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skyring's review
4.0
This book opens as fireworks explode and a band plays in an American city. Don Watson is there, making some comments about America with an Australian's eye for the details that might escape the natives. Such as the fact that the crowd is entirely white - the others in the population are busy elsewhere. Save for a man picking up the refuse after the fireworks had ended and the band packed up.
This was my second reading of the book. Well, the first where I sat down and read it cover to cover - the previous occasion was on December when I drove the awesome (and paraplegic) world traveller Ken Haley down to Melbourne, and he read it to me as we cruised down the Hume Freeway. Some sections of this copy have Ken's proofreading marks - he has an eagle eye for detail!
This time, I read the location - the grassy field in front of the Kansas City Amtrak station - and I realised that this was one place in the world where I'd been. and Ken had not. Ken has climbed the leaning tower of Pisa on his buttocks, gazed out on antelopes in Namibia, and taken a ferry to the Faeroes, but he's a virgin in KC.
It was last year on Anzac Day (or dawn in Auckland anyway, it was the previous day in America) and Discoverylover and I found ourselves at the Kansas City World War One memorial. A grand affair, it had columns and ramparts and pools and plaques. And a grassy slope stretching down to the railway station. We browsed through the museum gift shop, not having time to look at the museum itself, and bought a few trinkets. The big Kansas City mug lost its handle in transit and new holds the family toothbrushes, so I am reminded of the day on a daily basis.
I like KC. And Des Moines where we spent that night, wrangling over the pronunciation until we sought a local who could tell us whether it was pronounced in the French manner or not. "What's the name of this place?" we asked and she replied, slowly saying, "Buuuuurrr gerrrrr Kingggggg."
And San Francisco and Santa Monica where Route 66 ends and Chicago where it begins, and I even got caught up in the same anti-choice rally through Washington DC that Watson mentions. Same massive throng of people, different year. But they all seemed to know each other. It was a continuing celebration, and if they ever achieve their aim, they will be disappointed to miss their annual get-together.
There are many places and things in America to love. The Mojave. The inspiring words of Lincoln and Jefferson, who founded the world's first modern democracy in a time when every other nation had a monarch. Jefferson founded it, Lincoln ensured that it endured. The museums on the Mall. The manners, the food, the sense of history, the mighty highways.
And there are the other things. The homeless people sleeping in the snow. The huge gap between rich and poor. The immense machinery devoted to keeping people locked up. The ranting of fundamentalist preachers. The lack of any safety net to help people when they get into trouble. The cheerful corruption as the legislatures draw and redraw the electoral boundaries and refine the suffrage laws to diminish those who might vote against them.
We visited New Orleans, a year or two after the cyclone, and got a hug from the lovely black lady at "A Diner Named Desire" on Bourbon Street. The food, the fun, the atmosphere there was exhilarating. The next day, we headed east, past a mighty wasteland of undead - or undrowned - suburbs.
Don Watson looks at America with a cynical eye. He takes a few words, a sign, a blast on the radio, mingles them with the passing landscape, and travels through modern America. I loved Ken for reading this book, and I loved Don for writing it. He says things that need to be said. He says them in a way that is lyrical, pointed, entertaining and insightful. He looks at the land with a kindness that escapes Bill Bryson, but he doesn't hold back.
It's odd, but the Americans I've met have all been the most loving and loveable people. I wonder how on earth these gentle creatures ever managed to set up a state where so many are slaves in all but name. A mother is jailed for falsifying her address so that her child may attend a decent school. A teenager is sent away for years in prison for some trivial possession of marijuana - and is then denied the vote when he is released after his best years are gone in pointless boredom and senseless violence.
America, Land of the Free?
This book is the companion to all the guidebooks that describe Disneyland or Fall in Vermont. It is necessary reading for the tourist who wants to take it all in, not just the scenery.
This was my second reading of the book. Well, the first where I sat down and read it cover to cover - the previous occasion was on December when I drove the awesome (and paraplegic) world traveller Ken Haley down to Melbourne, and he read it to me as we cruised down the Hume Freeway. Some sections of this copy have Ken's proofreading marks - he has an eagle eye for detail!
This time, I read the location - the grassy field in front of the Kansas City Amtrak station - and I realised that this was one place in the world where I'd been. and Ken had not. Ken has climbed the leaning tower of Pisa on his buttocks, gazed out on antelopes in Namibia, and taken a ferry to the Faeroes, but he's a virgin in KC.
