Fragment Amerika in een rugzak Engels
Fragment Amerika in een rugzak Engels
‘So… how was it?’
After a trip through any country or continent, people always ask ‘How was it?’ After my trip through America, the question went: ‘So … how was it?’ A striking difference. That ‘So …’ conceals exactly what the Dutch feel and think when they are talking about America. Everyone feels they have to have an opinion. Some are pro, others anti. With some, what predominates is admiration, while with others, it is disgust. There is almost never a neutral view.
The Dutch tend to have a love-hate relationship with America. That is less so for those who experienced the Second World War. I am part of that generation, even though I was only seven when the war ended. In my childhood, the fact that I was ‘liberated by the Americans’ was set in stone. I even felt the death of President Delano Roosevelt as a personal loss. The date - 12 April 1945 – is engraved in my memory. Roosevelt was the subject of my first class presentation at secondary school and no trip to Washington is complete without a visit to his Memorial.
During George W. Bush’s presidency, aversion to this president frequently spilled over into all things American. When I wrote to a good friend that we were planning to travel through America for a few months, she wrote back: ‘And then taking a trip to the b… USA! How could you? Will you still be able to get in without an iris scan, your diet, your credit card statement, a breath test, your fingerprints, your faith and a mile-wide smile plastered all over your face? I’ve decided never to go there again, at least not while that hypocrite is still in office …’.
While we were preparing our trip, I read the following sentence in Sandor Márai’s book ‘Land! Land!’: ‘Here were the young American writers guzzling down cheap brandy: Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Hemingway with his bushy moustache, and many more who had fled from the desolation of commercial pseudo-Puritanism in America to Montparnasse…’ So the mixed feelings were not held only by the Dutch, and were not just a recent phenomenon.
Why is that? There are 300 million Americans! Why does admiration give way to aversion among so many Dutch people and other Europeans? And what do I actually think, as a child brought up with admiration?
Before this big trip, my wife and I had visited America dozens of times. Lout had even lived there for a year after graduating. She worked on a large farm and at the end of that year, she and a girlfriend bought a second-hand car and toured the country together. They were way ahead of their time: this was in 1957. When I first met her, she told me about that trip with great enthusiasm, and my longing to visit America grew. We worked together on a ship, and I will never forget how excited I was when I finally stepped ashore in New York. No-one ever arrived with a more positive attitude than me. After a month, I thought all Americans were overwhelmingly friendly and hospitable, and I had no problem at all with their limited knowledge of Europe. To be honest, I was so impressed with that mighty country that I surrendered to it without question. Of course I noticed that people were very quick to say what ‘a nice conversation’ they had had with me. I detected a degree of shallowness and was indeed astonished when someone I had met at a party, and with whom I really had had a good conversation, could barely remember who I was a few days later … but those were marginal issues. I came back every time with high praise and minimal criticism.
I’m not exactly sure when that positive image began to change. It happened very gradually, and I think that travelling to other countries led me to take a more critical view of America. In countries that were still Communist, or where there was still widespread sympathy with Communist ideas, I defended America as well as I could, but I noticed that I was finding this increasingly difficult to do. All the same, the real change did not come until Dutch newspapers published appalling images of African Americans – who were then still called ‘blacks’ – being barred from entering a university by hate-filled whites. Was this possible in a country that was so proud of being a democracy? Next came the war in Vietnam, and I became even more confused.
In 2004, my son and his family moved to Washington for a few years, and we visited them regularly during that time. I discovered (and that was nothing special – you would have to have been pretty stupid not to see it) that Washington has nothing to do with the Bible Belt and that millions of Americans had considerable reservations about their own country and its position in the world. My youngest daughter, who also lived in America, put it this way: ‘If you say ‘you Americans’ to an American, that’s no different from saying ‘you Europeans’ to a Dutch person.’
I decided I would never again talk about ‘the Americans’. I began afresh with the preparations for this trip, keeping an open mind on the country and its people as far as I could. I remain well aware that, as a child ‘liberated by the Americans’, I could never travel with complete impartiality.
This is not a book for or against America. This is a book about America, written by a man who has travelled 25,000 kilometres through America.
Vertaald door: C.R.P. Bakker
