I Pledge Allegiance
to the Bag
ONE OF THE DRAWBACKS to living in Paris is that people often refer to you as an expatriate, occasionally shortening the word to an even more irritating “ex-pat.” It is implied that anything might take you to London or Saint Kitts, but if you live in Paris, it must be because you hate the United States. What can I say? There may be bands of turncoats secretly plotting to overthrow their former government, but I certainly haven’t run across them. I guess we don’t shop at the same boutiques. The Americans I’ve befriended don’t hate the United States, they simply prefer France for one reason or another. Some of them married French people or came here for work, but none of them viewed the move as a political act.
Like me, my American friends are sometimes called upon to defend their country, usually at dinner parties where everyone’s had a bit too much to drink. The United States will have done something the French don’t like, and people will behave as though it’s all my fault. I’m always taken off guard when a hostess accuses me of unfairly taxing her beef. Wait a minute, I think. Did I do that? Whenever my government refuses to sign a treaty or decides to throw its weight around in NATO, I become not an American citizen but, rather, America itself, all fifty states and Puerto Rico sitting at the table with gravy on my chin.
During Bill Clinton’s impeachment hearings, my French teacher would often single me out, saying, “You Americans, you’re all such puritans.” Citizens of Europe and Asia, my fellow class members would agree with her, while I’d wonder, Are we? I’m sure the reputation isn’t entirely undeserved, but how prudish can we be when almost everyone I know has engaged in a three-way?
I’d never thought much about how Americans were viewed overseas until I came to France and was expected to look and behave in a certain way. “You’re not supposed to be smoking,” my classmates would tell me. “You’re from the United States.” Europeans expected me to regularly wash my hands with prepackaged towelettes and to automatically reject all unpasteurized dairy products. If I was thin, it must be because I’d recently lost the extra fifty pounds traditionally cushioning the standard American ass. If I was pushy, it was typical; and if I wasn’t, it was probably due to Prozac.
Where did people get these ideas, and how valid are they? I asked myself these questions when, after spending nine months in France, I returned to the United States for a five-week trip to twenty cities. The plane hadn’t even left Paris when the New Yorker seated beside me turned to ask how much I’d paid for my round-trip ticket. Americans are famous for talking about money, and I do everything possible to keep our reputation alive. “Guess how much I spent on your birthday present?” I ask. “Tell me, how much rent do you pay?” “What did it cost you to have that lung removed?” I horrify the French every time I open my mouth. They seem to view such questions as prying or boastful, but to me they’re perfectly normal. You have to talk about something, and money seems to have filled the conversational niche made available when people stopped discussing the Constitutional Convention of 1787.
During my five weeks in the United States, I spent a lot of time on planes and waiting around in airports, where the image of Americans as hard workers was clearly up for grabs. Most passengers were in favor of the stereotype, while the majority of airport employees seemed dead set against it. Standing in long lines, I could easily see how we earned our reputation as a friendly and talkative people. Conversations tended to revolve around the incompetence of the person standing behind the cash register or computer terminal, but even when pressed for time, I found most travelers to be tolerant and good-natured, much more willing to laugh than to cause a stink. People expressed the hope that they might catch their plane, that they might leave on time, and that their luggage might eventually join them once they reached their destination. Once considered relentlessly positive, we seem to have substantially lowered our expectations.
I thought a lot about American optimism when, on a flight from Chicago to San Francisco, I watched one of those video magazines stitched together from a week’s worth of soft network news reports. There was the standard “just how safe are they?” report focusing on chopsticks or cardboard boxes, followed by the latest study proving that people who wear socks to bed are likely to live five hours longer than the rest of us. Then came a human-interest story about a New York City program designed to expose the homeless to great works of art. The segment opened with a genteel docent standing before a Rembrandt painting and addressing a group of unshaven men dressed in ragged clothing. The woman lectured on the play of light and shadow. She addressed the emotions provoked by the artist’s somber choice of colors, and her eyes glittered as she spoke. Interviewed later, one of the men conceded that the painting was nice, saying, “Sure, I liked it okay.” Then the camera cut back to the docent, who explained that art appreciation was a form of therapy that would hopefully help get these men back on their feet. Here was an example of insane optimism coupled with the naive popular belief that a few hours of therapy can cure everything from chronic obesity to a lifetime of poverty. It’s always nice to get out of the cold, but I think this woman was fooling herself in believing that these men would prefer a Rembrandt to a couple of reubens.