It was last year on Anzac Day (or dawn in Auckland anyway, it was the previous day in America) and Discoverylover and I found ourselves at the Kansas City World War One memorial. A grand affair, it had columns and ramparts and pools and plaques. And a grassy slope stretching down to the railway station. We browsed through the museum gift shop, not having time to look at the museum itself, and bought a few trinkets. The big Kansas City mug lost its handle in transit and new holds the family toothbrushes, so I am reminded of the day on a daily basis.
I like KC. And Des Moines where we spent that night, wrangling over the pronunciation until we sought a local who could tell us whether it was pronounced in the French manner or not. "What's the name of this place?" we asked and she replied, slowly saying, "Buuuuurrr gerrrrr Kingggggg."
And San Francisco and Santa Monica where Route 66 ends and Chicago where it begins, and I even got caught up in the same anti-choice rally through Washington DC that Watson mentions. Same massive throng of people, different year. But they all seemed to know each other. It was a continuing celebration, and if they ever achieve their aim, they will be disappointed to miss their annual get-together.
There are many places and things in America to love. The Mojave. The inspiring words of Lincoln and Jefferson, who founded the world's first modern democracy in a time when every other nation had a monarch. Jefferson founded it, Lincoln ensured that it endured. The museums on the Mall. The manners, the food, the sense of history, the mighty highways.
And there are the other things. The homeless people sleeping in the snow. The huge gap between rich and poor. The immense machinery devoted to keeping people locked up. The ranting of fundamentalist preachers. The lack of any safety net to help people when they get into trouble. The cheerful corruption as the legislatures draw and redraw the electoral boundaries and refine the suffrage laws to diminish those who might vote against them.
We visited New Orleans, a year or two after the cyclone, and got a hug from the lovely black lady at "A Diner Named Desire" on Bourbon Street. The food, the fun, the atmosphere there was exhilarating. The next day, we headed east, past a mighty wasteland of undead - or undrowned - suburbs.
Don Watson looks at America with a cynical eye. He takes a few words, a sign, a blast on the radio, mingles them with the passing landscape, and travels through modern America. I loved Ken for reading this book, and I loved Don for writing it. He says things that need to be said. He says them in a way that is lyrical, pointed, entertaining and insightful. He looks at the land with a kindness that escapes Bill Bryson, but he doesn't hold back.
It's odd, but the Americans I've met have all been the most loving and loveable people. I wonder how on earth these gentle creatures ever managed to set up a state where so many are slaves in all but name. A mother is jailed for falsifying her address so that her child may attend a decent school. A teenager is sent away for years in prison for some trivial possession of marijuana - and is then denied the vote when he is released after his best years are gone in pointless boredom and senseless violence.
America, Land of the Free?
This book is the companion to all the guidebooks that describe Disneyland or Fall in Vermont. It is necessary reading for the tourist who wants to take it all in, not just the scenery.
hickey_mt's review
4.0
Read this while undertaking my own American journey. Simultaneously loved it, because it's an engaging read, but loathed it because it served as such a stark reminder of how limited my own writing talent is compared with that of someone in whom it abounds!
edgeworth's review
3.0
America holds a fascinating sway for Australians - for foreigners in general, certainly, but more so for an English-speaking nation with little history and a feeble culture. I grew up watching the Simpsons, eating at McDonalds, reading Calvin and Hobbes, going to see Hollywood blockbusters and playing Grand Theft Auto. For me, names like "California" and "New York" are on par with "Narnia" and "Oz;" equally fantastic and unreachable.
And yet there is a vehement anti-American streak running through Australian culture; perhaps a kneejerk reaction against our children being bred as quasi-Americans, or a way to compensate for our own inferiority complex, or simply the fact that most of the world, by and large, dislikes America. This creates a paradox, one which Australian journalist Don Watson tasked himself with exploring:
On The United States of America my senses swing like a door with no latch. They are moved by fierce gusts and imperceptible zephyrs. Love and loathing come and go in about the same proportion. But then, one rages about one's own siblings from time to time, and one's own country: it is not rational, in the main. Yet there had been a time when anti-Americanism took on a gleam of reason. As earnest student radicals in the late 1960s, we saw the thread that joined the vicious white mobs of the South to the very foundations of the republic - because we learned that such founders of American democracy as Washington and Jefferson took slaves. We learned what we took to be the real truth about the Indian Wars, the Mexican Wars and the Monroe Doctrine, and it persuaded us that Vietnam was part of a pattern which, when you looked at it hard, revealed IMPERIALISM.
