I hate the Republican presidential candidates. But they aren’t my bad
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Version 0 of 1. I have lived in New York for almost as long as I lived in London – eight years – but time moves differently in your 30s to the way it does in your 20s and it seems like a much shorter period. There are advantages to this sense of having just stepped off the boat. After emigrating, you can predict with some certainty the people you won’t ever run into again. Buying milk is always a tiny bit interesting. And you aren’t implicated in the culture or the politics of the country around you. I hate the Republican presidential candidates as much as the next person, but they aren’t my bad. If I live in the US until I’m 105, I suspect Tory goons will always hurt more. From time to time, however, it is unsettling to live in a place where you have no significant memories. John Guare, the playwright, who has lived in New York all his life, once said to me in an interview that walking around his neighbourhood was like rereading an old diary: “Everything has a history.” For the immigrant, it’s the opposite. Nothing reminds you of anything. It can be exhilarating and also a little dispiriting, the kind of thing that drives Brits in New York to watch Antiques Roadshow on PBS, or get weird about Alan Bennett. On the way to a cafe on Bond Street, I passed the bar where I ran up a tab I still shudder to think about Last week, I walked from the Seventh Avenue subway station to a cafe on Bond Street in Soho, and on the way something started to happen. I noticed with sadness that what used to be a bookshop on the corner of Eighth Street is now a bank. A few doors along was the site of the old Washington Mutual, the bank where I opened my first US account and which went bust during the crash, taking the $67 I had deposited down with it. I passed the vegan restaurant where everything tastes like salted cactus, and the bar where I ran up a tab I still shudder to think about. When I finally got to the cafe on Bond, I remarked to the hostess that it used to be called something else, and that I once saw an Olsen twin sitting on the steps outside, knitting. The diary sprang open and there it all was. Bad-mouthing protocols The official moment of acceptance into US culture of course is becoming a citizen, something that brings with it responsibilities not to bad-mouth the country in public. Poor Emily Blunt. All she did was joke that, after watching the Republican presidential candidate debate, she wondered to herself, “What have I done?” and then – good for her – compounded it by saying she mainly naturalised for tax reasons. Of course, she was forced to apologise, the way you would be in Britain only if you had insulted a particular region. There was an era, I recall, when reporters were forever being sent to Liverpool or Southampton to make amends for writing something flippant and offending everyone who lived there. My sense is that if an American bad-mouthed Britain as a whole, they would be smoothly and rather pityingly humoured – “I know, it is awful, isn’t it?”. Unless they insulted the NHS, of course, in which case all bets are off. The unity of cowards Every time there’s another school or college massacre in the US, as there was in Oregon last week, people with young kids and foreign passports talk about leaving. Not everyone who lives here feels vulnerable, however. A friend who works in a big high school in the Bronx takes her 10th graders through regular lock-down drills, which, she says, they always treat as a joke. It’s a tough, inner city school with metal detectors on the doors, the kind of place, say her students, that white men with guns who pick on children in the suburbs wouldn’t in a million years dare to attack. It’s never good to tempt fate, but they are right about one thing: the unifying detail in all these shootings is cowardice. |