The Good Ole U.S. of A.

America.

For as long as I can remember there has been a tendency to look up to the country with something approaching a religious awe.  It's the place everyone wants to go to.  The place where anyone can get off the boat (or airplane) penniless and earn fortunes.  The place that consistently picked up on people's ideas, provided the funding and turned them into a reality denied elsewhere...... The land where anything is possible.

Cowboy films.  Musicals.  Gangsters.  John Wayne movies.....  Inventing the game show and daytime tv.  Inventing blues, jazz, rock and roll.  And the cheeseburger.

Big cars (most of them crap).  Big trains.  Big planes.  Skyscrapers.  Wide open spaces and wide open mouths.

The space race.  Winning it, then losing interest and losing it again.

Arriving late for both the First and Second World Wars.....and then claiming the Allies wouldn't have won without them (and probably rightly too....).  Korea.....a bloody nose.  Vietnam.....a disgrace and a tragedy and another bloody nose.  The two Gulf Wars and Afghanistan......more bloody noses (ok, Saddam was toppled, thank God, but what a shambles the USA has presided over since then).  It's hard not to conclude that, when it comes to Wars, the Americans just aren't very good.

A culture with ingrained racism.  Massacres of Indians (sorry, Native Americans).  The persecution of Negroes in the past (and in some areas still).  Not to mention the poor of any colour and origin.
Arrogant cops.  Even more arrogant airport security people.

An absolute refusal to admit to any mistakes made, anywhere.  Ever. 

What IS it about the place and the people?

America......

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I've spent much of my life working alongside Americans and for American companies.  I've had some good times and some dreadful times.  I've prospered, both professionally and financially, and been close to bankrupted.  Some of the nicest people I've ever worked with were American.  So were some of the biggest arseholes.....  But then, I worked with nice people and arseholes in British companies and German banks as well, so that is not a uniquely American thing. 

In the late 70s and early 80s I worked for a major US bank in London (they're no longer with us: once the biggest in the world, successive senior management fucked them up to such an extent that they were close to bankruptcy in the last financial crisis and bailed out (with tax payer assistance) and swallowed up by another US bank).  Those years were some of the most enjoyable in my career, and I'm still in touch with some of my old colleagues now, 30 years later.  We had a unique team in place then, a mix of people that I've never encountered since.  I can't define what made it so special - partly it was the times, where the world itself was changing, the markets were booming and offering opportunities to everyone to progress if they wanted to.  Maggie was changing the UK for the better, breaking the unions (but tragically destroying whole industries in the process and in the name of free enterprise) and creating a wealthy share-owning democracy by selling off public utilities and privatising national industries - not that it lasted that long.  Her mate Reagan, before Alzheimers kicked in, was busily confronting Russia and its allies and ended up bringing down Communism (with a little help from the Polish Pope and several million peeople who were desperate for change and willing to die for it across Europe and elsewhere).  They were exciting times......and America (and American companies) was, as usual, taking a lead role.

The bank I worked at was very hierarchical.  You started as a Clerk, and sat at a desk in an open plan office with a phone and computer terminal (mainframe, of course - no PCs then).  If you did well, after a few years you'd be promoted to Lead Clerk....and then were entitled to a desk at the end of your block of co-workers and got little notepads with your name on, and became responsible for the day-to-day work your co-workers were doing.  If you still kept your nose clean, after a few more years you might make Supervisor....then things started getting really cool - as well as your personalised notepads, you got business cards and your own office, with a desk, comfortable armchair, a visitors chair and a filing cabinet.....wow.  Depending on the size of your local office or department, you could then progress to Section Manager (personalised notepad, business cards, slightly larger office, 2 visitors chairs and 2 filing cabinets), Department Manager (personalised notepad, business cards, bigger office, 3 visitors chairs and a coffee table, 3 filing cabinets....and a secretary!).  And so on, until you hit Chairman of the Board, where you occupied the entire 57th floor of the HQ buiding on Wall Street, with its own apartments, butler, catering staff and chauffeur driven limousines.  You could even end up as Treasury Secretary for the US government (as my first Chairman did for Reagan).  My rise through the ranks was meteoric.....within three years I had made supervisor, and had a very nice little office overlooking the cells behind the Old Bailey.  I had a visitor one time, from our New York office, who couldn't believe I had got there so quickly....he had been with the firm for 6 years before making Lead Clerk and another 5 before making Supervisor, where he had (at that time) spent the next 12 years....in the same job.  Over 20 years doing the same thing, day in day out, in the same corner of the same floor (the 12th).  Variety is the spice of life, I suppose....

