Four
years have passed since I left England to study in the United
States. In that time I have of course learned much about America,
and I have also made some interesting discoveries about myself.
Nothing surprising about that, you might say; self-discovery
is one of the reasons people visit foreign countries. Quite so,
but I have nevertheless been surprised at times by exactly what
it is I have discovered. I think it's safe to say, for example,
that if I had not come to America I would never have found out
that I cannot pronounce my own name.
In the United States, when I meet someone for the first time
the conversation follows a certain routine. Things start to go
wrong as soon as my new acquaintance tells me his or her name
(Alex, let's say), which puts the onus on me to reciprocate in
kind. The next part of the conversation proceeds as predictably
as if it had been scripted in advance. Here is the script:
"I'm Alex," Alex says, reasonably enough, probably while giving
my hand a friendly shake, "and you are?"
"Peter," I reply, these days with a certain amount of trepidation.
I know what's coming next.
"Pizza?" Alex asks.
I wait a moment before replying, allowing Alex to register the
fact that he has just asked me if my name is Pizza. Then I say
"Peter" again, slowly, trying my best to enunciate both syllables
clearly. To be fair to Alex, since I have never been able to work
out exactly how the syllables are supposed to sound, it is unlikely
that this actually helps matters.
"Pita?" Alex says, as if exploring the possibility that I might
be an unleavened bread popular in Greece. It's usually at this
point that I give in and resort to spelling.
As well as introducing a note of awkwardness into otherwise
friendly encounters, this inability to pronounce my name so as
to foreclose the possibility that I might be a Mediterranean foodstuff
threatened to prevent me from enjoying that great American institution,
home-delivered pizza.
The problem was convincing the people on the other end of the
phone line that I was making a bona fide attempt to place an order.
Since from their point of view every time they asked for my name
I just kept repeating the word "pizza" at gradually increasing
volume, their skepticism was wholly understandable. Under the
circumstances it was entirely reasonable for them to conclude
that they were talking to a drunken frat boy too consumed by alcohol-induced
pizza-craving to remember his own name.
At first I dealt with this conundrum by delegating these calls
to my roommate, who was born and raised in New Jersey and knows
a thing or two about ordering pizza. This arrangement lasted for
almost a year before it occurred to us that there was an easier
solution; I could lie. So now I can order pizza by employing the
following Machiavellian subterfuge; when asked for my name I say
"David." This works out better for me, for my roommate and also
for the pizza delivery boy since, being unsure of the moral status
of my deception, I always overtip.
Now I would be the first to admit that all of the above falls
far short of constituting the sort of problem country songs get
written about. As an Englishman studying at Notre Dame, I have
no elaborate tales of cross-cultural misunderstanding. My name
game is as bad as it gets.
The truth about being English at Notre Dame, at least in my
experience, is that it's easy. Sometimes I even feel guilty about
just how easy it is, because the University has provided all sorts
of resources and services for its international students, and,
with one exception, I never make use of any of them. The exception
is this: Each year a student from the business school does my
taxes, a service provided free of charge to all international
students, and one for which I am eternally grateful.
Come to think of it, at Notre Dame it may be easier to be English
than to be American; you guys have to do your own taxes.
I think it was the great Czech director Milos Forman who said
that there are two places you feel at home: at home and in America.
I wouldn't go quite that far. There are certainly plenty of things
about America that remind me that I am in a foreign country, but
since I came to this country the culture shock has never amounted
to more than mild turbulence. I may not understand the rules of
baseball, but I don't understand the rules of cricket either,
and I played the game for five years.
When I first talk to Americans, after we get past the whole
"pizza" thing, there is admittedly sometimes a brief period of
polite incomprehension, during which time they usually smile and
nod noncommittally in the way that people do when they cannot
make out what is being said to them but are confident that it
does not include threats of physical violence or a proposal of
marriage. Within a few minutes they tune in to my accent, and
then the conversation usually goes so smoothly that it's easy
to forget we are from different countries.
This may come as a surprise to those of you who are familiar
with the adage that England and America are two countries separated
by a common language. Most of the great British quotables, from
George Bernard Shaw to Bertrand Russell, seem to have produced
a version of this aphorism (I have even seen the saying attributed
to Winston Churchill, although that doesn't prove anything; all
the best quotations get attributed to Winston Churchill eventually).
The earliest quip on this theme that I know of was provided not
by a Brit but by an Irishman. In The Canterville Ghost,
Oscar Wilde has the narrator say "We have really everything in
common with America nowadays, except, of course, language."
Although I am reluctant to dispute the consensus of such an
august pantheon of wits, I have found that the rumors of a great
divide between American English and English English have been
greatly exaggerated. There are certainly words and phrases that
Americans use and Brits do not (and of course vice versa),
but it is rare that I will encounter an Americanism that I do
not recognize.
What Wilde, Shaw and Russell have in common, aside from sharp
tongues and large egos, is that they lived before the advent of
an international Anglophone culture dominated by American films,
television and music. True fluency depends not just upon knowledge
of the meanings of words but also shared reference points. These
days Brits in America quickly find that we have both.
