The USA

Personal reflection on the end of a love story

Just before I start, I want to post a quick update on my proposed serialised novel I plan to release every week here on Substack.

I have just finished the first 2 chapters. I’m going to write a few more before I start releasing it so that I can keep up a consistent release schedule for a couple of months.

I will update soon on how it’s all going.

But for now, back to the jolly old U.S of A.

I have had a long and generally very positive relationship with the United States of America. I have been exposed to American television and films since I was a toddler. American culture is part of British culture.

When I was 6 I wanted to be a cowboy. A small village in the British countryside was about as far removed from the Wild West as it’s possible to get, but I grew up watching the Lone Ranger for pities sake.

The Lone Ranger was so much more fun than anything made in England.

As an adult living in London, through happenstance I met with a small group of American expats who were big, (I’m talking physically big) loud, brash, confident and enormously entertaining.

I admired the way they would have no truck with the hidebound British class system. They would never bow and scrape if they met a lord, and they equally wouldn’t look down on a working class person because of their dress codes or accent.

Through those contacts I visited the USA for the first time back in 1987. During my 31 years before I stepped off the bus in the middle of Manhattan, I had seen countless movies made in America, many of them set in the Big Apple as it was once called.

Suddenly I was standing on a street in New York City, and there really were yellow cabs thundering past, and steam coming out of manhole covers, and homeless people, and huge towers, and incredible poverty, and offensive wealth, and incredible art and architecture, and horrific gaudy taste. An audio visual overload all the time, everywhere you looked.

We are all very aware that America has made thousands of legendary, amazing, challenging and brilliantly crafted films and I saw most of them. I was very strongly influenced by American culture.

And I was always an admirer of American engineering. The Boeing 747, the Ford Mustang, the Apollo program, the Empire State building, the Pontiac GTO, the Golden Gate bridge, the huge semi trucks with their glistening fuel tanks and monstrous belching exhaust pipes.

Wonderful, big, loud, confident and proud. It was impossible not to stare at these icons in awe.

During my 1987 visit I stayed with friends in upstate New York and was transported from loud, dangerous (in those days it really was pretty wild) Manhattan to an idyllic little town on banks of the Hudson River. The fire station, the court house, the town hall, the library, all surrounded by clapperboard houses where an honourable lawyer character played by Kevin Costner might live.

I later visited the West Coast. Seattle, loved it, Vancouver, magical and yes, I know it’s in Canada. Then Los Angeles, loved it less but an amazing place to visit. Then St Louis Missouri on the way back east, okay, just for a weekend, and an equally brief visit to Philadelphia. Incredible city, it felt properly old in the middle bit.

Over the past 30 plus years I have visited and indeed worked in the USA many times. Making the pilot of Red Dwarf USA in 1992, visits to enormous sci-fi conventions all over the place and then from 2001 to 2005 I worked in Los Angeles and all over California making episodes of Scrapheap Challenge and Junkyard Wars.

I went to all the best scrap heaps or junkyards and boy are they big. Americans love to throw stuff away. I have wandered along avenues of busted refrigerators, washing machines and tumble dryers piled as high as a 3 story house. Towers of old cars shimmering in the heat, massive fields of them as far as you could see.

I met incredibly talented engineers, I fired handguns in shooting ranges, ate burgers, drank ice cold beer and said sidewalk instead of pavement. USA baby, God, Guns and . . . I don’t know, whatever you want to add. It’s a free country, love it or leave it bud.

All that. The USA’s very attractive, powerful culture has been successfully exported all over the world. Their style and democratic freedom has been a beacon of hope in so many dark corners of the globe.

In the past couple of hundred years millions of people have escaped poverty, persecution, torture and sometimes certain death from hideously unpleasant regimes around the world and have settled and for the most part thrived in the USA.

It is a melting pot of cultures, of beliefs, of races and creeds and when at it’s best is proud of the fact that so many people want to live there.

How many people from anywhere on the planet are desperate to be allowed to live in Russia. Let’s be real, it’s near zero.

But since the Russian backed rise of the fanatical right in US politics, the whole flavour has changed. It has soured, it has lost its sheen. The USA is simply less attractive. I do not want to visit the USA. I’m very sad about it. Huge swathes of young American men whose main driving emotion is hatred, resentment and anger have come into the mainstream, and taken power.

We’ve seen glimpses of this vile attitude from within the White House and seriously, it is not a good look.

The world is already turning its back on the USA, for a while anyway. I know there will be many Americans who think that’s fine. Apparently we’ve all been ‘ripping off’ the USA for too long.

Strange, because we feel their overpowering culture is crushing ours, so we might be happy to be left alone for a few years.

It’s clear now that the bullying tactics of the current administration are an unexpected galvanising force, particularly in Europe. We are uniting and shifting allegiances and that might, in the long run, be very unfortunate for the USA.

Which really big, really wealthy and powerful country is ready to fill the void left by a country we once trusted as our ally?

It begins with C and it’s not Cyprus, although of course the Cypriots are all lovely.

The power vacuum will be filled though, in Europe it’s obvious the ally of the current US administration, Russia, is going to step up big time.

In Australasia, China is already so far ahead in terms of economic, military and technological power they have already taken over.

The brain dead introduction of tariffs is totally self defeating and deluded. I heard some tragically dumb republican woman recently saying that people in America buy European cars but no one in Europe buys American trucks. She said it’s not fair. She can’t understand why we don’t buy massive, heavy, expensive inefficient monsters like the Cadillac Escalade, the GMC Yukon XL or the Chevrolet Suburban, she said this is an example of the USA being ripped off.

Of course no one in Europe buys those ridiculous vehicles because they are so grossly obese, they won’t fit on European roads. Add to this the fact that she’s displaying the standard pitiful ignorance of the GOP by ignoring the massive elephant in my room. There is one American brand that has made huge inroads into the European market, you know the one.

Never before have so many people bought so many American cars as they have done in the last 10 years.

So I am genuinely sad to see what is happening in the once amazing country that I have admired for so long. When it comes to the hyper elite uber rich boys running the USA right now, the only thing the rest of us have in our favour, is biology.

They will die eventually. Some of them might spend billions delaying it a bit, they may even get to other planets and let’s hope they do, and soon. But they all will die and their ugly focus on their personal wealth above all else, not the wealth of society, not fairness, not anything approaching equality, that filthy religion they wallow in will, eventually, die with them.

The rest of us just have to hope we live long enough to witness their inevitable demise.

Fear not, it will come.