Love it or leave it

Culture shock USA - Part V

Love it or leave it -- a popular retort commonly used in the US to shut up anyone with a good idea. I was practically visiting the States as an ambassador for German energy policy. Would my audiences hide behind invisible Stars & Stripes and categorize me as a know-it-all who had spent too much time in Europe? "You are either with us or against us" -- to what extent had George W. Bush's black-and-white thinking become the standard?

In my lectures, I repeatedly tried to explain how often Americans waste energy because they don't even know how they are using it. And I pointed out that they waste so much energy that they don't even have to do without creature comforts in many cases when they want to save energy.

First example: my parents bought a new house. The hot water tank is on one end of the house; the shower in the master bathroom all the way on the other side. The house is not that large by American standards, but it still takes about two minutes for the hot water to get to that shower. I could be almost finished showering in that time. It would be a lot nicer if the architect had thought to put the hot water tank where it is needed instead of where the cars are parked. (Hot carwash anyone?)

Second example: a new house is built in the sunny South. First, you cut down all the trees so you can move around better. Then you put a black roof on the house. Now, the inhabitants get to use as much energy as they can afford eight months out of the year to try to keep this unshaded house with a black roof cool inside. What's so great about that?

But nobody tried to cut me off in any of my lectures. Nobody asked me when I would be flying back. On the contrary, my audiences were open-minded and curious. After my lecture at the Tulane Business School, one student said she had really enjoyed my lecture because it was so funny. I didn't know quite what to say because I could remember having put in any jokes, so I just smiled and told her, "Yes, it must've been especially funny where I was trying to be real serious."

Blue vs. Red

Is it possible to forget about where a person is from and just treat them as individual? Sure, theoretically, but I didn't know if it was going to be hard for me not to run around like a broken record repeating how disappointed the whole world was since November of 2004, when Americans showed their support for four years of unilateralism and complete disdain for the rest of the world.

It is incomprehensible to many outside the United States how such a developed society could still trust a man who waged war under false pretenses.

The Jakarta Times on Bush's reelection

But I was never even once tempted to enlighten anyone. When my uncle passed away, I met about 40 relatives, many of whom I had not seen for around 20 years. Everyone wanted to know how I was doing. I told them about two kids, a Master's degree, a successful career, a famous German web site I write for ;-) and how I was in the States giving lectures on a topic I had just written a book about.

My relatives in the Bible Belt looked at the little boy they remembered in me and spoke of my "God-given talents". At no point was I tempted to remind them that I was also a smartass by saying something like, "Right, I have my talents from God and my vices from Lucifer." We rarely ever think about what it means to live on another continent far away from any family. After so many years abroad, it was just nice to have so many people around me who wished me the best -- or, as Lyle Lovett once sang:

I went to a funeral
And Lord it made me happy
Seeing all them people
That I ain't seen
Since the last time somebody died.

I was thus recently upset to see that Lyle Lovett sang at one of the parties for Bush's inauguration. Do I not get to listen to him anymore? Then I also wouldn't be able to listen to jazz pianist Herbie Hancock, who played in the White House on Valentine's Day. But he's probably just playing there because he deserves to -- just like Miles Davis, who was asked by a clueless lady during a dinner in Reagan's White House what he had done to merit his presence there. Davis replied, "I've changed music four or five times. What have you done of any importance other than be white?" (Legend does not have it that the woman responded, "Would you have fared as well as a woman on the trumpet?")

I also don't want to end up like the Americans who broke the CDs of the Dixie Chicks for criticizing Bush or who boycott Ben & Jerry's, only to turn around and have to make Star-Spangled Ice Cream. I don't want to divide the world up into friend and foe. Republicans and Democrats, nonvoters and anarchists are all welcome at my door.

But in general, lots of Americans didn't give me a chance to criticize the stupidity of Americans. They were too busy doing it themselves. The general tenor was that Americans are ignoramuses who know nothing about the world except that the United States is the best country. Reminds me of what Michelle Shocked once sang about the people in her town in East Texas:

Looking back and asking myself
What the hell'd you let 'em break your spirit for?
You know their lives ran in circles so small
They thought they'd seen in all
And they could not make a place for a girl who'd seen the ocean.

In the comments to previous articles in this series, a lot of my German readers have criticized me for allegedly forgiving Americans for everything. When my country invades another, I go to the barricades, but I can't say my pacifist commitment has ever made a damn bit of difference. So I just try to live by the words of Gandhi: "be the change you want to see". And mostly, as I get older I understand better than it is foolish to want to change another person.

So while many of my German readers would like to hold all Americans accountable for US foreign policy, they have different standards for themselves. A previous generation of Germans rejected the very notion of "collective guilt". Later generations have spoken of what former Chancellor Helmut Kohl called the "good fortune of not being old enough" to have been involved (Gnade der späten Geburt). Well, I guess that pretty much gets everybody out of the hot seat.

How about the "good fortune of being misinformed"? As Robert Kennedy Jr. put it in this radio show (hereby highly recommended!):

80% of the Republicans I meet are just Democrats who don't know what's going on.

There are no Republicans and Democrats, no such thing as Germans and Americans. But you can tell people what their identity -- their nationality -- is and divide them up by underscoring differences. You can even get them to hate each other. This is what makes the divisiveness in the United States so frightening today. Republicans and Democrats have stopped speaking to each other, and the Divided States of America are dividing the world up into good and evil.

