A lengthy post-mortem.

It has been a while since I left the rain-swept British islands, and even longer since my last blog post. In the months since I've been back in the United States, I've spent a lot of time reflecting on and waxing nostalgic for my year at the College in London. Though I have been through it before, I really must admit, reverse culture shock can be a bitch to deal with. From the use of certain words and expressions, to beer serving sizes (fluid ounces, America, wtf?), to the tenor of national politics - the overall cultural milieu which we spend our lives embedded within can be both a warm blanket of familiarity and a cold bucket of water dumped over one's head. Sure, it's been great spending time with my family and reconnecting with friends, but things that once seemed normal and given now often seem bizarrely contingent and arbitrarily chosen. So I thought I'd attempt to synthesise my thoughts on the matter, those things that bug me most that differ from one United country to another, and hopefully offer a nice period (UK: full stop) for this blog. Excuse the all-over-the-place topics.

First, America needs to get its act together on measurements. I mean it. Fahrenheit and fluid ounces, pounds and inches, are not a sensible way for a modern internationally oriented country to run things. I'll grant the US superiority on the UK when it comes to weighing people, as the antiquarian system of stone and pounds the Brits use is mystifying and silly. At least the US just uses pounds; I think kilograms would probably help seem a little more sophisticated, though. Fluid ounces, on the other hand, definitely need to go. I for one cannot visualise what one fluid ounce looks like, and I think I'm probably not alone. So, why do we insist on measuring canned (tinned) foods and bottles and all matter of fluid and semi-fluid items in fluid ounces? The rest of the world uses millilitres. So should we. Except for beer, in which case the imperial pint is the way to go. The most frustrating thing about going out for a drink in America: a pint never really is. No one seems able to say for certain, but a standard beer in America seems to range between 12 and 16 fluid ounces, depending on the glasses used and whether you're ordering bottled or draft. Sixteen fluid ounces, assumedly the US standard for a pint, is only 473 millilitres - 27 less than a nice Central European half-litre of beer, and nearly 100 less than the imperial pint's lovely 568 mL (or 19.21 US fluid ounces!). Really, beer in the UK (even in London) is hands down a better deal than a beer in any American city. $5 (£3.15) for a 12 fl. oz. (354 mL) bottle of beer is obscene. I'd willingly pay the £2.50 - £3 London price for a middle of the road lager if I can get a proper pint's worth.

Enough of that, I'm beginning to sound like a crazy beer-obsessed alcoholic. Which is untrue, I far prefer a nice glass of red to fuel my nascent alcoholism. Let us now turn to my other favo(u)rite topic: politics! Or, more specifically, the bizarre tenor of American politics and the total inability of our 'progressive'/vaguely-left party to affect much in the way of progressive change despite majorities in both houses of Congress, and the White House.

First, America is just more right-wing on the base-line than the UK. Which is saying something, because the UK isn't an especially left wing country by European standards. Witness: the birthers and their surprisingly wide acceptance in the 'mainstream' right, Lou Dobbs' rampant anti-immigrant rampaging (I don't care that he has a Mexican wife. Thomas Jefferson had black babies, that didn't make him an abolitionist, did it?), and the remarkable propensity of the American working/middle-class to wage class warfare against itself. The health care reform debate demonstrates this phenomenon very well. Senior citizens want the government to keep its hands off their Medicare, people scream and cry at town hall meetings about the public option as if these town halls were meeting to arrange the establishment of worker's councils for some anarcho-syndicalist future. You've seen the videos on youtube and TV, you know what I'm talking about. Still, more than 60% of Americans consistently supported the public option in polling done by various agencies throughout the debate. Yet, in Senate sub-committees led by Democrats, the policy option floundered and disintegrated. Moneyed interests and too little party loyalty dash progressives' hopes in this country every time. I won't even go into how let down I feel about Obama's inaction, and sometimes even veiled antipathy, to gay rights. Or the Afghan situation. Or any number of other areas where change was promised and none can be found. Compare this to the New Deal and the sweeping changes in law and social services that followed the Labour Party under Tony Blair's 1997 victory. No comparison.

And lest we forget, the American people seem eager to conflate Obama (a centrist politician internationally) with both socialism and fascism. Which is pretty remarkable, as these are polar opposite political positions. Americans don't know this, of course, because they've been spoon-fed sugar-coated hyper-nationalism about the unique wonder that is the American story since first grade social studies class. What's more, a huge amount believe it, and see nothing amiss with such nationalism. Europeans, except for the small fringe on the far-right, can't even think in these terms anymore (nationalism kinda killed tens of millions of people between 1914 and 1945..). Here, its part and parcel to the mainstream political and media discourse.

If I believed in Jesus, I'd ask him to take me home now. This isn't to say British politics are perfect either. I have problems with the British-ness push under Blair and Brown, with the incipient ethno-nationalism that devolution seems to have done nothing to sate, top-up fees for university education, and certain types of privatization. But, on the whole, the terms of political debate there seem to be a little more objective, a little more informed, and a little more sane. Ignore the Sun, and the Telegraph and the Tories on Europe, and you have an almost civilised political public debate!

Finally, words and phrases. I use words, phrases, and grammatical constructions that as an American I should not use. I found that I picked up these linguistic habits fairly quickly this time around (I think the year in the UK from 2006/7 softened me up), and I have had trouble shedding them. I'm often confused about a particular usage's American or British origin. People think I'm being snobby or showing off. I am not. My brain is confused, that's all. So what if I use an unnecessary 'do' here and there (ie: Oh, you would do!)? Who cares if, when angry, I become 'fucked off'? Who cares if my voice rises at the wrong point in the sentence from time to time? This is all slowly fading, especially things like voice inflection (except when I talk to UK people on skype, then it comes back a bit). I'll hold on to some of the words and phrases as linguistic souvenirs of my time there, and hopefully will be able to put them to use in their native setting again in the not-too-distant future.

Until then, I emit a high-pitched bye and leave it at that.