AMERICA ! – That country we really know so little about

Brilliant Australian writer Don Watson set out to explore the United States, the citadel of liberty that has become the world’s supreme democracy and global superpower. He travelled the country ordinarily north to south, east to west, by train and car.

Watson’s experiences are profoundly affecting and he tells them in a remarkable book “American Journeys” (published this year by Knopf). It’s a book everyone who is watching this year’s Presidential election process with fascination and sometimes disbelief must read. Watson reveals the incomparable genius of America, its optimism, sophistication and wealth – and also its darker sides of ignorance and prejudice and its disavowal of failure and uncertainty. This book is a “must read” for this election year and the immense social and political changes that seem to be taking place …..

Here are two extracts …..

“When one travels in America … you come to see that, to Americans, Freedom means something that we incurable collectivists so not quite understand; and that they know freedom in ways that we do not. Freedom is the country’s sacred state. Freedom is wht must be protected. All over, they will tell you what is wrong with American, but freedom is the one thing they think right. And whatever the insults to my social dmoncratic senses, that is what I find irresistible about the place – the almost guilty, adolescent feeling that in this place a person can do wht he wants. He can grow absurdly rich; he can hunt a mountain lion; he can harbour the most fantastic ideas; he can shoot someone. He can commune with God or nature, but anything he wants, pay anyone for any service and at any fee. He can be a social outcast or even a prisoner and yet, being American, believe that he is free.

“ … It may seem crass, juvenile and provincial. It has seemed that way to visitors since Tocqueville. But in the midst of this unworldliness, one also sees startling, unselfconscious acts of grace and generosity that might be possible only when something childlike and raw remains in the spirit of the place. Depending on the angle and the lights, much that seems unworldly or unformed in America will, a moment later, manifest something older and better in our natures.”