In series three of the superlative HBO series Madmen, set in early 1960s Madison Avenue, New York’s advertising engine room, Conrad Hilton, the founder of Hilton Worldwide, explains to the show’s main protagonist, advertising executive Don Draper: “America is where you look; it’s where you want it to be. It’s my purpose in life to bring America to the world.” In real life Hilton called it “planting a little bit of America around the world.” Later in the show, when Hilton suggests a bold advertising campaign highlighting American integrity, he says: “… This country is a force of good because we have God. Communists don’t … There should be goodness in confidence.”

 

It was this idea of America, as “a force for good” and as a creative, vibrant and exciting society that since its inception, has fascinated, entranced even, foreigners. Visiting the US in the 1830s, Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville was arguably the most perceptive observer of American life ever to step ashore. English luminaries like Charles Dickens and Oscar Wilde toured to the delight of American audiences. Rudyard Kipling resided there for a while whilst many creative people settled there permanently, including WH Auden, Charlie Chaplin, and John Lennon. 

 

In England in the fifties and sixties, we youngsters ingested it throughout our childhood and adolescence. America’s pioneering history, its icons and shibboleths, its literature, it’s movies and its music transformed it into a secular Ka’ba, a touch stone of all that was good about modernity, ingenuity, creativity and enterprise. Whilst we could not realise the “American Dream” in all its freedom-lovin egalitarianism , we could imagine it and hope to emulate it.

 

Out of curiosity, I recently rewatched the 1962 epic How The West Was Won. Like many films of that era, it has not stood well the test of time. In a voice over at the very end, the iconic actor Spencer Tracey intones:

 

“The west that was won by its pioneers, settlers, adventurers is long gone now. Yet it is theirs forever, for they left tracks in history that will never be eroded by wind or rain – never plowed under by tractors, never buried in a compost of events. Out of the hard simplicity of their lives, out of their vitality, of their hopes and sorrows grew legends of courage and pride to inspire their children and their children’s children. From soil enriched by their blood, out of their fever to explore and be, came lakes where once there were burning deserts – came the goods of the earth; mine and wheat fields, orchards and great lumber mills. All the sinews of a growing country. Out of their rude settlements, their trading posts came cities to rank among the great ones of the world. All the heritage of a people free to dream, free to act, free to mold their own destiny”. 

 

America, the idea of America, the ideal of America, the promise of America, and the idiosyncrasies of America are part of our own cultural DNA. It’s one of our most challenging love-hate relationships. “I love the country but I can’t stand the scene”, as Canadian expatriate Leonard Cohen sang. It’s Walt Whitman’s America, Leonard Bernstein’s America, Paul Simon’s America, Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan’s America. But it’s also an America that seems forever roiled with searing divisions at home and brutal adventurism abroad, and even before Donald Trump’s America, the bitter and twisted, revanchist and retro America, the dangerously blinkered and overconfident America driven by its creation myths of manifest destiny and American exceptionalism.

 

Many outside observers and admirers have from early to late adulthood seen their earlier golden American dreaming tarnished by the grim realities of American history, society and politics. The “land of the free” seems perpetually riven with conflict about freedom and equality: the civil rights struggles, unending struggles for equal rights for all ethnicities, for labour rights, women’s rights, gender rights, and indigenous rights, capitalism red in tooth and claw, and the ongoing carnage fueled by untrammelled gun laws. On the world stage, there was the virulent anti-communism, and a reflex ignorance and hatred of socialism that persists today, the morass of the Vietnam War, the US’ violent and hypocritical intervention in Central and South America, and it’s ongoing meddling in a muddled world, including the high stakes and high cost arms race, the endless and unwinnable “war on terror”, and the ruinous backwash and undertow of its reckless invasion of Iraq in the wake of 9/11. 

 

And yet, as we admire American literature, films, music and art, products of its unique historical and cultural diversity, and recoil at its disunity, dysfunction and self-destructiveness, we hear still a faint echo of that idea of America as “the city on the hill”, and cleave still, albeit it tenuously to the hope that somehow, some day, it will once more model what Lincoln saw as “the better angels of our nature” rather than the Iranian ayatollahs’ caricature of “the Great Satan”.  We harken unto the words of Leonard Cohen in his sardonic anthem Democracy (is coming to the USA).