My friend Mark will serve as a useful illustration of how much
has changed since the days of Wilde and Shaw. Some years ago Mark
became a devotee of the television show Dawson's Creek,
a coming-of-age drama set in rural Massachusetts. Mark told me
that he liked the show because it reminded him of his childhood
growing up in America. This might not sound all that strange until
you consider that Mark did not grow up in America. Like me, Mark
grew up in a small village in the southeast of England. He had
not even set foot in the United States until he was well into
his 20s. But, like the rest of us, he grew up watching American
television, and now he finds that watching shows like Dawson's
Creek makes him nostalgic for the American childhood that
he sometimes forgets he never had.
While growing up with American popular culture gives people
like me an effortless sense of cosmopolitanism, the common ground
thus gained comes at a cost. I do not think the problem is one
of quality, which is not to say that America has not produced
plenty of programs that make me wince. When I first heard the
premise of The Bachelor I worried that this was the show
that would finally provoke God to destroy the City of Los Angeles
unless 10 righteous producers could be found within its walls.
In England we like to complain about the baleful influence of
American television almost as much as we like to watch it. For
us such programs as Temptation Island offer an added
benefit not available to their domestic audience: We get not only
the salacious viewing pleasure but also the frisson of
superiority that comes from being able to congratulate ourselves
that this sort of thing could only be produced in America. This
is true, but not for the reason supposed; the British television
networks are prevented from creating shows like Temptation
Island by their limited budgets, not any highly developed
sense of propriety.
Besides, while it is true that a sizable proportion of American
television shows can only be the result of an unannounced competition
between the networks to see how far they can lower the bar --
a sort of moral limbo dancing -- it is also true that the best
American television is the best in the world. So if you have been
watching The Simple Life with Paris Hilton, it's probably
about time to admit to yourself that this is because you like
it and not because there is nothing better on.
The real problem with American pop culture is not that it is
bad but that it's pop culture, and hence ephemeral. It has to
be. The obsolescence built into pop culture is, as designers like
to say, not a bug but a feature. Room always needs to be made
for the new new thing. You can see this by browsing any magazine
rack and surveying the countless periodicals committed devoted
to the ongoing search for the newest star, the hottest band, the
most recent book sensation, and of course the new diet that will
allow you to fit into the latest fashions.
I can travel around America, and to some extent around the English-speaking
world, confident that I will have grown up listening to many of
the same songs and watching many of the same films and television
shows as the people I meet. The catch (and it's a big one) is
that this applies only when the people I meet are relatively close
to my age. A shared pop culture helps forge connections horizontally
but makes it harder to connect vertically, across generations.
It is said that the family of the 21st century is made up of friends
and not relatives. That's exactly what you would expect in an
accelerated culture. My generation has less in common with our
parents than any previous generation in history, and our children
will have less in common with us.
One might hope that education could serve as a corrective here.
Cicero said that the purpose of education is to free the student
from the tyranny of the present. Or maybe it was Winston Churchill.
Either way, schools have not been immune to the bias toward the
new. On the contrary, eager to keep up with the latest thinking
on pedagogy, educators have joined in a large scale capitulation
to students; a capitulation often made with the best of intentions,
but a capitulation nonetheless. Our age, as Flannery O'Connor
noted, is the first in history that has asked the child what he
would tolerate learning. Some schools still manage to instill
in their students a sense of history and a familiarity with some
of the permanent works of art, music and literature, and those
schools that are most successful by Cicero's measure do not seem
to be any worse in preparing their students for modern life. On
the whole however, education is in a bad way, and this is just
as true in Britain as it is in the United States. So that's another
thing we have in common.
Since coming to Notre Dame, I have often been asked -- on both
sides of the Atlantic -- how British and American educations compare.
A widely shared prejudice amongst the British holds that Americans
are poorly educated, and I often find that people are disappointed
to hear that this prejudice seems to be based on nothing but the
wish that it should be so. The British are attracted to the idea
that a British education is superior because, confronted by the
world's undisputed superpower, it is comforting to believe that
there is still something we can do better. What has surprised
me is that the idea of the superiority of British education also
holds considerable appeal among Americans. Some are Anglophiles,
but I suspect that in most cases the reason why many Americans
think that the problems with America's schools are peculiar to
the United States rather than part of a trend observable in Britain,
Europe and throughout the modern world is that they want to believe
that they are the result of, and potentially correctable by, government
policy.
I do think there are some real differences between British and
American students however. I have managed to shock more than a
few of Notre Dame's faculty members by telling them that I am
convinced that, generally speaking, American undergraduates are
better organized and harder working than students at similarly
prestigious British universities.
They are better organized because they have to be. At British
universities students don't work toward liberal arts degrees but
focus entirely on one subject. They do not have to juggle five
or more potentially unrelated courses every semester, an arrangement
that makes good time-management especially important.