For all our earnest recycling, America is still seen as a terribly wasteful country. It’s a stigma we’ve earned and are trying to overcome with our own unique blend of guilt and hypocrisy. On the first night of my trip, while brushing my teeth in the bathroom of my $270-a-night hotel, I noticed a little sign reading SAVE THE PLANET!
Okay, I thought, but how?
The card reported the amount of water used every year in hotel laundry rooms and suggested that, in having my sheets and towels changed on a daily basis, I was taking this precious water directly from the cupped hands of a dehydrated child. I noticed there was no similar plea encouraging me to conserve the hot water that came with my fifteen-dollar pot of room-service tea, but that apparently was a different kind of water. I found an identical SAVE THE PLANET card in each of my subsequent hotel rooms, and it got on my nerves in no time. I don’t mind reusing a towel, but if they’re charging that much for a hotel, I want my sheets changed every day. If I’d felt like sharing my bed with trillions of dead skin cells, I would have stayed at home or spent the night with friends. I was never the one paying for the room, but still, I resent being made to feel guilty for requesting a service an expensive hotel is generally expected to perform.
Pandas and rain forests are never mentioned when it comes to the millions of people taking joyrides in their Range Rovers. Rather, it’s the little things we’re strong-armed into conserving. At a chain coffee bar in San Francisco, I saw a sign near the cream counter that read NAPKINS COME FROM TREES — CONSERVE! In case you missed the first sign, there was a second one two feet away, reading YOU WASTE NAPKINS — you WASTE TREES!!! The cups, of course, are also made of paper, yet there’s no mention of the mighty redwood when you order your four-dollar coffee. The guilt applies only to those things that are being given away for free. Were they to charge you ten cents per napkin, they would undoubtedly make them much thinner so you’d need to waste even more in order to fight back the piping hot geyser forever spouting from the little hole conveniently located in the lid of your cup.
Traveling across the United States, it’s easy to see why Americans are often thought of as stupid. At the San Diego Zoo, right near the primate habitats, there’s a display featuring half a dozen life-size gorillas made out of bronze. Posted nearby is a sign reading CAUTION: GORILLA STATUES MAY BE HOT. Everywhere you turn, the obvious is being stated. CANNON MAY BE LOUD. MOVING SIDEWALK IS ABOUT TO END. To people who don’t run around suing one another, such signs suggest a crippling lack of intelligence. Place bronze statues beneath the southern California sun, and of course they’re going to get hot. Cannons are supposed to be loud, that’s their claim to fame, and — like it or not — the moving sidewalk is bound to end sooner or later. It’s hard trying to explain a country whose motto has become You can’t claim I didn’t warn you. What can you say about the family who is suing the railroad after their drunk son was killed walking on the tracks? Trains don’t normally sneak up on people. Unless they’ve derailed, you pretty much know where to find them. The young man wasn’t deaf and blind. No one had tied him to the tracks, so what’s there to sue about?
While at a loss to explain some things, I take great joy in explaining others. After returning from my trip, I went to my regular place to have my hair cut. They’d given me a shampoo and I was sitting with a towel on my head when Pascal, the shop owner, handed me a popular French gossip magazine featuring a story on Jodie Foster and her new baby. Pascal, who speaks English, is “aped over Jodie Foster” and owns all her movies on videotape. His dream is to frost her tips while asking behind-the-scenes questions about Sommersby.
“I’ve been looking at this one photo,” he said, “but there is something here that I am not making out.”
He pointed to a picture of the actress walking down a California beach with an unidentified friend who held the baby against her chest. A large dog ran just ahead of the women and splashed in the surf.
“I can see that Jodie Foster is holding in one hand a leash,” Pascal said. “But what is it she is carrying in the other hand? I have asked many people, but nobody knows for sure.”
I brought the magazine close to my face and studied it for a moment. “Well,” I said, “she appears to be carrying a plastic bag of dog shit.”
“Go out of here, you nut.” He seemed almost angry. “Jodie Foster is the biggest star. She won an Academy Award two times, so why would she like to carry a bag that is full of shit? Nobody would do that but a crazy person.” He called to his four employees. “Get over here and listen to what he’s saying, the crazy nut.”
In trying to communicate why an Academy Award–winning actress might walk down the beach carrying a plastic bag full of dog feces, I got the sort of lump in my throat that other people might get while singing their national anthem. It was the pride one can feel only when, far from home and surrounded by a captive audience, you are called upon to explain what is undoubtedly the single greatest thing about your country.
“Well,” I said, “it goes like this…”