I had two memorable managers in the firm: one a good ole Southern Belle, the other a Canadian guy who looked a bit like a younger Burle Ives (complete with goatee) who considered himself a bit of a comedian but the rest of us considered a bit of a twat.  I worked for him for about 18 months until one of our regular re-shuffles moved him out of London and sent him to somewhere exotic like Boise Idaho, ne'er to be seen again....the reward for screwing up, basically - brought in to build up a particular part of our (enlarged and re-organized) department he instead turned it into a disaster area and laughing stock that needed a team of about a dozen people to be shipped over at extortionate cost from the US (including my long term Supervisor from the 12th Floor) to clean up the mess.  I only worked for the Good Ole Southern Belle for less than a year before taking a chance and leaving to work for an American competitor at better money with (I thought) better prospects.

It wasn't that at all.  Hired on a bunch of promises for the completion of my obligatory 3 month probationary period by an English guy who then left for another (inevitably American) competitor after three weeks, I struggled on for a further 4 months reporting to a guy from Florida who nearly pissed himself laughing when I asked him, at my confirmation interview, for the additional benefits.  The writing was on the wall: 6 weeks later I was fired (sorry, made redundant)....and I was so happy!  That company is the only one I've ever worked for in over 40 years where the corporate phone directory listed both your office telephone and your home telephone numbers, effectively making you "on call" 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.  I lost count of the number of 1 and 2 a.m. calls I get from the New York office as they closed for the day, reminding (or ordering) me to do something when I got to the office....usually something I'd already done anyway.  We of course worked to US Bank Holidays, which meant that Good Friday was a working day.  The fact that the rest of the market was closed, so that London was a ghost town, made no difference.  I drove in (as did all in the Back Office - even though the dealing room was on skeleton staff) and sat reading a book until New York opened.  By this time even the skeleton staff upstairs had left, for home or the pub. I had a call from my equivalent in New York.

"You gotta call Mabon Brokerage now,  Gotta missing instruction on a trade."

"When's settlement, Ronnie?" I said.

"Next Thursday.  But you gotta call 'em now.  Big ticket.  Five million bucks."

I sighed wearily.  "Love to help you, mate, but it's a holiday here.  We're the only peeople working in the entire city of London.  It'll have to wait until Tuesday.  Don't worry, they'll still have a couple of days."

"So phone them at home, for fuck's sake!"  Ronnie was not happy.  "I says you gotta call 'em so you gotta call 'em."

"Ronnie, are you deaf or stupid?"  I was not happy either - I wanted to spend Eastrer with my kids.  "London is closed.  No-one else is working. I may be good, but I don't have the home number of every bond settlements clerk in London.  It will have to wait til Tuesday. Live with it.  Was there anything else that you wanted?"

"Fuck sake," he grumbled.  "That ain't good enough, Bob.  I'm gonna escallate this..." He paused.  "Nicky ain't gonna be happy"  Nicky was his boss, a homicidal maniac Vietnam vet who ruled with an iron fist and everyone in the New York office was terrified of him.  (He was asked to come to London for a meeting and insisted on travelling first class on the QE2, as he was terrified of flying, on the grounds that his last flight had been strapped to the outside of a medevac helicopter out of the Vietnamese jungle.)

"So what?" I said.  "You can escalate it to the Chairman of the Board for all I care.  I still can't help you, Ronnie.  Good talking to you, mate.  I'm going home"

So I went home then, and had three calls ffrom Nicky waiting for me when I got there.  I didn't answer them.  He made a fourth, and started screaming abuse at me.  I cut him off and unplugged the handset for the rest of the Easter weekend.  That was typical of that company.

Another time I went upstairs to see someone about a problem.  We were launching a new issue that day, so it was busy.  The head of the Retail Sales desk was another crazed guy from New Jersey.....when I walked in he was balancing on two computer terminals on his desk, cracking a leather bull-whip over the heads of his team,  and screaming at the top his voice: "Sell, you dumb fiucks, sell!!!   Come on, it's my fucking bonus.....sell!!!!"  His people were all on two lines each, selling......

In the end it didn't do any good.  Long after I left, they were caught up in a price manipulating scandal (basically caught rigging the US Treasury auctions over a period of years).  Their Chairman was kicked out, his licence revoked, and they were banned from that market for 5 years.  They never recovered, their business collapsed and they were eventually absorbed by a competitor (who in turn was swallowed up by Citibank).  I did chuckle....

There was another American guy I worked with, for 18 months or so in my last job, who was a marketting guy.  He was ok, and helped me a lot - we had to go out on the road to potential investors, trying to sell our company and its new business opportunity (not something I'd ever had to do before).  Some years previously I'd had a one day presentation skills training course that I had never used since, so I was nervous about standing up in front of professionals across Europe and trying to persuade them to sign on the dotted line and present us with a cheque for 50 grand or whatever.  Larry helped me lot: both in preparing the slides, in the delivery of the show and, crucially, handling the Q&A afterwards.  We travelled to Paris together for a couple of days, visiting banks there, and shared the presentations (Larry did most of them while I mainly contributed to the Q&A on certain points).  We dined one time in a l ittle restautant close to Notrre Dame, and he had a dish of snails in garlic butter.....I had to wait outside while he ate them.    Our venture failed in the end, and we all lost our jobs, but the stuff Larry helped me with in presentating ideas and running slide shows and handling a possiibly hostile audience, has stood in me good stead in my job now.  I'll always be grateful to the bloke....definitely one of the better Americans.

