Cake or Death (23 page)

Infantilism is the American watchword. Chemical dermabrasion is just another term for facial skin like a baby’s bottom. Americans like big eyes, pulpy pink lips and pug noses. Baby faces. (Actually, the pulpy pink lips might be ascribed to something else entirely.) They like youth, even in the non-young, which has led to evil things.

Oh, the gasps that come from normal people catching a glimpse of John Travolta, Michael Douglas, Kenny Rogers or Barry Manilow after losing sight of them for twenty years. What the hell did he do with his head? These people’s old faces are now sitting on top of their heads; their faces are a tight, trim stripe of neck skin. People like Linda Tripp and Katherine Harris have entire head transplants. With breast implants, what you have is small children with beach balls in their chests, covered with human skin.

American grown-ups wear overalls, T-shirts, sneakers and white ankle socks with their Keds. I saw a reporter show up for an interview on
The Colbert Report
about his book on the U.S. hostage crisis (something about it being
the start of the continuing Islamic war on the United States) in a lime-green short-sleeved sports shirt and sandals. Sandals on a grown man. On TV. In the evening.

Americans have a limited range of references and will never catch yours, which means they don’t get jokes. They have no shared literacy, which means that intelligent books are impossible to market. You’re looking for five people in every city and maybe they’re busy that day.

Oh, and their food. Huge portions, all fried, all glistening with fat and coated with something cheesy. The one thing Americans got right, sportswear, has become impossible because of the growth of the American ass on this fatty, aorta-blocker of a menu. You cannot look elegantly casual while fat. The lines aren’t there, only the bulges they don’t even put in kids’ cartoons any more. And even when an American gets thin, it’s not because he said no to enormous portions of disgusting filler-food, it’s because he had his stomach stapled into something the size of an ankle sock and now he can only eat one potato chip on the hour. An American person is a hog. If he were sliced up, his meat would be pale and tasteless, like a modern pork chop. Things are so bloaty that to combat childhood obesity, American thinkers have suggested making toys heavy. I am not making this up. Rather than sending children out to play or stopping them from stuffing their cake-holes at McDonald’s, they’re considering putting weights in stuffed toys and building blocks. Playtime as workout. What they haven’t considered is the nature of children. Someone’s going to lose an eye.

Anyway, and I thought of this first, Americans should
have huge iron cutlery, so heavy it takes two hands to lift it. Not only would they exercise while eating but they wouldn’t be able to eat those huge portions. Good idea or what?

Americans never stop eating. In fact, they never stop anything, never do one thing at a time. They’re always multi-tasking. In other countries, this means talking on a cell phone while walking or driving. Since Americans don’t walk, they talk in their cars while eating, usually food-on-a-stick, and by the way, they have no notion of when to stop when it comes to devising stuff on a stick. They sell meat popsicles that you can force up from the bottom of the cup, and don’t tell me that isn’t worse than Twizzlers. It’s mystery meat. The only buzz comes from seeing how oddly food can be designed so as to be conveniently adjacent to the American mouth.

Americans choose not to think. No, that’s wrong. It’s not a choice. The capacity isn’t there. I read BBC Online’s report on the Bush Administration threatening
The New York Times
for reporting that the government is secretly studying the bank accounts of American citizens. It includes comments from readers. And there he is, the typical American, John of New York telling the world, “If your transactions are completely legitimate, then why should you be worried?” John, if your colon is completely empty, then why should you object to a search of your anal cavity?

Here’s what one of my favourite humans, Mil Millington, who wrote the brilliant novel called
Things My Girlfriend And I Have Argued About
, has to say on his Web mail about American brain function: “Even my limited
experience suggests most Americans are extremely pleasant people. I’m just sorry that the majority have to share a country with such a large minority of yawping, jingoistic, humourless, moronic wankers. Oh, and my sympathies about your President too.”

He adds, “Let me repeat what I just said there so there can be no possible mistake. We have, dear people of the Internet, a hard core of morons. They are: dull-eyed, humourless (though they think they aren’t), wearisome, insistently vocal and—consistently—American. However, how-ev-er, the large majority of Americans are quite, quite lovely. I adore them all. If one of my children ever came home and said, ‘Father, I’m in love with an American,’ I’d swell with delight. I’d have a feast prepared and bells rung. Americans are ace. I genuinely do like Americans. Excluding (for obvious reasons) the French, then the only set of people I think are more rubbish than not are the English—sullen, littering drunks, clutching a mobile phone in one hand while in the other there is a lead which ends in a crapping dog. OK? Is that plain? America—come here, I want to kiss each and every one of your pretty faces. Tch.”

Back to me. Americans can’t grasp principles or ideas, only things. I keep a gun beside my bed, an American will say. The gun is then stolen and used to kill a child. Not his fault, the American says. Because guns don’t kill people, people kill people. The fact that the gun is a wildly effective way to kill people, much better than bare hands, is not mentioned. They use those guns to rampage through the world, killing millions of people who are, not by coincidence, smaller and more beautiful than Americans.
Millions of children starve because Americans swelled up on this planet and nothing can be done.

Yet Americans at home are so obedient. Their Congress hasn’t raised the minimum wage since 1997. It stands at $5.15 an hour. But they did vote to reduce the estate tax, so that only the top half of a percent of estates will pay it. This will cost the government $602 billion over the next ten years, money it sorely needs from people who don’t need it at all. But this is just fine with Americans because they think that one day they will be in that top half of a percentage of the money pyramid. They have no clue that they will probably die in harness while still young, all the while saying, Thank yuh, thank yuh, land of opportunity. It’s hard not to despise people that dumb, admit it. Your children will likely be poorer than you, you tell them. Thank yuh, thank yuh, land of opportunity.

