My hopes for America lie less in Obama- mania, more in Vaud and the Villains
Long before I became a journalist I taught myself to absorb the essence of an unfamiliar city by staying alert in the taxi from the airport: Los Angeles offers a particularly vivid first encounter. As the yellow cab barrels out of the precincts of LAX on to an angry avenue called La Brea, images and warnings crowd in. Neon signs in Korean and Spanish tell me that this is one of the planet’s most multi-ethnic conurbations. Half-crazed vagrants haunt the sidewalks, their random possessions piled in shopping trolleys. Radio ads offer a catalogue of modern American neuroses. Behind on your mortgage payments, facing foreclosure? Here’s the number of a friendly lawyer. Expecting the unexpected? Book yourself a mammogram at Kaiser Presidente. Still believe your luck might change? Win, win, win at Pala Casino Resort. To which a placard on the fence of a derelict site adds ‘Divorce — Child Custody — Visitation Rights — Call 0800-123-DADDY’.
But the in-your-face alienation of urban America is so often countered by unexpected charm. ‘Sir, are you British?’ the world-weary Hispanic driver asks as we pull over for a screaming police car. ‘There’s a British TV show on cable I really like, it’s called Keeping Up Appearances. But I can’t say the lady’s name right.’ ‘You mean Mrs Bucket, pronounced “Bouquet”?’ ‘Yeah, that’s her,’ he brightens up and enunciates: ‘Hiya-cinth Boo-kay.’
I’m here for the annual British-American Project conference, the veritable Bretton Woods of transatlantic networking. This year we’re due to talk about popular culture, but of course there are only two topics anyone really wants to discuss: the economic crisis and the triumph of Barack Obama. One modest contributor to his campaign proudly shows me on her BlackBerry the personalised emails his team sent out in the final days, culminating in one which began ‘Dear Susan, in ten minutes I’ll be leaving for Grant Park… And it’s all down to you.’
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