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Mad, maddening America, the wisest of all
The US is hobbled by bigotry but it has an unrivalled vitality that pushes it ever forward
America can drive you up the wall. To Europeans and world-weary Brits, it can sometimes seem almost barmy in its backwardness. It is a country where one state, Arkansas, has just refused to repeal a statute barring atheists from holding public office but managed in the same session to pass a law allowing guns in churches. It incarcerates a higher percentage of its population than even Russia and aborts more babies per capita than secular Europe.
Darwin remains a controversial figure, but Sarah Palin was a serious candidate to be vice-president. Last week the California legislature took five days to prevent the entire state from going bankrupt; and more than three months after the election, and five months since the financial system went kablooey, the Treasury secretary had not mustered the staff sufficient to craft the details of a rescue package for the banks.
There are times in the quarter of a century since I arrived in America that I have been tempted to throw my hands up in frustration. To give a brutal, personal example, I’ve lived in the US since 1984. I’ve made a home and a life here. But I still cannot even begin the process of becoming a citizen because the United States makes it illegal for anyone with HIV to get a green card.
The ban was passed in the 1980s in a moment of total, ignorant panic. It took two decades to repeal it last summer, and the government bureaucracy still hasn’t changed the regulation. There are only 12 countries in the world with such a draconian policy on HIV-positive immigrants: Armenia, Brunei, Iraq, Libya, Moldova, Oman, Qatar, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, Sudan and the good old USA. Quite some company, no?
Another small insanity: the residents of the city I live in, Washington DC, America’s capital, do not have any representation in Congress. Since the founding of the country, the district has never been formally a part of a state, and so cannot, according to the constitution, have representatives in the House or the Senate. Imagine the residents of Westminster not having any MPs in the Commons. The residents of Bagh-dad, in fact, have more democracy than the residents of Washington but no one in government cares enough about this actually to amend the constitution to make that change.
And yet I stay and love it and defend it, even as it can push me to bang my head against the wall at times and may eventually throw me out altogether. Why? Because I’ve learnt over the years that the constitutional system that seems designed to prevent change has more wisdom in it than some more centralised parliamentary systems; and because the very chaotic, decentralised and often irrational mess of American state and federal politics also allows for real innovation and debate in ways that simply do not occur as vibrantly elsewhere. The frustration and innovation are part of the same system. You cannot remove one without also stymieing the other.
Take gay rights, a cause dear to my heart. Many Europeans feel quite smug about their enlightenment, and the transformation of the debate in Britain in the past decade has been as profound as it has been welcome. But few doubt that America pioneered the gay rights movement, as the movie Milk, up for eight Oscars tonight, underlines. New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco in the 1970s forged a liberation movement that changed gay lives throughout the world.
Yet even now, though I have a marriage licence, something no gay couple in Britain have, my five-year relationship is not recognised by the federal government. In Massachusetts, a state where gay marriage is legal and where I married my partner Aaron in August 2007, the licence is no different in any respect from that given to heterosexual couples. Civil partnership may provide rights at a national level, but it is still indeli-bly a separate and lesser institution than marriage itself, and offers a lesser measure of the social, psychological and cultural acceptance that civil marriage provides.
In California, gays just suffered a horrible setback as a majority narrowly voted to take away marriage rights. But at least they had a chance to get them in the first place. And the debate was a real and raw one – which made victory more meaningful and defeat more profound.
In America, the bigotry you face is real, unvarnished and in the open. In Britain, it can come masked or euphemised or deflected into humour. It hurts much more to punch a brick wall than to punch a deep velvet cushion. But if you punch hard enough, the wall will one day crumble, while the pillow will constantly absorb the blows.
There is plenty of religious bigotry and fundamentalist rigidity and crude sectarianism in America. But there is also a clear and invigorating religious energy that takes the question of God seriously and does not recoil from it in apathy or world-weariness. Give me a fundamentalist to argue with any day over someone who has lost the will to care that much at all.
On race, of course, this is especially true. No civilised country sustained slavery as recently as America or defended segregation as tenaciously as the American South until just a generation ago. In my lifetime, mixed-race couples were legally barred from marrying in many states. But equally in my lifetime, a miscegenated man who grew up in Hawaii won a majority of the votes in the old slave state of Virginia to become the first minority president of any advanced western nation.
That is the paradox of America; and after a while you find it hard to appreciate anything more coherent. What keeps America behind is also what keeps pushing it relentlessly, fitfully forward.
That Canadian genius Leonard Cohen put it best, perhaps. In his anthem Democracy he called the United States “the cradle of the best and of the worst”.
You live with the worst because you yearn for the best, because the worst in its turn seems somehow to evoke the best. From the civil war came Abraham Lincoln; from the Great Depression came FranklinD Roosevelt; from segregation came Martin Luther King; and from George Bush came Barack Obama. America may indeed drive us up the wall, but it also retains a wondrous capacity to evoke the mountain top and what lies beyond.