A Portrait of America — By Someone Who Has Never Been
America is a concept as much as a country, and its connotations are changing for the worse.
We all feel that we know America — even those of us who have never been.
I, like many in Britain, view America as both a country and a concept, a notion that imposes itself on every aspect of daily life, from the brands we buy to the films we enjoy.
American culture is its greatest export, but it is a vision made of broad strokes, of stereotypes without nuance. For the last seventy years, it has also been one of envy for those of us on the outside looking in.
America is the prism through which Britons’ world is framed; American celebrities, American musicians, American actors, and American politicians — they form as much the basis of our popular imagination as Britain’s own.
America as Britain conceives it is a country of wondrous supersize. Of skyscrapers and of Cadillacs; of plates of food piled high and larger-than-life characters.
It is a place of shopping malls the size of cities and states larger than most European countries. Even nature bows to America’s penchant for enormity: the Grand Canyon, Mount Rushmore, the Great Lakes.