As for American students working harder, this might just be
part of the American work ethic. But I suspect it has more to
do with the sense of investment that comes from undergraduate
education in the United States being so astronomically expensive.
In Britain, where until very recently all tuition was paid for
directly by the state (and where the legal drinking age is 18),
there are many more students who essentially regard their university
as a state-subsidized bar to which lecture halls have inexplicably
been attached.
American colleges like to recruit students who have demonstrated
achievement in a range of domains. Elite schools like Notre Dame
(yes, I know, there are no other schools like Notre Dame, but
suppose for a moment that comparison is possible) get to recruit
many students who are absurdly accomplished for their age -- Resume
Gods, as columnist David Brooks likes to call them. Last year
one of the incoming class of undergraduates arrived at Notre Dame
having just won a gold medal for fencing at the Olympic Games
in Athens. As far as I can remember, when I was her age my greatest
accomplishment was completing the computer game Doom on
the "insane" difficulty setting.
While some of the graduate students at Notre Dame are tied to
their laboratories, in my day-to-day studies I work with books
and articles rather than, say, NMR spectrometers, so I have a
certain freedom in where I spend my vacations. I usually manage
to make a short visit to England over Christmas and a substantially
longer one during the summer months. While back in England people
often ask me questions about America, including "What's America
like?" This is what we in the education business like to call
an "open question," indeed it's the kind of question you could
fall into and not be able to get out. Generally, when asked what
America is like, I just say "big."
Of course we Brits know that the United States is large, but
the sheer magnitude of the place is something we only understand
in an abstract way; it never quite sinks in to our imaginations.
So when I said before that Britain and America are not separated
by a common language, I could have mentioned an exception: The
American word "near," as used in sentences like "South Bend is
near Chicago," is untranslatable into British English.
While I don't presume to be able to tell my fellow Brits what
America is like, I do try to disabuse them of some of their sillier
prejudices about America, like the belief that Americans spend
all their time telling each other to have a nice day. I try to
point out, aside from the inherent implausibly of the idea that
America could maintain its supremacy in the world economy if its
people made nothing but verbal gestures of good will toward one
another, that the small fragment of truth from which this myth
derives -- the fact that in American restaurants and bars the
waitstaff are generally upbeat and friendly -- hardly qualifies
as an indictment of American culture. Of course it's true that
the person serving your pasta probably does not really care how
well your day goes, but that doesn't show that American culture
is phony any more than my saying "pleased to meet you" to people
the meeting of whom has not been accompanied by any noticeable
feelings of pleasure makes me a hypocrite.
While living in the United States I have found the Americans
I have met to be genuinely friendly, and I have lost track of
the number of people who have barely had a chance to assimilate
the fact that my name is significantly less exotic than it first
sounded before they have invited me into their homes for a meal.
Notre Dame, of course, prides itself on being a welcoming family,
and in my case it certainly has been. I have also now visited
five of the Midwestern states and met countless people resolutely
determined to confirm the stereotype of the friendly Midwesterner.
New York, which I first visited some years before I came here
to study, is, of course, a very different matter. New Yorkers,
or so it seemed to me, are rude not out of animosity but of duty
and civic pride. I got the impression that they were working on
the not unreasonable assumption that if you wanted your day to
go easily you wouldn't be in New York, and if you managed to visit
without being shouted at by a complete stranger it would be like
going to Disneyland and never seeing Mickey Mouse.
New York was also where I first experienced the strange sense
of half-belonging that foreigners often encounter in America,
especially those for whom English is their mother tongue. Walking
around uptown Manhattan soon after my arrival I was struck by
how much of it I already knew. The streets and especially the
yellow cabs were familiar images from countless films. I recognized
Columbia's Low Library (from Ghostbusters), the Cathedral
of Saint John the Divine (featured briefly in Six Degrees
of Separation) and of course Tom's Restaurant (from both
Seinfeld and the Suzanne Vega song "Tom's Diner"). So
for a while I was feeling quite pleased with myself for being
on such familiar terms with a new city, but then I walked past
a policeman and noticed the gun on his belt, and I stopped dead.
It is not that I did not know that American policemen carry
guns. Any minimally attentive -- indeed any minimally conscious
-- filmgoer knows that. But until I saw that gun, that loaded
gun, there is a sense in which that know3ledge had not been real
for me.
I am not trying to make any point about gun policy here. However
I will note, purely as an anecdotal observation, that in England,
where policemen do not carry guns, I have seen far fewer overweight
cops than I have in America, where they do. You can make of that
what you will.
Familiarity based on films, television and music, punctuated
by a sudden reminder that I was far from home; that first afternoon
in New York set the pattern for my subsequent years as a student
at Notre Dame and my experience of the United States so far. After
four years here I find that, unlike Milos Forman, I don't quite
feel at home, but I've had a lot of nice days.
Peter Wicks is a graduate student in the philosophy department
at Notre Dame. His biweekly column, "Englishman Abroad," has been
published in the Viewpoint section of The Observer since
the fall of 2002.
(October 2005)