But just as we were thinking it was in the "nature' of America to be brutal, racist and imperialistic, a paradox appeared. The Freedom Marchers had been American. Martin Luther King was American. Sidney Perelmen was American. Mark Twain was American. Portnoy was American. Louis Armstrong, Bob Dylan, William Appleman Williams, Herbert Marcuse and Robert Crumb were all American. Our jeans were American. The most articulate critics of America - the most articulate people on earth, and the most liberal - were American. The America of my most avid anti-American phase was the America of my first rational adult heroes. The paradox, greatly modified though it is, animates me still.
America itself is a paradox. It is a country responsible for the lion's share of the great technological and scientific breakthroughs of the 20th century, yet a country where evolution is widely disbelieved and the vast majority of the population is religious. It is a country that, in spite of its Christian values, executes convicts by the truckload and craves a war every twenty years or so. It is a country full of people who call for "smaller government" while supporting the erosion of civil liberties. None of this is this a new phenomenon; the phrase "all men are born equal" was coined by slaveowners.
It is on this paradox that Watson bases his book, part travelogue and part social commentary. His journey takes place in 2005 and 2006, beginning in Katrina-devastated New Orleans and spanning a very respectable chunk of the country, crossing back and forth almost as much as Jack Kerouac in "On The Road." There are several recurring themes - race relations, the plight of America's underclass, the pervasive influence of Christianity, the political polarity. Watson is a fine writer and an intelligent scholar, and while "American Journeys" can be tedious at times, one is certainly never short of food for thought.
For a book supposedly about the Great American Paradox, however - which would mean both the good and the bad - "American Journeys" paints a very bleak picture. Black Americans continue to occupy a low socio-economic rung. The prison-industrial complex leaves penitentiaries overflowing with inmates. Violence seems ingrained in the history and the culture. There is no universal healthcare, the state values the rights of employers over employees, and the minimum wage is appallingly low - many people live day-to-day, dollar-to-dollar, teetering above the poverty line. The political sphere is rife with slander, pettiness, and unbelievable ignorance.
Watson mentions only two arguments in favour of America. The first (and minor) one is the kindness and friendliness of its individual citizens, which I'll come back to in a moment. The second - a major theme which he bases his entire conclusion around - is American freedom.
Freedom is such an old chestnut of American rhetoric that it does not impress outsiders as perhaps it should. The more the president speaks of it, the less meaning it registers... And yet, when one travels in America, the chestnut sheds at least some of its shell. You come to see that, to Americans, freedom means something that we incurable collectivists do not quite understand; and that they know freedom in ways that we do not. Freedom is the country's sacred state. Freedom is what must be protected. All over, they will tell you what is wrong with America, but freedom is the one thing they think right. And whatever the insults to my social democratic senses, that is what I find irresistable about the place - the almost guilty, adolescent feeling that in this place a person can do what he wants. He can grow absurdly rich; he can hunt a mountain lion; he can harbour the most fantastic ideas; he can shoot someone. He can commune with God and nature, buy anything he wants, pay anyone for any service and at any fee. He can be a social outcast or even a prisoner and yet, being American, believe that he is free.
If I am American, I am as free as a person can be. If I am free, I can do - or dream of doing - all the things it is in my nature to do or to dream; no other place on Earth need interest me. So long as I am guaranteed this freedom, I will forgive the things my country does that are not in my nature or my dreams. I will be "spared all the care of thinking about them." This is, of course, unless my country or some other place threatens freedom.
This comes completely out of the left field in the afterword, as though Watson suddenly realised he'd written a comprehensive tome detailing every one of America's flaws and felt compelled to balance it out somehow. It feels quite hollow when he has been told numerous times throughout the book, by taxi drivers and barmen and retirees and countless others, that America is a unique stronghold of freedom - and which he counters every time with the plain and simple fact that dozens of other countries are equally free. More free, perhaps, given the current American penchant for trading in civil liberties for security.
The lasting impression I got from the book (one that I mostly already held) was that America is, among Western countries, an extremely dysfunctional nation. A fascinating place, yes, when held at arm's length and viewed through the lens of movies and video games, and a place I wish to visit. But not a place where I would like to permanently live, or raise a family. Not a healthy society.
