TheBanyanTree: Wherein Peter invades the USA 1

[Peter Macinnis]

"O wad some Power the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!"
-- Robbie Burns

"The fish will be the last to discover water."
-- JS Bruner

I don't know how many parts this will be in, but it will take some time, 
because I have hit the ground running, back here in Australia.  I have 
just spent 16 days getting to and from a conference in Oxford, 
Mississippi, where I was opening speaker in a symposium run by the 
Southern Foodways Alliance. The theme was sugar, and I wrote a world 
history of sugar which is distributed but not published in the USA.  A 
more recent book on poisons and poisoners HAS been published there, but 
more of that anon, perhaps.

The trip began atrociously, got much better, and ended on a dismal note, 
but that was my own silly fault for flying with United.

I am, to say the least of it, canny about travel (if we leave out some 
of my choices of airline). Flying from Sydney to the USA would entail 
major internal disruption due to jet lag (going east is worse than going 
west), so I decided to stage over in Hawaii (four hours away in time 
terms, ten flying hours) and have a look around.  There were museums on 
my list, and volcanoes as well -- and I was not unaware that this would 
make that leg of the journey undeniably tax-deductible.

We flew out of Sydney at 10 am Sunday, arrived in Honolulu close to 
midnight Saturday, I slept and got up to have Sunday all over again.  We 
had, you see, crossed the International Date Line.

My first (and worst) experience of my second visit to the Land of the 
Free was a young woman with a 45 on her hip, an IQ to match, and several 
gallons of attitude.  She was waiting to find a suitable victim, and I 
fitted the bill.  The first problem arose when she discovered that the 
visa waiver card from my last visit was still there -- United Airlines 
had failed to collect it, but according to her, the fact that it was 
stapled to my passport meant I had never left the USA, and must be ejected.

I should explain that Australia is seen as an ally, so we get in under a 
visa-waiver program: no visa is required for us, but these morons in the 
front line have the right to bar us from entry and/or deport us.  I said 
it was the fault of the airline, that I was clearly arriving and so must 
have left, and suggested that if I had been dodgy, I would have known to 
remove it.  Aha, you could see her thinking, as she chewed her gum or 
her cud, a smart-arse!

I explained that I was headed for the University of Mississippi to give 
a talk at a symposium, and she seized on that -- I was here to work! 
Foolishly I explained that no, I wasn't working, that there would be a 
contribution to my costs (I dodged mentioning free accommodation or 
other stuff), and she then announced in tones of triumph that I was 
working for a US company.  No, I said, I was appearing at the University 
of Mississippi, but I was not working, and that appearance was one 
morning out of 16 days.  Luckily, I used the key word "honorarium" which 
seemed to close off some of her opportunities to shaft me, but she was 
far from finished.

Pointing at the form with an extensively-gnawed and grubby fingernail, 
she asserted that as I was talking about two of my books, I was engaging 
in trade, when I had said on the declaration that I was not.  I had 
lied!  This is a classic trick in law-enforcement: get the suspected 
perp on any minor technicality, and the perp is guilty and on the mat 
and pinned, unable to squirm.

Back and forth it went, but in the end, I was given a clear ultimatum -- 
either I agreed with this idiot that I was wrong, that the University of 
Mississippi was a US company, or I was sent home. Under the pressure of 
circumstances, I agreed, and so I was allowed through, wondering "if 
they treat their allies like this, how do they treat their enemies?" 
There was worse to come, because I was on my way to Waikiki, and it was 
about this time that I started thinking about national cultures and how 
they vary.

Border keepers are generally unpleasant, wherever they come from, even 
Australian ones -- it is probably a tool they use to flush out the truly 
Bad Guys, but I was now seething with anti-American indignation.  That, 
I suspect, is not as uncommon as we might like -- and I wonder: can the 
world afford to have large numbers of educated foreigners conceiving a 
distaste for the USA and all it stands for?

I regard myself as friendly towards the US (while having reservations 
about the current administration).  I can be realistic/pragmatic about 
certain political decisions, but there is a desperate need for a wider 
cultural awareness in those USians who represent their nation. In short, 
I regard a strong and aware USA as essential to the way we live -- but I 
believe it is hard for those in the US to see themselves as others see 
them.  They can see their failings about as well as we see ours, which 
means not at all.  It's the fish discovering water thing.

