let them drink bacon vodka or observations on the current state of america

just a few observations from our time in the states. it's funny how time away makes what was once familiar seem strange, tho' i simply don't recall some of this stuff, so maybe it's new in the past decade or so...

~ there's a real obsession with anti-bacterial hand cleaners. in bathrooms, in the cleaning product aisle, on the dish soap, little purse-size bottles. apparently americans are really, really scared of bacteria. and i wonder if it's not contributing to illness and allergies.

~ there's a lot of fake stuff - especially fake sweeteners and fake creamers. i just wanted some ordinary half & half in my coffee and that was a rare commodity in many convenience stores, tho' 5 sweetened, artificial flavors of carnation wanna-be cream(er) were on offer.

~ waitresses introduce themselves, "hi, i'm shelly, i'll be your server." do i really need this information? do people actually take note of it and remember their server's name?

~ the lighting is really, really depressing in shopko, k-mart and even macy's. what's the purpose of that? wouldn't good lighting move more merchandise? how can these stores be so off on this important detail?

~ walmart's new logo doesn't hide that they're still pure evil.

~ enormous, chernobyl (as in possibly irradiated), giant fruit and vegetables - peaches bigger than a softball, same with plums and the leeks, as big around as my calves, i tell you. we also had a 50 pound watermelon. talk about having to pee after that...

~ only in the states could you overhear a casual conversation at the airport between two waiting passengers on the merits of the M16 vs. the M4.

~ struck by how people who have BEEN there, still pronounce iraq "eye-rack."

~ a shocking lack of recycling. i had a little shudder of horror every time i saw a bottle or can in the ordinary garbage can.  this is part of why the US is consuming far more than its share of resources.

~ vodka that comes in bacon, marshmallow, cake or cookie dough flavors. i can see these are produced in france, but still, they apparently know what the american market craves.

~ direct marketing (long ads on television and in magazines) of prescription meds. man, that must drive doctors nuts.

~ no television show can be watched or enjoyed with any sense of continuity because it's constantly broken up with ads. i remember when i first came to denmark, it was agony for me to watch an whole episode of the x-files without commercial break, because i was so accustomed to the release of tension the commercials brought with them. now, i can hardly stand to watch television in the states. and don't even get me started on the shameful coverage of the olympics by nbc, i'm still not over that.

~ automatic-flush toilets. these possibly symbolize everything that's currently wrong with america, not to mention scaring the living daylights out of the user. apparently people cannot even be trusted to flush the toilet on their own these days.

~ interesting how with two acts of terrorism committed while i was there - one in a crowded movie theatre in colorado and one at a sikh temple in wisconsin - that i never heard them referred to as terrorism. it seems that word is now reserved only for acts committed by muslim extremists. if you ask me, both of those maniacs were also terrorists. 

~ car design has truly gone awry. i talked about this a little bit after my visit two years ago, but it's only gone downhill. even old design stalwarts like mercedes have given up and started making what appears to be a chevy impala with a mercedes logo. it's sad, really.

lest you think i only observed the negatives, i'll be back soon with a list of positives. because there are also good things about the land of my birth. you just have to look for them a little harder.

we won't solve the world's problems on a monday morning

the longer i live outside the country of my birth, the less american i get. it stands to reason. we are most affected by the environment in which we find ourselves. for me, this means that i have become more egalitarian (what? a differentiation in the car taxes by area (200% instead of 150%) to help with traffic congestion in cities? no way, car taxes must be the same for all), i have better taste, i am less likely to talk to strangers or say "excuse me," and i think that famous people should be allowed to get on with living their lives unmolested (winona, you did NOT just take a hit on that 17 when the dealer has a 6 up).

generally, i trust the integrity of the media where i live, find the healthcare system to be modern and accessible (even if they're not the most service-minded folks ever), and while politicians are a bit idealess, they're generally not corrupt (i mean, what's a little fudging your taxes among friends).  all of this contributes to my today having generally logically-reasoned, balanced, non-conspiracy theoretical opinions about the events of the world. and for that i blame credit denmark (and husband, all those holes he digs aside, that boy is good for me).

so it's quite interesting to encounter someone who makes wild leaps of reason in the course of an otherwise quite normal and reasonable discussion. for example, that michelle obama hates america. this reasoned from a comment that she made about having never been more proud of america before whatever day she made the speech. conclusion: since she'd never been proud of america before, she must hate it. really? i don't know the context of her comment (and neither did the person making the conclusion), but it seems pretty innocuous to me. and context would seem to be completely necessary to drawing any untoward conclusions. but my impression of clips i see of current american media is that context is irrelevant. and the person making this statement (possibly parroted from something former miss america (obviously makes her an authority on the level of affection for america) gretchen carlson said on fox "news") didn't question that at all. he had just ingested and then passed along the venom.

i really don't understand the venom towards obama. while i grant that he has not lived up to the promise and hope i felt in november 2008 as i bought a huge ring to commemorate his election and for the first time in 8 years didn't conceal my passport in line as i went through passport control, he has done what he can. i simply can't fathom why, when millions and millions have no health insurance anyone would be against obamacare. i'm still reeling a little a bit from a bloggy friend who asked me if it wasn't just horrible for the poor insurance companies? really? you can't be serious.

it strikes me that people's memories are short - does no one recall the mess he was handed by bush, an illegitimate president, bent only on being elected to get the approval of his father? when bush took office, there was a budget surplus.  after two wars that have accomplished little as far as i can see there is now billions in crippling deficits. bush's cronies dismantled the last of the regulation keeping the financial sector in check and i think it's quite obvious to everyone that's been a disaster of global proportions. these are the things that obama was handed to deal with. and no mere mortal could solve these problems overnight.