I probably shouldn't cast judgement on a country I've never been to, only experienced (a lot, mind you) through popular culture. But I'll do it anyway. I think that, under my personal definition of "great," America is far from being the greatest nation on earth. I think it is nonetheless the most interesting nation on Earth, by a long shot. I think it's important to separate people from their governments; I've met many Americans in my time, and found, as Watson did, that they're quite friendly and likeable. I have nothing but disdain for Australians (invariably, Australians who've never actually met an American) who accuse American citizens of being arrogant and rude and stupid - without a shred of self-awareness. It's one thing to criticise the sweeping history of the American nation/government's brutality; quite another thing to generalise 300 million people.
I think that while America has many flaws, there are plenty of great things about it... but that none of those great things are absent in the other nations of the Western world.
I think that while these other Western nations may not seem to have as many severe flaws as America does, that may just be because we are smaller and quieter and less populous. I think that Australia or Europe or Canada would be equally liable to sabre-rattling and imperialism, were any one of us the most powerful nation in the world.
I think that, while my beliefs about America may be naive or uninformed, at least I'm fucking consistent and lucid with them, unlike Don Watson.
Overall, "American Journeys" makes a lot of interesting arguments about aspects of America, but ultimately fails to make any kind of cohesive statement on the country as a whole, other than the bizarrely uncharacteristic afterword that suggests Watson felt a book about America would be incomplete without a big stirring speech about trademarked American Freedom - a myth he has previously debunked. (A myth that is self-evidently debunked, for that matter.)
That's okay, I suppose. America has been the defining cultural, political and economic juggernaut all over the world for nearly a century, and will remain so in the English-speaking world for a long time to come. You can't wrap your head around it by taking a few train rides and writing a book, let alone by reading that book from your distant home in suburban Perth. I doubt I'll ever understand a place as powerful, dynamic, intense and loud as America, but if my life goes to plan I'll be arriving there sometime next year, and I'll see things for myself.
And yet there is a vehement anti-American streak running through Australian culture; perhaps a kneejerk reaction against our children being bred as quasi-Americans, or a way to compensate for our own inferiority complex, or simply the fact that most of the world, by and large, dislikes America. This creates a paradox, one which Australian journalist Don Watson tasked himself with exploring:
On The United States of America my senses swing like a door with no latch. They are moved by fierce gusts and imperceptible zephyrs. Love and loathing come and go in about the same proportion. But then, one rages about one's own siblings from time to time, and one's own country: it is not rational, in the main. Yet there had been a time when anti-Americanism took on a gleam of reason. As earnest student radicals in the late 1960s, we saw the thread that joined the vicious white mobs of the South to the very foundations of the republic - because we learned that such founders of American democracy as Washington and Jefferson took slaves. We learned what we took to be the real truth about the Indian Wars, the Mexican Wars and the Monroe Doctrine, and it persuaded us that Vietnam was part of a pattern which, when you looked at it hard, revealed IMPERIALISM.
But just as we were thinking it was in the "nature' of America to be brutal, racist and imperialistic, a paradox appeared. The Freedom Marchers had been American. Martin Luther King was American. Sidney Perelmen was American. Mark Twain was American. Portnoy was American. Louis Armstrong, Bob Dylan, William Appleman Williams, Herbert Marcuse and Robert Crumb were all American. Our jeans were American. The most articulate critics of America - the most articulate people on earth, and the most liberal - were American. The America of my most avid anti-American phase was the America of my first rational adult heroes. The paradox, greatly modified though it is, animates me still.
America itself is a paradox. It is a country responsible for the lion's share of the great technological and scientific breakthroughs of the 20th century, yet a country where evolution is widely disbelieved and the vast majority of the population is religious. It is a country that, in spite of its Christian values, executes convicts by the truckload and craves a war every twenty years or so. It is a country full of people who call for "smaller government" while supporting the erosion of civil liberties. None of this is this a new phenomenon; the phrase "all men are born equal" was coined by slaveowners.
It is on this paradox that Watson bases his book, part travelogue and part social commentary. His journey takes place in 2005 and 2006, beginning in Katrina-devastated New Orleans and spanning a very respectable chunk of the country, crossing back and forth almost as much as Jack Kerouac in "On The Road." There are several recurring themes - race relations, the plight of America's underclass, the pervasive influence of Christianity, the political polarity. Watson is a fine writer and an intelligent scholar, and while "American Journeys" can be tedious at times, one is certainly never short of food for thought.
For a book supposedly about the Great American Paradox, however - which would mean both the good and the bad - "American Journeys" paints a very bleak picture. Black Americans continue to occupy a low socio-economic rung. The prison-industrial complex leaves penitentiaries overflowing with inmates. Violence seems ingrained in the history and the culture. There is no universal healthcare, the state values the rights of employers over employees, and the minimum wage is appallingly low - many people live day-to-day, dollar-to-dollar, teetering above the poverty line. The political sphere is rife with slander, pettiness, and unbelievable ignorance.
