Back to the US of A

(First published in Bali Advertiser, September 13, 2006)

“They took my Blistex.” – Bill Hunstein, 39, of Fairbanks, Alaska, on the ban on liquids, gels, and other personal toiletries on airlines after the discovery of a terror plot in Britain (New York Times, August 11, 2006)

We are preparing for our first trip to the US in three years and I am wary. Maybe there’s some worry about personal inconvenience after the foiling of the airline bombing plot in Britain in early August. Will I be able to keep my laptop with me as carry-on? If we can’t bring our own bottled water into the cabin, will the stewardesses supply enough to keep us from thirst and thrombosis?

Maybe a few times during the flight I will worry about being blown out of the sky by exploding hair gel. Mostly, I expect, I will accept that flying is statistically safer than traveling by car, and that, if anything should happen, it would be over quickly. A few seconds of screaming terror is all.

Six weeks in America is another matter. It won’t be quick. It won’t be painless. The country has grown strange to me the past 13 years. Three visits in that time have barely spanned three months, and I often contemplate “home” with bewilderment. Perhaps, too, I remember the fear on long family trips home when I was an adolescent and suddenly became the outsider who didn’t know what was cool and never got the jokes at school.

And still there is much in America that is confusing and contradictory:

For instance, just how big does a weapon have to be before it is unacceptable to say you won’t give it up until someone pries it out of your cold, dead hands? I mean, why does the premise that concealed weaponry makes everyone safer not hold when dictators and theocrats want to pack nuclear heat? At what caliber does, “Everybody’s got to have guns,” become “Everybody’s got to have guns – but not those guys or those guns.”?

Or how to explain the many US organizations and politicians that say they stand for family values and the protection and nurturing of children with the public outrage when US parenting magazine Babytalk had the “courage” to carry a cover picture of a baby breastfeeding? How can there have been a taboo against showing women’s breasts in parenting magazines in the first place? People can generate the same indignation at a picture of a breastfeeding mother as at a primetime, Super Bowl nipple flash?

Or how can religious Americans not see the illogic of ridiculing and reviling Islamic religious states and “fanatical” devotion to a prophet’s words -- and then working to institute prayer in their own public schools, advocating home or religious schooling to counter secular education, and trying to redefine science because they believe the earth to be 6,000 years old according to Biblical reckoning? Does every religious difference have to be reduced to my-god-said-your-god-wears-army-boots simplicity?

Or how can a country with supposedly the best university and education system in the world have such large numbers of people that apparently believe Elvis, Jimmie, and Jim still live, aliens are keeping watch, The Da Vinci Code is a documentary, Pamela Anderson’s breasts and reality TV are real, and Geraldo Rivera is a journalist?

America leaves me wanting to laugh hysterically or weep, and usually doing the wrong one at the wrong time. When in-country, I constantly worry people are looking at me weirdly and keeping their hands on their pistols. A friend has recommended buying a flak jacket and putting it on enroute. I want to warn my wife to keep her hands away from her pockets and in plain sight in most public situations. Maybe we should wear signboards saying we are not “carrying.”

Yet, it is home, in a historical, ancestral sort of way, and I cannot deny being an American. Baseball was my first sports love. The Dallas Cowboys were my and America’s team in the 1970s. I get cravings for chicken-fried steaks and bacon-beef burgers, and believe home pizza delivery is a fundamental human right. I like to look at the gun and knife catalogs at my uncles’ houses and review my cousins’ new toys that go bang. Most tellingly, I am proud when I hear of Americans doing something noble and self-sacrificing and feel personally embarrassed every time Americans screw up on the world stage.

So back we go to the land of plentiful excess, where Darwin is a myth and creation is a science, where it no longer matters how or what you say as long as you say it on TV, and where everyone shops at Big ‘N Tall. Here’s to safe journeys and returning sound and sane without any bullet holes that cannot be mended. Hold the exploding hair gel, please.

Copyright © 2006 Lee Roy LeRoi