I got off the boat some 23 years ago and have not left the US ever since, except for short but numerous business and personal trips overseas. This makes my stay in the US the longest continuous stay in any other country I ever lived, including the one in which I was born. What was unusual about my decision to live in the US was the fact that I did less research and background checking than for any of the short business and vacation trips. Basically, on one day, my ex and I decided to sober up, gave away all our meager possessions (mostly books), bought a train ticket to Vienna, and voila! We set on a new life course, but our plans did not go beyond arriving in Vienna.
When we arrived in Vienna one early morning, the pertinent question was what to do next. We asked a policeman, and he directed us to a refugee office. The times were such that anyone form Poland was considered a "refugee" if he or she said the magic word "Solidarnosc." We said the magic word and found ourselves in a refugee camp with the following emigration choices: Germany, Australia, South Africa, Canada or the US. We ruled out Germany because of "blood lineage" requirement to obtain citizenship (I have a fine mixed Eastern European blood, buy unfortunately no Deutsch traces can be found in it). Australia was too far, South Africa too fascist (this was the heyday of apartheid), and Canada too cold. So we were left with only one option, the US.
I knew a little bit about the US - I knew Jimmi Hendrix, and Janis Joplin, I heard about Woodstock, I saw Klute, Kramer v. Kramer and a film or two by Woody Allen, - which created an impression, which I hold to this day, that San Francisco and New York City are cool places to be. We were young, educated and white - so obtaining immigration papers was not too difficult, and one rainy day we landed in Grand Rapids, MI - about the same time and place of the action of Michael Moore film "Roger & Me."
My first thought was that this must have been a some sort of mistake - that this was not what we expected to find, that we ended up in some particularly distressed area - but the next 23 years demonstrated that Grand rapids, MI is a representative picture of the US, while SF and NYC are an exception, a screen-saver like in that old heaven and hell joke. I think that set a general tenor of my attitude toward the United States - that of a disappointment that the country of my dreams turned out be, well, smoke and mirrors, a big Potemkin Village if you will.
This attitude of disappointment and disillusion permeates most of what I think of this country. It is one thing to come to a poor and struggling country and seeing poverty and decay, inadequate public services, make-shift structures, lacks of transportation infrastructure, paranoid people and the general "jeder fuer Sich und Gott gegen alles" attitudes. In a way, one is not disappointed, one does not expect to find anything else there, and one may be even pleasantly surprised finding signs of good will and humanity amidst general squalor. Like that guy in the slum of Nairobi - one of the most horrible places I have ever seen - that offered me two necklaces ("one for you and one for your wife") made of cattle or pig bones (he made them for a living). I came there with a friend of his, the driver of a car that was assigned to me during my visit to Kenya, and being a guest of that man's friend was a reason good enough to offer a token of appreciation.
But when one encounters sights of squalor and deficiency in a country that boast to be only remaining superpower, a country that does not mind spending billions of dollars on bombing to the stone age poor folks around the world or promote the most wasteful and unsustainable life style known to mankind, but does not have enough money to pave the road, build rail tracks, provide basic equipment to schools, pay for rudimentary public health services - that creates nothing but disappointment. And if the people and leaders of that country tell you with the straight face that there is best country in the world, levels of civilization never achieved before and that everyone in the world envies them such paradise - the disappointment turns into anger and a desire to punch that straight face and shatter the idiotic illusion in which those folks live.
To be sure, the United States is not a bad place to live, comparing to most places in the world outside Europe. It is comfortable, relatively free of unmet basic needs, relatively safe, and having relatively well functioning public institutions - again in comparison to the Third World. But its general living standards and quality of services are rather mediocre comparing to those of Western Europe. Yet, the United States was never war-ravaged like Europe, actually it made huge profits off Europeans ravaging each other in two wars. It claims to be the richest and powerful state of the world, one whose per capita GDP is among the highest in the world. Yet those riches translate into at best mediocre and for many substandard living conditions.
The US system of government is another horror story. This is probably the most unrepresentative political system among the developed countries - a system where nearly 300 million people of every imaginable color, creed, and life style are represented by two (sic!) political parties - or roughly one party per 150 million people! This party to constituent rate is lower than even in most single party states!. The system of election, moreover, is designed not only to preserve such low representation ratio, but also to facilitate behind the scene manipulations known as gerrymandering.
The idiocy of the US political discourse is truly monumental. Most US politicians are genuinely unable to say anything, either in public or privately, that is not utterly banal, self-righteous, bombastic, pious, or self-congratulatory. The same can be said about the way the so-called "Middle America" talks about politics. The cretinism of the US political discourse is a sharp contrast to the way politics are discussed in Europe or Africa. Even ordinary folks on a train or a bus have more reasoned and articulated approach to politics than most of the US population and professional politicians. Such high level of political idiocy could be excusable in a poor country with uneducated, illiterate population - but the US boasts one of the highest college attendance rates in the world. True, most of that attendance is for credentials rather than education, but still one would expect the US-ers to do better than regurgitate imbecile myths received from authority figures.
So to summarize, I view the US as one big disappointment - a country commanding extraordinary resources to achieve quite mediocre outcomes. It is this wasted and squandered potential in the face of world's needs, the imbecile navel gazing and self righteous attitude, the pretense and posturing cover the most expensive mediocrity ever known to humankind what I dislike the most about the United States.
Have a great Fourth of July.
Wojtek