AmericaInTheWorld.com has featured the writings of the BBC's Justin Webb on a number of occasions. He also addressed a gathering of journalists, politicians and other opinion formers hosted by AITW.
Mr Webb has now left America and will soon become one of the principal presenters of the BBC's flagship currents affairs programmes; Radio 4's Today programme.
Before he left he wrote a goodbye reflection. You can read it all here but this was his conclusion:
"I deplore the superstition and the eating competitions and the tatty dreariness of so much of America, and I note that the new president is also unimpressed by the infrastructure and not a fan of fat but, after more than seven years living here, I am increasingly convinced that these elements of the nation are not the flip side of the greatness of America, they are part of that greatness.
There is something about the carelessness of America that gives space for greatness.
Out on route 17 in South Carolina, you can do very well or very badly. You can crash and burn, or you can fill up with cheap petrol and ride off into the sunset. If you do not like yourself in South Carolina, you can hire a self-drive hire truck and take it to Seattle. If you do not like your life and you have drive and luck, you can change it because - being American - you believe you can change it.
Sitting in a dingy apartment in New York watching Perry Mason on the TV, you can decide to make it big in law as eight-year-old Sonia Sotomayor once did. This summer, now in her fifties, she becomes a Supreme Court justice and the latest American story to send shivers down the spines of dreamers of the American dream. But if Sonia Sotomayor is to make it big, there must be something creating the drive, and part of that something is the poverty of the alternative, the discomfort of the ordinary lives that most Americans endure and the freedom that Americans have to go to hell if that is the decision they take...
More than 300 million people live here now, settlers from all over the world. From Ho Chi Minh City, from Timbuktu, from Vilnius, from Tehran, from every last corner of the earth, they have made America their home and they are still streaming in. I feel crazy going back to the old world. My five-year-old daughter Clara, who is the proud owner of an American passport, agrees. She says she intends to leave home, at around 12-years-old, and return to her native land. I do not blame her.
If you are willing to chance your arm, if you back yourself, if you want to live the life, America is still the place to be. Drive out on Route 17 and take a chance! So that's it from me, I am checking out. But part of me can never leave…"
He is only full of praise and saying it because America is governed by Democrats.
If Bush had been still in power, I believe our man from the "impartial" BBC would be telling a different story - don't you?
Posted by: Dontmakemelaugh | August 25, 2009 at 03:01 PM
'the discomfort of the ordinary lives that most Americans endure'
I consider myself pretty ordinary and I don't 'endure' much in the way of 'discomfort' in my ordinary life, except the physical therapy for my knee. Webb is certainly better than the average BBC hack, but I don't think he really gets America as a whole. The left and far-left coasts, of course. But the fly-over states? Not a clue.
Posted by: Kevin Sampson | August 26, 2009 at 02:35 AM