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Can America’s belief that all things are possible win it back its coveted global status?
EVERYTHING IS about China these days. As I understand it, this mighty nation now holds the deeds to every apartment building, gin mill and houseboat in the western world. The cautious, thrifty ant to our drunken, spendthrift grasshopper, the People's Republic is about to become – to use the language of W C Sellar and R J Yeatman's 1066 and All That– the holder of the Top Nation trophy.
Poor America. The US has had a long run at the head of the hit parade. Sellar and Yeatman’s book, a hilarious pastiche of conventional history teaching, suggests that America achieved Top Nation status at the end of the first World War. That sounds about right. The Great Depression put the brakes on US hegemony, but, even during those grim years, European cinemagoers wallowed in the waves of glamour that gushed from American movies. Never mind prohibition and soup kitchens. Just savour the photons speeding from Jean Harlow’s implausibly silver head.
The real surge in American influence came, however, in the aftermath of the 20th century’s second great conflagration. While we still ate turf and drank our own urine, every citizen of the US – or such was our impression – bathed daily in ice-cold beer before flicking through all 10,000 of his or her consistently excellent television channels.
Today’s irritating young people have no notion of the perceived gulf that existed between the US and western Europe in the decades following the second World War.
Growing up during the early 1970s, I marvelled at the environment Jack Lemmon inhabited in Billy Wilder's imperishable The Apartment. The huge office space in which he worked – with its 100 identical desks crouching beneath cold lighting – looked like something out of H G Wells's Shape of Things to Come. He used chopsticks to eat Chinese food out of strange rectangular containers. Wonder of wonders, he actually operated his television with a remote control. (If such a device had existed in contemporaneous Ireland, it would serve only to endlessly call up the same dreary, monochrome channel.)
But wait. The Apartmentwas made as long ago as 1960 and Lemmon's character was supposed to be down at heel. Catch a glance of modern, wealthy Americans at play and you risked asphyxiation from your own toxic covetousness.
New technologies became affordable in the US years before they found a place in European homes. Look at Jim Rockford (ask your dad, junior) replaying messages on his answering machine. Marvel as Lieut Columbo experiments with an early video recorder. If we’d been told American teenagers used jetpacks to get to school we would have shown no great surprise.
The sense of wonder and envy was stoked by the knowledge that almost nobody you knew had ever been to this abundant Nirvana. Several generations of Europeans remember remarking, on finally making it across the Atlantic, that it was “just like it is on the telly”. Victorians would, surely, have felt similar emotions if magically transported to Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland or Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Xanadu.
Everything has changed. After reversing that slide towards the economic Dark Ages during the 1970s, Old Worlders steadily caught up with their brasher transatlantic cousins. By the end of the century, certain technologies – notably mobile telephony – were actually more advanced in this corner of the world than in the United States. Flights to New York and LA became affordable. Globalisation caused high streets in Birmingham, England, to look creepily like those in Birmingham, Alabama. Suddenly, young people began to envy Australians (of all people) more than Americans. We never saw that coming.
So, as we all prepare for imminent annexation by the People's Republic of China, have Americans ceased to seem properly foreign? Not quite. The citizens of that country still have the capacity to baffle. Even right-wing Europeans were surprised that an advanced nation could elect such a transparent boob as George W Bush to the highest office (not that the Irish have much to boast about in this area). Their near-universal patriotism – all those flags on lawns – contrasts markedly with our own more cautious pride in nation. And they will continue to find the brainless Saturday Night Liveamusing.
The biggest difference between us and them, however, concerns the average American’s optimistic belief that all things are possible. So much of what is great and so much of what is regrettable about the US springs from this pioneer spirit. It drove them to put a man on the moon years before such an operation should have been possible. It inspired them to construct transcontinental railroads and to dam the absurdly terrifying Colorado river.
Sadly, it also led them to believe that, by launching unwinnable wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, they could eliminate world terrorism. One may as well seek to annihilate death or bad weather.
Could that spirit see them, despite looming threats from the east, retain their cherished Top Nation status? Well, if one does not plough, there will be no harvest. That’s a real Chinese proverb, you know.