America

Man with cleft palette eats radioactive burger

The best part about America being the most overweight nation on the planet is that, boy, can America make superb beef burgers. God damnit, why do I have to be mean even when I’m being nice. I tell you, I should have called this blog “Things other people apart from me do badly”. That way I could be persistently negative and snipey without really making any constructive effort to remedy the situation, which is my favourite thing.

If you walk into a random bar in the United Kingdom and order a beef burger, you can guarantee some things about it. Firstly, it will be black and hard around the edges, as though it has been fried more than once in its tortured life. Second, it will be strangely soggy in the middle, as though it was finally put out of its misery in a microwave oven. If it’s an upscale bar, you’ll probably get a large piece of wizened-looking tomato to go along with it, and if it’s a really fancy joint then you’ll get a pickle. Generally a burger you bought in a British pub can be regarded as a good one if it’s possible to tell the meat from the bun.

The first time I ordered a burger in America, the waitress asked, “And how would you like your burger?” I peered back at her. “I beg your pardon?” “How would you like your burger, sir?” I tried to sneak a peak at the menu to see if I’d accidentally ordered the Kobe special. The waitress tried to help, “For example, sir, medium rare?” I looked at the waitress and back at the menu. A burger medium rare? Are you nuts? At that sort of temperature the eyeballs and toenails won’t even have melted. “Umm… medium,” I said, and waited for her to ask whether I’d like my chips cooked or not.

As to why Americans are so good at burgers, I can only assume that it comes down to the fact that America actually has a lot of space in it. A cow reared in America owns its own piece of land and has a tree-lined driveway and a hot tub. A cow reared in Europe is sharing a room with another cow in order to pay the exorbitant rent, and turning tricks in the evenings to make ends meet. She’d stop smoking if it wasn’t for the coke habit, which has made her udders practically disappear and left her gaunt and emaciated. How cows are supposed to cut coke with no fingers I’m not sure. This post needs some work to be believable, but it’s getting late now.

It's playtime, Sheryl

I can’t speak for the rest of the world here (well, I can, but it stands a high chance of being discovered to be false) but America has a much smarter approach to making you do your taxes than the UK does. In the UK you slave away all year, fill in your tax return, send it off and in a couple of months you either gain or lose a few quid. While you’re filling in the forms, you think about how the government are taking all this money that you worked so hard to make and spending it on gay marriage and old people. In America, you almost always get money back. This means that, whilst they don’t like form-filling any more than anyone else, Americans aren’t thinking the same stuff while they are sitting there writing down their social security numbers. They are actually thinking of the ride-on lawnmower, or the new flat-screen television, or the Sheryl Crow special edition real doll that they’re going to buy when the refund comes in. These are not necessarily the things that I personally thought about. I don’t have a lawn. I am also against neither gay marriage nor old people, just to nip that one in the bud.

Americans have something of a tradition about the place they choose to work. Regardless of their particular position in the company, they generally choose to work in places where they like the end product. Financiers in the software industry are gadget-junkies; delivery drivers in the pet food business have a house full of dogs. Hey, why work towards the creation of something you don’t care about?

In Britain, being excited about anything to do with work is gay. If you are interested in not looking gay, you should actively avoid any job which runs a risk of interesting you. If you’re bulemic and allergic to nuts, why not get a job in the food industry? You hate men? Get a job in a strip bar! If Stevie Wonder was British, he’d be a parachute stuntman.

Personally I rather enjoy being permanently curmudgeonly about work. However, this approach does leave the United Kingdom with a service industry which is almost entirely useless. Let me leave you with a typical conversation between a member of the public and an in-store customer service representative.