I was trying to understand, not judge these tendencies during my stay back home -- just as I try to understand the motives of terrorists. Trying to understand does not mean forgiving, and certainly not condoning. You can't change another person, but can you change the conditions that make it natural for people to think and act a certain way?

A bad conscience

During my 30 days in the states, I tried to imagine how I would be faring today in the US. Would I be able to live the American way of life without giving up my ecological principles? Would I slowly but surely abandon my values, get myself a nice car, and just enjoy life in this land of plenty? In other words, to what extent does living in Germany determine the way I behave?

I took a road trip with a rental car from New Orleans to Austin. The cities -- indeed, just about everything man-made -- in the US are not much to see by day (though the natural wonders in the US are unsurpassed). But at night, American cities light up like Christmas trees.

The area between New Orleans and Houston is oil country. You drive by places like Sulfur, Louisiana. In the distance, you can see the refineries at night; as ugly as they are by day, they light up the night sky like gigantic spaceships. They are not of this world.

I drove by giant billboards the size of a house. They lined the highway on both sides, and the lighting around them enveloped the ads like halos in the winter fog: "Real Cajun cooking! Texas-size plates, Louisiana smiles..."

My rental car took off like a rocket. I had rented a car in the "economy class", but what I got would be a racecar in Europe: the Dodge Neon. Apparently, they don't have smaller cars than this four-door model with 132 horsepower in the US. Back in Europe, my poor Renault Twingo has to make do with 55 horsepower. Although Bobby McFerrin used to sing the song in ads for this car, it is not even sold in the states. To top it all off, my economy-class racecar only cost 25 dollars a day, including insurance and unlimited mileage -- half of what the cheapest rental car in Europe would cost.

When I drove my economy class racecar around on the elevated thoroughfares in Austin Texas at night, the high-rises in the downtown area were an illuminated spectacle. A world that knew no energy shortage, one in which the material standard of living is much higher than in my little town of Freiburg in the Black Forest, which does very well by German standards, thank you very much.

It was easy to see how the residents of this world people call the United States of America can believe that economies can continue to grow forever. After all, Americans are not exactly confronted with the end of the world very often. In their daily lives, Americans are not only surrounded by a culture of all-you-can-eat&drink, but also of general wastefulness with resources -- which does have its pleasant side effects. The media in the US generally only report about the outside world when a catastrophe has already happened. No wonder so many Americans mistakenly tend to see the rest of the world as a place where people just don't get things done right and where everyone basically just sits around waiting for the Americans to come in and make everything right.

Manta on the road again

I met one of the people who was soon going to be sent out to save the world from itself: a US soldier who did not want to be mentioned by name so that, as he put it, his career would not be ruined. Let's just call him Manta in honor of Germany's most popular hotrod.

During the first Gulf War under Bush Sr. in 1991, I got to know several US soldiers at the University of Texas. All of them had joined the military to pay for college. And all of them were afraid of being sent to Iraq. Some of them had families to support. I will never forget one sentence that one of my ROTC students told me: "I don't want to die with sand in my teeth."

In the past few years, I have thus had trouble understanding why the US military seems to be standing so firmly behind its Supreme Commander, who has never been to war himself but apparently has no qualms about sending America's Finest to the front, where he has even invited insurgents to "bring it on" - a quote that one web site justifiably ranked number one among the "50 dumbest things that Bush said in his first term".

I asked Manta why US soldiers would let such a wuss send them into harm's way. Well, he explained, it's fairly well known that the military tends to be strongly Republican. But while most low-ranking soldiers are quite ecstatic about Bush, officers like him are a bit concerned about recent events.

Up to now, he had really only been called on to defend the borders of his country from "rabbits and coyotes", but in 2005 it looked like it would be time for him to go to Iraq. He told me that he would do so willingly, not because he supported his government's policies, but because he is an officer, and he has to protect his boys. After all, he trained them. A bunch of great guys, he said, "And I don't want to lose any of them."

And anyway, he continued, he had taken an oath that he still stands by. On the one hand, he had sworn to execute the commands of the President of the United States; on the other, to protect and defend the Constitution. According to Manta, the military would stand behind the President as long as he did not do away with the Constitution. At that point, Manta surmised, the military would probably be split, for the two main elements of the oath would be in conflict.

I admired his sincerity and selflessness and was about to wish him all the best when he wanted me to tell him something: How could he and his wife leave the US?

I didn't quite know what to say. "No", he said immediately, reading the expression on my face, "I don't want to go AWOL. But when I get back from Iraq, I'll be able to leave the military, and we would just like to live somewhere else -- you know, emigrate. So how do we go about that? You did it -- you're living in Europe!"

"Why do you want to emigrate?" I asked them. "First you want to risk your life, and then you want to leave the country once you're safe?"

Yes, they explained. "You see, life in the States is not what it's cracked up to be. Everybody we know works all day, never takes vacation, never has time to enjoy life. We want to move somewhere where people know how to live instead of just working and shopping all the time."

"So you don't just want to leave the country for some highfalutin political ideals; you want to have a better life," I asked.

"Exactly", the two turtledoves smiled.

"That's smart," I said. "But there's just one thing: I hate to disappoint you, but being a foreigner is not all it's cracked up to be either. Foreigners are not always welcome everywhere. Lemme tell y'all what it's been like for me in Germany..."

(to be continued)