The front-liners, the contact people, need the sorts of training that my 
staff in a large Sydney museum, used to get as a matter of course -- 
quick immersions in the expectations of other cultures, both those in 
the community, and those in the tourist market, so we could understand 
their perceived "oddness".  After that, I could accept Japanese 
photo-fiends who howled with amusement when they saw me in our local 
tourist-hole with a child on my back, and who then obtrusively and 
obsessively snapped us -- but I was on home ground for that, and now I 
was surrounded by foreignness.

Waikiki did not help my attitude, though let me say that things got much 
better.  Waikiki is a tacky, plastic, Disneyfied hole, only marginally 
better than a few tourist holes I know in Australia. There were no 
saving graces, and the only concession to Hawaiian culture was the use 
of "aloha", "mahalo", grass skirts (which are actually manufactured in 
Micronesia, far to the west) and ukuleles.

It was at this point that I realised that tourism ANYWHERE inevitably 
reduces cultures to three things, mostly an unusual food, funny clothes 
and funny music. As an example, Scotland is reduced to haggis, kilts and 
bagpipes, France is reduced to escargots, berets and the musette 
accordion.  People who work in the tourist industry do not go beyond 
that stereotype in presenting their own culture, and like the border 
guards, they have no awareness that there are different cultures, or 
even that they differ.

When the boy at the hotel desk in Waikiki told me where the ice machine 
was, I thanked him and explained that Australians don't usually bother 
too much about ice machines.  How did I know about this US trait?  Well 
a totally unpleasant New Hampshire mall developer was on a tour with us 
some years ago, and he got into a hissy fit because our four-star hotel 
in Budapest had no ice machines, and another nice American (the sort who 
understands other cultures) explained it to me.  He said the solution 
was to go on tours using two-star hotels, where such tantrums were 
unlikely -- like us, he was batting out of his class, and thirsted for 
simpler fare.

So Waikiki was the low point, the time when I despaired of seeing any 
real American culture.  I was wrong, but in the process, I think I 
stumbled on a profound truth: tourism is bad for international 
understanding. Meeting in the confines of the tourism industry, you are 
exposed to those whose job is to meet the lowest common denominator and 
meet your expectations. As a tourist, you develop a familiarity of the 
most superficial kind with the local culture, as it is packaged, and 
that leads inevitably to an unjustified contempt for that depauperate 
construct.

The other side of the evil that tourism brings is exposure to the Ugly 
Australian, American, Englishman, Japanese or other national, who, drunk 
or jet-lagged or plain stupid, throws a tantrum -- like the American 
woman who stood behind us in a slow-moving immigration line in Cyprus 
last year, and brayed loudly to the party she was guiding about how 
incompetent "these people" were.  I considered reminding her that the 
natives speak English, but in the end, I could not be bothered.  All the 
same, like the NH mall developer, she remains at the front of my mind as 
an exemplar of her nation, when the pleasant majority are forgotten.

There is another aspect: we are separated by a common language, as 
Winnie once said.  While I know that a lift is an elevator in the US, 
and know what to look for if told to go to the elevator, I tend to use 
the British/Australian forms rather than say sidewalk, restroom or cafe 
latte. We are on the outskirts of the cultural empire, looking in, and 
our television brings us enough exposure so we know that there are other 
words, enough to understand them.  Ask for a white coffee, though, and 
you are treated as though you come from another planet by the barista.

Here comes the contempt problem again: we know (most of) the American 
terms, even if we choose not to use them, but they seem to know none of 
ours, and do not even realise that there might be alternative words. 
Based on small samples, we tourists grow familiar with the ignorance of 
the Americans we contact, and so develop a contempt that cannot help 
anybody.

Hold that thought, that tourism is a cultural devastator and a source of 
political ill-will on both sides, because I will probably return to it, 
but the evidence was about to start leaking in that there IS indeed a 
strong Hawaiian culture, going beyond the stereotypes.  That said, you 
need to be looking for it, if you are a tourist, but it's there in the 
ways people think and behave, away from the tourist strips.

I was on my way to the Bishop Museum, and that took me through streets 
where the culture was choking out the plastic.  The good times had started.

(part 2 will be some time next week)


-- 
  _--|\   Peter Macinnis, feral word herder & science gossip.
/     \  Klein bottle stopper design consultant,
\.--._*  wholesaler of patented bonsai windvane mechanisms
      v   http://members.ozemail.com.au/~macinnis/index.htm