the times | Saturday May 28 2022 31
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Buy prints or signed copies of Times cartoons from our Print Gallery at timescartoons.co.uk or call 020 7711 7826Insular America can’t see its gaping flaws
The US used to be the future but its exceptionalism over issues like guns has turned global admiration into derision
Hoover dam or Golden Gate Bridge,
nation-defining infrastructure
projects? Last year the American
Society of Civil Engineers classified
43 per cent of roads in “poor or
mediocre” condition. New York lacks
mass airport transit; its subway is a
sewer. Even mutton-munching,
forelock-tugging Brits, as the New
York Times sees us, have the shiny
new Elizabeth Line. We have a cost of
living crisis and food banks but urban
Californians pick their way home
through tent cities, rarely
appreciating how mad this looks in
the world’s richest nation.
No one will ever decline America’s
money or protection but with every
school shooting its soft power melts.
No shining citadel to emulate, no
longer the future. And I write as a
lover of America: I was married there,
have many American friends; few
nations have shown me greater
hospitality. But an isolationism of the
mind leads America to believe its
problems are insoluble and this lie
enables Cruz and his NRA ghouls to
head off any broad political
movement to make the Uvalde
massacre the last. They’re already
blaming the police response or an
unlocked school back door or, for
God’s sake, failing to arm elementary
teachers. False flags and conspiracy
theories will soon crank up, drowning
out parents’ grief. While the rest of
the world sees only guns, guns, guns.what better time for online liberal
magazine Vo x to run a feminist
assault on breastfeeding. It’s not the
solution to the formula crisis, it said,
listing all the horrors of nursing a
child. “When you tell lactating
parents [sic] that there’s no cost to
breastfeeding what you mean is their
time, their work... have no value.”
To women outside the US this
piece was preposterous. Almost
everything the author despised —
pumping milk in the office,breastfeeders losing more income
than formula-users — came down to
one stark fact: America is the only
OECD nation without paid maternity
leave. That women either struggle
along in penury or stagger back to
work with post-partum bleeding is
calamitous for maternal and infant
health. But instead of demanding
that, say, global corporations extend
14 weeks’ paid maternity leave to
American as well as European staff,
feminists trashed healthy, cheap and
convenient breastfeeding — and
became a shill for Nestlé.
If America looked out into the
world it might see how far it has
fallen behind. Where is the newa son of African migrants, are
stripped of context or complexity —
“simply put in the mould of black
Americans”.
British diversity campaigners now
use the term BIPOC people (black,
indigenous, people of colour) when
our indigenous tribes are Picts or
Celts. “Anglo Saxon” is being erased
from academia because, although it
describes a specific European people
and history, it is sometimes wielded
by the US far right.
Online we are all Americans and
such cultural imperialism might be
tolerable if the US showed the
slightest reciprocal curiosity. Rather,
like US extradition treaties, the traffic
is all one-way. And blinkered
exceptionalism is not confined to
Republicans like Cruz. In December,
while the US reeled under a surge of
Covid-19, Jen Psaki, President Biden’s
press secretary, was asked why the
administration didn’t make tests free
to all households. Psaki sneered, as if
it was an outré idea rather than a key
pandemic policy across Europe.
Other countries knowing better than
America? How can this be?
Even on the social justice left I’m
astonished to find east coast
Democrats as myopic and insular as
the southern Baptist Trumpsters they
despise. The US has a national
formula milk shortage, deeply
worrying for all mothers but, as
prices soar, especially the poorest. SoI
t took a foreign journalist, Mark
Stone of Sky News, to ask a
question the world is thinking.
Cornering the US senator Ted
Cruz after the Texas shooting, he
said: “Why does this only happen in
your country? Why is this American
exceptionalism so awful?” Cruz
balked, feigned affront at British
impertinence, then scuttled away.
He could not answer why the
number one killer of American
children is guns. Not cars or illness or
domestic mishaps. But letting off a
parent’s pistol, getting caught in
street crossfire or — 27 times this
year — a loner with an assault rifle
entering a school. I fear the world will
not remember poor Xavier Lopez or
Annabelle Rodriquez or the other
Robb Elementary pupils and their
teachers. We recall our wasted tears
for Sandy Hook, shrug and turn away.
Will America ever learn? Once
more US newspapers run through
Australia’s crackdown after the Port
Arthur massacre, Britain’s after
Dunblane: fellow Anglophone
democracies which declared “never
again” and meant it. But America
sees itself not as part of the world, but
alone, above it. An idea which was
once its genius, the root of its pre-
eminence, is now its tragedy.
For decades we’ve been bewitched
by America: its granite glitter,
boundless possibility, all that West
Wing liberal swagger, the moon
landings, Hollywood, a bigness and
can-do mindset unimaginable in
cramped, sclerotic Europe. Still
America absorbs much of our mental
bandwidth and, by inhabiting Silicon
Valley’s online worlds, we’re
conscripted into its culture wars.
Too often therefore we see
American experience as the default,
the universal, rather than ever more
sui generis. This week David Lammy,the Tottenham MP, marked two
years since George Floyd’s murder in
Minneapolis, saying: “He could have
been me.” The British writer Tomiwa
Owolade recalls protesters at Black
Lives Matters demos in London
crying “Don’t shoot!” as though our
police are routinely armed. BLM has
initiated a global discussion about
racism but Owolade feels a myriad
black experiences, such as his own asEast coast Democrats
are as myopic as the
southern Trumpsters
Conspiracy theories
crank up and drown
out parents’ grief
Janice
Turner@victoriapeckham