinating, independent response to
what is doled out. For England,
bordered by the living, writhing world as opposed to being geographically
separated from it, unfettered perspectives are pretty much available all the
time. And there's a maturity and sophistication that goes beyond the
preternaturally entrancing accent (My wife is from London. I rest my case.) to British culture
that the preening upstart America lacks, wrought from its many years of having
ruled unwisely, having wielded its imperial arrogance in much the same way
corporate-controlled America does now except without having absorbed the bitter
lessons of such self-defeating folly that England has.
At my most pessimistic, there's something that suggests America won't
go the same way, that there's little or no chance of relatively humble
introspection where its true identity will be found among the ruins of its
failures and that its redemption will be thwarted by the same powers that
visited her current miseries upon her in the first place.
Is there any irony in watching an entire country other than Sweden
exhibiting Stockholm Syndrome? There would be, if Americans possessed a sense
of irony, something that's been effectively amputated from them by the shrewd
surgeons who have wielded their scalpels knowingly, by the corporate cabal that
has purchased the complacency of its leaders and exploited the masses' pride in
nation by creating a nation in which they would, if they were in their right
minds, never be proud of.
Americans subsist on the echoes of its nation's greatness while Britons live
amidst theirs, their history and all its lessons achieving relevance and
retaining power from their reverence for monument and tradition and for knowing
all too well what their place in the world once was and what is now.
England
is spiritual yet secular, strong yet humble. It has its rogues and its rotters,
its gossip and its greed. But it also has an abundance of self respect that is
not hindered by hubris. England
wasn't always this way. Finding itself took generations. So perhaps there is
hope after all for its rowdy relation, born in rebellion, its distinction as a
beacon of democracy hewn from the rich and fertile land it journeyed thousands
of miles to settle, but who is now currently distracted, off course and at sea.
It's possible if there's time. Distance, measured in years or nautical miles,
can bring clarity. To see the USA,
maybe you have to travel far away.