Watson mentions only two arguments in favour of America. The first (and minor) one is the kindness and friendliness of its individual citizens, which I'll come back to in a moment. The second - a major theme which he bases his entire conclusion around - is American freedom.
Freedom is such an old chestnut of American rhetoric that it does not impress outsiders as perhaps it should. The more the president speaks of it, the less meaning it registers... And yet, when one travels in America, the chestnut sheds at least some of its shell. You come to see that, to Americans, freedom means something that we incurable collectivists do not quite understand; and that they know freedom in ways that we do not. Freedom is the country's sacred state. Freedom is what must be protected. All over, they will tell you what is wrong with America, but freedom is the one thing they think right. And whatever the insults to my social democratic senses, that is what I find irresistable about the place - the almost guilty, adolescent feeling that in this place a person can do what he wants. He can grow absurdly rich; he can hunt a mountain lion; he can harbour the most fantastic ideas; he can shoot someone. He can commune with God and nature, buy anything he wants, pay anyone for any service and at any fee. He can be a social outcast or even a prisoner and yet, being American, believe that he is free.
If I am American, I am as free as a person can be. If I am free, I can do - or dream of doing - all the things it is in my nature to do or to dream; no other place on Earth need interest me. So long as I am guaranteed this freedom, I will forgive the things my country does that are not in my nature or my dreams. I will be "spared all the care of thinking about them." This is, of course, unless my country or some other place threatens freedom.
This comes completely out of the left field in the afterword, as though Watson suddenly realised he'd written a comprehensive tome detailing every one of America's flaws and felt compelled to balance it out somehow. It feels quite hollow when he has been told numerous times throughout the book, by taxi drivers and barmen and retirees and countless others, that America is a unique stronghold of freedom - and which he counters every time with the plain and simple fact that dozens of other countries are equally free. More free, perhaps, given the current American penchant for trading in civil liberties for security.
The lasting impression I got from the book (one that I mostly already held) was that America is, among Western countries, an extremely dysfunctional nation. A fascinating place, yes, when held at arm's length and viewed through the lens of movies and video games, and a place I wish to visit. But not a place where I would like to permanently live, or raise a family. Not a healthy society.
I probably shouldn't cast judgement on a country I've never been to, only experienced (a lot, mind you) through popular culture. But I'll do it anyway. I think that, under my personal definition of "great," America is far from being the greatest nation on earth. I think it is nonetheless the most interesting nation on Earth, by a long shot. I think it's important to separate people from their governments; I've met many Americans in my time, and found, as Watson did, that they're quite friendly and likeable. I have nothing but disdain for Australians (invariably, Australians who've never actually met an American) who accuse American citizens of being arrogant and rude and stupid - without a shred of self-awareness. It's one thing to criticise the sweeping history of the American nation/government's brutality; quite another thing to generalise 300 million people.
I think that while America has many flaws, there are plenty of great things about it... but that none of those great things are absent in the other nations of the Western world.
I think that while these other Western nations may not seem to have as many severe flaws as America does, that may just be because we are smaller and quieter and less populous. I think that Australia or Europe or Canada would be equally liable to sabre-rattling and imperialism, were any one of us the most powerful nation in the world.
I think that, while my beliefs about America may be naive or uninformed, at least I'm fucking consistent and lucid with them, unlike Don Watson.
Overall, "American Journeys" makes a lot of interesting arguments about aspects of America, but ultimately fails to make any kind of cohesive statement on the country as a whole, other than the bizarrely uncharacteristic afterword that suggests Watson felt a book about America would be incomplete without a big stirring speech about trademarked American Freedom - a myth he has previously debunked. (A myth that is self-evidently debunked, for that matter.)
That's okay, I suppose. America has been the defining cultural, political and economic juggernaut all over the world for nearly a century, and will remain so in the English-speaking world for a long time to come. You can't wrap your head around it by taking a few train rides and writing a book, let alone by reading that book from your distant home in suburban Perth. I doubt I'll ever understand a place as powerful, dynamic, intense and loud as America, but if my life goes to plan I'll be arriving there sometime next year, and I'll see things for myself.
steve_h's review
4.0
I thought it have a great picture of the US, both its positives and negatives, all the while using beautiful language to construct visual images of the world around.
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