Letter from America
Full of frontier spirit, Americans arrested – and befriended – me
A perennial mystery about America is how a nation that rightly prides itself on friendliness and abundant, generous hospitality can be capable of such irrational spasms of anger, aggression and violence.
The people who, after all, invented saccharine sentiment with ‘Have a nice day’ are more likely than most to make sure you have a nasty one if you so much hint that you might ‘step outta line’. People are nice; officials can be lethal. Anyone who has negotiated the terrifying ordeal of immigration at JFK Airport will know the feeling. The signage alone, in the ‘Walk’/‘don’t Walk’ imperious brevity of nearby Manhattan, reminds visitors of their inferior status. Everywhere there are official notices barking orders to do this and not do that.
Foreigners are unashamedly described as ‘aliens’. After nervously handing in their landing card promising not to subvert the US Constitution – ‘Sole purpose of visit’, one British wag is said to have written before, no doubt, being frogmarched back to the plane – visitors are treated as such, fingerprinted and brusquely interviewed by blackuniformed officials determined to show who is boss.
Yet drive only 50 miles inland from the coastal cities and the default mode of the American in the street is kindness itself. This Jekyll-and-hyde aspect of the US character is exemplified by the current presidential campaign, with the incumbent in the role of the triggerhappy marshal and the challenger as the good ol’ boy chewing a straw on a fence.
My own experience of US authority is a mix of good and peculiar. I was once parked outside my home in Chevy Chase, an affluent suburb of Washington, DC, when the familiar, dreaded ‘whoop, whoop’ preceded the flashing blue lights of a police patrol vehicle pulling up behind me.
‘Don’t get out of the vehicle!’ boomed from the loudspeaker. ‘Put your hands on the wheel, where I can see them.’ The officer strolled over, hand on holster, to issue the command to see my driver’s licence which I suddenly remembered was in my wallet, 30 yards away across the front lawn.
‘I am terribly sorry, officer,’ I gabbled in as British an accent as I could muster. ‘I live here. I forgot to bring it with me – can I get it out of the house?’
‘DO NOT MOVE,’ came the reply. Within five minutes, a second patrol car arrived, I was removed from the car, slammed against it, frisked, cuffed and on my way to a cell at the local station. My wife collected me an hour later.
The other occasion was when my son was taken ill. Only minutes after our 911 call, half a dozen enormous and jovial firemen in full gear were trampling through our living room. Why the Fire Department, we asked?
‘We are always the first citizen responders – it’s historic,’ came the reply; the ambulance would be here in a minute.
With the US still in the Black Lives Matter semi-crisis after George Floyd’s killing and the centre of the liberal city of Portland, Oregon, still in the hands of the citizenry and a no-go area for cops, is time up for the heavy hand of US officialdom? And if so, why?
A South Carolinian lawyer friend says part of the reason for the lethality of US law enforcement is in response to a generalised culture of suspicion of big government, a fear of the ‘other’ or outsiders and a frontier fierceness in defending property rights.
‘In the South, the view was always to have as little to do with government as possible – it was there for the hard edge of society to keep those other people in line and to defend your property.
‘Furthermore,’ he added, ‘it was largely Southerners who pioneered the opening of the West and brought their culture there – a belief in the primacy of the individual and that government was merely a necessary evil.’
An academic paper from 2017, published in the American Journal of
Public Health, established a clear correlation between fatal police shootings and localities where firearm ownership was commonplace and unencumbered by restrictions.
In New England, where Second Amendment rights are most inhibited by background checks on gun ownership, police killings are 51 per cent lower than in the lowest quartile where guns are commonplace and easier to obtain. It is, at least in part, the police’s own fear of being shot at that leads them to shoot first and ask questions second.
All that said, it might just be that it is the same frontier spirit that makes Americans so overwhelmingly friendly and hospitable – a readiness to welcome the stranger as a necessary counterweight, if you like, to an in-built dislike of officialdom. It’s tough out there; you’d better come inside.
The proof of the pudding is in the travelling. In almost six weeks touring around the presidential primaries this year, I stayed in hotels for less than a week. The rest of the time I was a guest of supremely welcoming and generous hosts, each determined I should indeed ‘have a nice day’.
‘I was removed from the car, slammed against it, frisked and cuffed’