Salesman: Can I help you, sir?
Customer: Well, yes, actually, you can. About this hifi system -
Salesman: Ah yes, the C9000. Beautiful system, sir. Sound quality is truly astounding. Blows your mind, the sound quality on this -
Customer: I was wondering if it has a radio. I’m guessing it does, but I can’t see any buttons for it.
Salesman: Oh yes, sir. State of the art, the C9000.
Customer: So it has a radio?
Salesman: We can also do you a two year warranty on this one – if anything goes wrong, you can just bring it back here, no questions asked, and – well, you know the rest. Not that anything goes wrong with these things. I don’t think we’ve had a single one back this year.
[Salesman gives the stereo system an affectionate but firm pat on the top]
Customer: So it definitely has a radio?
Salesman: It’s got everything, this puppy. Sound quality is astounding.
Customer: Can you turn on the radio for me?
Salesman: Blows your mi – hmm. The radio?
Customer: Yes, can you turn on the radio? So I can hear the sound quality?
Salesman: Well yes, of course. Let me find the remote.
Customer: I don’t think it has a remote, actually.
Salesman: Of course, yes, I’m thinking of the C8000.
Customer: Actually, I don’t believe that one -
Salesman: All of the functions are available from behind this beautiful stainless steel sliding panel. See how smoothly that slides back? That’s quality right there.
[pause. Salesman gazes with reverence at stereo system]
Customer: The radio.
Salesman: Yes, amazing radio. Astounding sound quality.
Customer: The radio switches on from this panel?
Salesman: Look, I’ll let you in on something. It’s getting near the end of the month and my boss is really putting pressure on us to get the numbers up, so I think we can come to some sort of deal.
Customer: I’m unlikely to be interested unless it has a radio.
Salesman: Well sir, here we pride ourselves on our sixteen-day money-back risk-free guarantee. Do you know what that means, sir? It means that you can take it home, use it for two weeks, and if it turns out it doesn’t have a radio, you can put it back in its original packaging and bring it back here with no questions asked. Is that a deal, or is that a deal?

If I could put this one in bold, I would, as it’s possibly the most spectacular thing the Americans have ever done.

To me, landing on the moon was always something humans had done ages ago, and barely even in colour. I knew my parents had lived through the event but they never implied that it was an important part of their lives – it wasn’t nearly as important as, say, that time my great-grandfather drove his car through the back of the garage by mistake.

A while back I read Andy Chaikin’s splendid book, A Man on the Moon. The book is an amazing account of the Apollo programme and the moon landings – Andy Chaikin is British, so it’s pleasantly devoid of chants of “USA! USA!” and trite tales of how Neil Armstrong’s dog fell in love as soon as he landed, or similar such Independence Day-esque bollocks. It’s just an honest account of an extraordinary feat of mankind.

The extraordinary feat, if it can be summarised, was this. In 1959, America had no rockets other than missiles. In 1969, they landed someone on the moon, had them potter around for a while poking at stuff and brought them back again. Of course there are all sorts of technological wonders going on here, but perhaps the most interesting part of this is in the numbers. The moon is 385,000km from earth. That is one fuck of a long way, whether you have a rocket or not. In 2005-dollars, this programme cost the taxpayer $140bn. That is the entire GDP of Pakistan and represents a thousand dollars for every American citizen. One fifth of the world population watched the live transmission of the first moonwalk. At its peak, 400,000 people were directly employed by the Apollo programme.

Every so often, we as human beings need these sort of dangerous, expensive, unjustifiable follies to be brought down upon our country by those in power. We need this to feel like we’re progressing as a species, even if on most days we are more worried about traffic and healthcare. Responsibility to the people through democracy makes things like this harder – my ancestors will sadly not be touring Castle Obama a thousand years down the line – but Kennedy proved that it doesn’t make it impossible. When the people have a genuinely inspirational common goal, a nation can unite behind it and enjoy a collective euphoria and sense of purpose so splendid that they hadn’t realised it existed.

It strikes me that the Kennedy-esque aura that surrounds Obama right now and the downturn of the economy is going to leave a situation ripe for a “grand plan” when America’s finances start to pick up.Once he’s pulled out of Iraq and turned it into a new bloody dictatorship, the American people are going to be clamouring for something less horrific and more exciting to pull together and spend money on. Ten years seems like a good watermark (it worked for Kennedy) but what to do? Tallest building? Man on Mars? Zero dependence on fossil fuel?