My God, what a place. We used to call them slow learners, and then we called it special ed, but half the country is so stupid you wouldn’t tolerate it in a six-year-old. That’s why they’re racist. Stupid people always have to feel better than someone else. So the whites dump on the blacks, probably because the blacks are better-looking. I can’t think of any other reason to envy black people in the U.S.A. Americans tie black men to the backs of their trucks and drag them down back roads in Texas until they disintegrate, and you like that, don’t you. Their women wear blue eyeshadow and
Be-lie-eve
in songs by Cher. Don’t deny it.

And all these stupid people with their stapled stomachs and guns are watching Fox News and learning real
good from human carrion like fat, limp-penised druggie Rush Limbaugh (caught returning from a weekend in the Dominican Republic, celebrated Sex Tourism Central, with a bottle of Viagra with someone else’s name on it—who had to service him? At least the woman who slept with British Deputy PM John Prescott got £100,000 for her story. What will some Dominican hooker get? Crushed, I’d say) and that ignorant bloated lump of rage Bill O’Reilly and that’s all there is to say, there’s nothing more.

Americans can’t even do anger properly. People they disagree with are harpy millionaires enjoying their husbands being burned to death in the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001. Or so says Ann Coulter. They can’t even do insults properly. Whereas the British do it right. Charlie Brooker wrote of Bush, “Where’s Lee Harvey Oswald when you need him?” No more need be said. Of course it was the Americans who got upset. About a man whose presidency was nothing but telling lies and torturing people, while tapping their phones and prodding their bank accounts. I swear, they only objected because Oswald killed Kennedy, and Kennedy and Clinton were the only do-able U.S. presidents in history. How low this country has sunk.

Go to hell, America. I couldn’t have dreamed a more awful place if I’d tried. I wish the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man would just sit on your country and squash you all into a seat cover. I can see the globules popping out at the edges, arcing into the Atlantic and Pacific, the waters rising with this new mass to accommodate.

Do it soon. Do it now.

The greatest thing Americans have given to the world is rock ’n’ roll. I’m going to be very strict in this chapter. I will not point out the irony of the blues that came out of the South being born of black suffering. It’s a fact, but many people have suffered and they haven’t come up with anything that resonated with humans the way the blues do.

The blues were stolen by whites and in the beginning misused very badly. But the truth is that when I need music to set me on fire or to soothe my soul, I turn
mainly to Americans. R.L. Burnside, Billie Holiday, black gospel choirs, Patsy Cline, Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes, Patti Scialfa, Carole King, Neil Diamond, the Four Tops, The 4 Seasons, Aretha Franklin, Steve Earle, Ray Charles, Carly Simon, Willie Nelson, Little Richard, The O’Jays, Roy Orbison, Elvis Presley, Kurt Cobain, Muddy Waters, Aerosmith, Louis Armstrong, Dionne Warwick, Emmylou Harris, James Taylor, The Supremes, Paul Simon, Talking Heads, Eric Carmen, Madonna, Buddy Holly, Pete Seeger, Macy Gray, Woody Guthrie, Dinah Washington, Linda Ronstadt, Lucinda Williams, Meat Loaf, Blondie, Etta James, Marvin Gaye, Otis Redding, Tracy Chapman, Bob Dylan, Boz Scaggs, R.E.M, Tina Turner, and you got it, Bruce Springsteen.

And of course there are writers to admire: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Edith Wharton, Anne Tyler, Erica Jong, Anne Sexton, Mark Twain, James Dickey, Jonathan Franzen, Peter Gent, Sue Kaufman, Irwin Shaw, Jean Kerr, Laurie Colwin, Larry McMurtry, Annie Proulx, Anne Lamott, Tom Wolfe, James Baldwin …

And the journalists—Barbara Ehrenreich, Seymour M. Hersh, Matthew Brady, Mary Ellen Mark, Susan Sontag, Martha Gellhorn, Barry Lopez, Hunter S. Thompson, E.F. Stone, Helen Thomas, W.E. DuBois, Lincoln Steffens …

But you see what is happening here. Not only am I merely compiling lists, but the lists are dwindling. A nation isn’t defined by its best people, it’s defined by how it treats its most unfortunate people.

Oh dear. We seem to be headed back into the previous essay.

Americans praise themselves, and were once praised, for their freedoms, but they seem to have given them up with little protest and even less noticing. That avenue is gone for me. If we’re talking freedom, I have found Europe most pleasant. I have had unfortunate encounters with French doctors and waiters, though never with their gendarmerie. But I am afraid even to try to cross the U.S. border. Forget freedom.

Americans dance well. By that I mean they’re not afraid to dance. And they like to drink. Although puzzlingly, not at Christmas. This may be because many of the relatives departed after their Thanksgiving holiday, held alarmingly close to Christmas, and so there is no need to drink heavily at Christmas. We don’t even want to discuss the Brits on drinking. So I will praise American good times. So many Hollywood movies take place at parties and gatherings, out at the lake or at baseball games, or around the family dinner table, a place where appetites go to die. For Americans are social, and I am social, although I don’t indulge that inclination. The instant friendliness of Americans is very attractive. I’ve always said there’s no better place to have a car accident. There you lie quietly bleeding by the side of the road. Someone is guaranteed to stop and help. It was certainly true in the case of Stephen King, forced to chat with the man who ran him over, but that doesn’t say good things about alcohol, so we’ll drop that anecdote.