it's problematic in general that the people who might be the very best for a job like president of the united states or even prime minister of denmark aren't the ones running. it's problematic that we seldom have access to the real person behind the power - they are so spun and fluffed and polished that i don't think we have any idea who they really are and what they stand for, other than remaining in power. but, we've got to keep cool heads and draw logical conclusions and then vote accordingly. michelle obama doesn't hate america. to say so is ludicrous.  and makes me a little bit more inclined to start hiding my passport again when i'm in line for passport control.

in which she ponders the waning years of the american empire

i've been pondering this post for awhile. and although gwen recently wrote it far better than i can, i still have to weigh in...you see, when i visited the land of my birth this summer, after 3+ years away, i was a little shocked at the state of things.

i had expected to see signs of a depressed economy and they were there in the little things...more weeds in the cracks on the roads, flaking paint on the light poles, a general sort of lack of road maintenance. but they weren't there in ways i expected them to be. everyone (in the upper midwest, at least) is still driving around in the most ginormous, ugly, ungainly and badly-designed vehicles i've had the misfortune to see in, well, about three and a half years. when i saw the dodges on the road, i tell you, i understood why the company was in trouble (but i wondered why anyone bothered to bail them out, since they clearly had made such bad business/design decisions that they deserved to go under). i know i've said this before, but the vehicles seriously look like tanks thinly disguised as cars. who needs a vehicle that large and bulky? and who can afford to keep them filled with gas, as they must get absolutely rubbish mileage?  so clearly the crisis hasn't been bad enough to drive anyone to consider downsizing to a more gas-economical vehicle.

and on the subject of cars, one of my facebook friends was recently lamenting how sad it was to own two cars and have both of them in the shop. i commented that she could have stopped after the first part of the sentence - as it strikes me as quite sad to be one person, living alone, and have two cars. while i appreciate that a single person cannot drive both of the cars at once, it is still a monumentally arrogant act to think that you are entitled to two cars. what if everyone in india and china felt that way too?

case in point

at the first snack village (my nephew's name for those gas stations with a mini(?) market) we stopped in i was a little taken aback that there was an entire wall filled with your basic jesus-related t-shirts. and just when i had filled my 42 oz. beverage (i wanted a small one, you see) and recovered my shock at the jesus shirts, i wandered into the pop tart aisle. seriously, like 10 feet of a shelf  devoted entirely to pop tarts, swathed in brightly-colored packaging. which brings me to the next shocking thing. people had noticeably gained weight since i was last in the country.  like more than just a few pounds. of course i'm not a twig myself, so i don't mean to point fingers, but this was bad.

and it leads me back to the pop tarts and to all of that packaged, processed food in general, which i'm sure is directly responsible for people looking the way they do. it's so unhealthy. and good odin, the bread, don't even get me started on the bread - husband's eye actually twitched on one occasion while eating a slice of it. the sorriest excuse for bread in the world, in fact, it should be labeled like the cheese is in the US - as a processed, pasteurized bread product and not actual bread. and although i know that most of my readers (at least until after this post) are US-based and most of you are concerned about buying fresh, local produce if you possibly can, it's obvious that the vast majority of people haven't caught onto that. at all. and it's really worrying (unless of course you are a drug company that makes insulin or own quite a lot of stock in one #silver lining). no wonder the US has health care-related issues.

it amazed me how little the whole locovore concept has reached the area where i grew up - which is kind of ironic in that it's agricultural country. i had a conversation with my mother, where she was cussing out the locally-produced eggs available in the grocery store, as although they said "large," they weren't large at all in her eyes. she came home triumphant one day, happy that the store had gotten some imported-across-several-states "jumbo" eggs instead of those dreaded local ones. i asked her if she thought about food miles on those eggs and she looked at me blankly. which is weird because she is otherwise quite a fan of barbara kingsolver.

another worrying trend was the amount of religious fundamentalist billboards. so many that it actually began to seem menacing. somewhere south of sioux city, iowa on I-29, husband and i looked uneasily at one another as we passed a stark white billboard with somber black text reading, "are you ready to meet your god?" there was an exit coming up and we glanced at the children in the backseat, wondering if we'd have to somehow defend them from snipers, the billboard seemed so threatening.

now, having grown up in a town with 12 churches, i knew that there was a religiosity in the US, so i'm not saying that it's new, but it struck me that it's become so much more aggressive. it used to be ok to just quietly be your religion, but now it seems that you must display your christianity (because that seemed also to be the only option) much more visibly. of course, i also realize that freedom of religion is one of the basic tenets of what it means to be american. however, i'm not longer sure it would be ok to be a religion other than evangelical christian. not if you judge by the roadside advertising and the lit-up ticker-style signs on all the churches in every little town in the upper midwest. it's undoubtedly different on the coasts and in larger cities, but this is the heartland. and it's worth taking the pulse there to see what's really happening.

but perhaps the most shocking experience of all was listening to the "news." for one, there's scarcely any news it in anymore...just a poorly-argued string of predictions as to the demise of this or that politician or hollywood star. it seemed that there's no reporting on what actually happened or real analysis of it, but just a lot of shouting by heavily-made up, coiffed people who may at one time have been involved with the miss america pageant. at least in south dakota, on the local news they still talk about the weather, but even that is a bunch of more or less wild predictions. 

it seems to me that americans are expending an awful lot of energy and resources protecting themselves from "enemies" - behind strident religious slogans, in shouting news-free opinion casts, in tank-like vehicles and underneath layers of fat. and i find it really worrying. and sad. and wonder if it doesn't look an awful lot like the waning years of the holy roman empire, only with evangelical preachers, fox news and reality television.