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I bought a book recently, "A People's History of the United States of America" by a guy called Howard Zinn, an American historian.  I thought it would give me a better understanding about the country and the people - what makes them tick.  It's frankly not a very good book - the prose is turgid, written in American English so the punctuation and spelling is all over the place, and I'm finding it very difficult to get through.  As a catalogue of events (from 1492 up to the present day) it's effective, but there is little explanation as to why those events happened.  It catalogues in great detail a series of attrocities committed by white Americans against both the Native Americans and the Negro slaves, over a period of hundreds of years, but makes no attempt to investigate and explain where this racism comes from.  The demand for more and more land (cited frequently - though not in this book - as the prime reason for annihilating the Native Americans) cannot be the only reason.  There is no clue why white American settlers (and for that matter British and other slave traders) consider themselves so superior to Negroes.  Nor can the land issue explain why weatlhy America (and there are reams of statistics showing how historically a very small minority of Americans have seized the vast majority of its wealth) consistently treat  - or more accurately mistreat - everyone else: keeping women and children employed in factories for countless hours in appalling conditions at starvation wages, forcing them to live in rat infested tenements; brutally surpressing any attempt by workers to extact a better deal.  Railway strikes broken by troops who quite happily shot strikers to death (often in the back as they ran away), strikes in mills and factories and steelworks for better conditions where the "ringleaders" were arrested and hung.   Tenant farmers and smallholders forced off their land as industrial sized farming methods, affordable only to a very few, spread across the midwest - is it me, or is that very close to the collectivisation that Stalin forced in the USSR between the Wars (and for which he was rightly condemned)?

Look at American foreign policy.  At some point in the 19th century, America decided that because of its wealth and production capabilities (a lot of it produced by slave labour and sold at inflated prices - though little of that profit was passed back to the workers), it had to seek overseas markets.  It did this not by honest salesmanship or marketting but by carving out "spheres of influence" - which basically amounted to sending the troops in to take over a country, often overthrowing existing governments.  Mexico, Cuba, the Phillipines, a swathe of Central American countries, Japan, even China, were affected by this gunboat diplomacy.  This has been going on for at least 150 years, and arguably still is (Iraq?  Afghansitan?).  Essentially, American foreign policy cares not about the effect that policy may have on the other country involved, just so long as it makes more money (or more power) for America.  As an American boss I used have would say - "It's my way or the highway".

They do not like criticism.  This week, WikiLeaks has released on the internet a huge number (up to 200,000) cables sent between American Embassies and the US State department over the past 40-odd years.  A lot of it is no more than gossip (is anybody really surprised at Chancellor Merkel being described as "risk averse", or Sarkozy as "vain", or Berlusconi as "a feckless womanizer"?), but there is also stuff there showing that certain Arab leaders have been trying to persude the US to bomb Iran (again, is this really a huge surprise?) and other stuff (Hillary Clinton encouraging her staff to spy on senior UN people, up to and including the Secretary General).  Sure, it's embarrassing for the US, but their claim that it's putting lives at risk?  Just how?  There may be a few less Embassy party invites winging their way to US Ambassadors across the world, I suppose, but I can't see much more than that.   Even the most unstable leader of the lot, Ahmedinajad in Iran, has dismissed it all as a storm in a teacup, propaganda aimed at de-stabilizing his government.  Berlusconi apparently laughed. 

America's reaction?  Well, they're going after WikiLeaks, threatening to close it down and prosecute everyone involved in it (quite how, when it's hosted on a Swedish ISP through servers located all over the world and has no headquarters or permanent staff anywhere, let alone in America, and is run by an Australian, is not clear....).  They're denouncing the organization as terrorists, but making no statement about what they're doing about finding the American employee of the State Department or CIA or whatever who provided WikiLeaks with the material in the first place.  There was another release recently, thousands of documents detailing American atrocities in the Iraq occupation (it's not a war now, really) and they have arrested a guy for that - he's awaiting trial - so clearly he has had nothing to do with this latest bit of mischief.

It's a typical American over-reaction.

And its the sort of over-reaction that over the last several years has caused a massive increase in anti-American feeling across the entire world.

I am not anti-American particularly.  The majority of Americans are I'm sure very pleasant, friendly and helpful people (certainly the vast majority of the - admittedly few- that I have met are like that).  But as a nation, they really need to accept that they are not the centre of the known universe, that other people and countries may have points of view different from their own (and have every right to do so).  This should not be an issue surely: their own Consitution states that "all men are created equal" and have "certain inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness".  All good stuff that surely applies to every person in the world, not just rich Americans - it applies to black, white, brown, yellow, Americans, Africans, Iraqis, Afghans, Israelis, Palestinians, men, women and children.

Doesn't it?