Getting Rid Of Misconceptions

Americans know an awful lot about Britain and Ireland. They have seen the royal weddings on breakfast television and bombed RUC police stations on the nightly news. Avidly they watch the Dickensian horrors of Our Mutual Friend, delight in the decadent affluence of Brideshead Revisited or The Buccaneers and thrill to the period pieces of Agatha Christie’s rural detective mysteries. The Sherlock Holmes stories forewarn a further generation about London fog while Blott on the Landscape confirms stereotypes of a perverted, class-conscious old world. No wonder they loved Four Weddings and a Funeral! It’s hardly surprising the real Britain often comes as a great surprise to American visitors.

European misconceptions about the USA may be just as misleading, for our images come from a steady diet of musicals and horror films, cop adventure shows and such modern yarns as the Die Hard movies. Unfortunately these media images repel as many people as they attract. Endless violence, materialism, urban sprawl and drugs seem to cloud many people’s views, as do equally misleading images of easy wealth, limitless opportunity and beautiful weather.

Of course, each stereotype can be substantiated. Commercial television can seem impossibly overloaded with adverts, the USA is considerably more violent than Britain or Northern Ireland, and though cheap the New York city subway is as chaotic and undercapitalised as London’s underground. But if you are prepared to look more widely the stereotypes can be put into some kind of perspective. After all the USA is almost a continent, with some 250,000,000 people of every kind. Knowing a little about where to go and what to avoid, what to buy and what not to, can make all the difference.

For most would-be visitors the outstanding feature will probably be the USA’s great variety of people and places, plus the incredible extremes of wealth.

The Usa: Discovering People And Places

The USA is about half of North America, one of the world’s major continents, over 9 million square kilometres (some 3 million square miles). Today the USA stretches beyond the mainland 48 states to the Arctic wastes of northern Alaska and the tropical forests of Hawaii. There is also one Federal district (Washington DC), plus the Caribbean Commonwealth of Puerto Rico and assorted island colonies. Being mostly temperate but with little of the polar or equatorial extremes found in other countries such as Canada or Russia on the one hand or Brazil or the Congo on the other, the USA is one of the most fertile slices of any continent anywhere.

North–south V. East–west

During the nineteenth century the newly independent USA spread westwards from its original colonial toe-hold along the Atlantic coast, over the mountains and rivers of the continental interior to the Pacific. This produces an essential feature of American geography: the mountains, rivers, weather systems and even migrating birds tend to move north and south, but the USA spreads against and across the grain. The attempt to forge a great north–south trading system to exploit the lay of the land and the southward movement of the main river system failed when the Mississippi River lost out to the growing east–west railway networks last century. Nevertheless, the overall physical structure of the USA remains north–south. But this physical variety is only a start.

Physical, Social And Economic Variety

Despite the superficial similarities of a common currency, a federal constitution, and one legal tongue, English, the physical (geographical) variety is compounded by a social variety and economic variety. The native peoples spoke many languages. The variety of lifestyles echoed that of the physical environment within which they lived. But the great eras of European settlement imposed a degree of variety far beyond that of the natural order. Imperial Spain moved in from the south-west, Russia from the north-west, Britain and France from the north-east. As in Africa their territorial carve-up paid scant regard to the original inhabitants. Territories were swapped for reasons of big-power politics. France was defeated by its British rival, but left behind a French-speaking, Roman Catholic population to the north of the USA’s north-eastern border, but only after its explorers, trappers, traders and priests had opened up the whole continent, teaching the native peoples such games as divide and rule, drunkenness and a desire for European goods. The British retired north of the Great Lakes, south to the Caribbean islands, or the Atlantic islands of Newfoundland, the Bahamas and Bermuda, or changed into Americans turning their back upon Europe as elsewhere would the Dutch of South Africa. Russia sold up for cash.

The vastness of the American continent is beyond our island imaginings. Crossing from New York to Los Angeles means crossing time zones and a score of state lines each with their own police, drinking laws and parliaments. Some execute killers, other let them rot in gaol. Some states are hot and wet as a steam room, others dry as the Sahara. Snow falls while flowers bloom. And beyond Los Angeles lies the Pacific Ocean where Hawaii lies as far to the west as Ireland does to the East of New England. The vastness is not that of unmitigated sameness. Quite the contrary – the topography changes in every direction, though in the midst of the plains the eye can refute this intellectual notion, so flat it seems. The rivers are trapped in deep gorges, winding across wide plains taking hundreds of miles of lazy turns to cover merely ten, pollution ridden, full of white water tourists, or disappearing into desert wastes. So vast is the land that it covers an expanse from alligator-ridden bayous along the Gulf of Mexico to permafrost deserts along the Arctic Ocean. Hardwoods give way to farming where once was only prairie grass. Desert threatens to spread again, like the African Sahel, into the southern high plains. Along the Pacific the earth moves, Mount St Helens spews forth a vision of hell, and sitting on the Pacific ring of fire has Angelenos awaiting the shuddering earth that may yet destroy the seventh largest economy ever known, that of California.