I'm Staying Home This Time

I’ve always been a big fan of the United States of America. I’ve spent a total of at least three years there during my life so far and have been to most of the 50 states (the remaining ones are too cold, too small or too hard to reach).

Plus three months in Washington DC, which for some reason is its own territory.

I was married to a wonderful woman from California whose parents, like mine, settled in Spain in the sixties, and we had thirty years together before she died. We have three children – two of whom are now living in the American mid-west (the third one stayed home here in España).

I was brought up (until I was thirteen) in Norfolk UK, near an American airbase. My parents were friendly with some of the officers, and I would be gifted (sic) lots of comic books (I was one of the earliest British fans of Batman, Superman and Casper the Friendly Ghost). Then came books (with writers like Jack Schaefer, Zane Grey and O. Henry), peanut butter and Hershey Bars.

From the age of nine onwards, I knew that I wanted to spend as much time as I could in America. Those cars!

Studying in Seville when I was seventeen, I took college entrance exams, and was all ready to go, when some friends of my parents warned them (erroneously, I’m sure) that I would end up in Vietnam being shot at by fellows wearing black pyjamas.

I finally crossed ‘el charco’ in 1974, arriving in Florida to stay with the Franzen boys in Pompano Beach – a place with no pavements, bad colour television, beautiful girls and amazing cocktails. Gayne and Ted’s parents were neighbours of my family in Spain. I remember to this day consuming my first Whopper.

I love the opportunity that the USA offers, plus the enormous and sparsely populated hinterland. My two kids live in a state that is 40% larger than the whole of Spain.

I’m a huge fan of American culture: its writers, musicians and artists who have brought so much pleasure to the world. 

Nowadays, I tend to go every November and visit the grandchildren, the local Wal-Mart and the breathtaking countryside (when I can afford to) and to eat the Thanksgiving turkey, but I shan’t be going this year.

Sadly, the USA that I know and love is undergoing a Once in a Hundred Year collapse (think the October Revolution or Brexit) thanks to the insidious MAGA philosophy. I can put up (more or less) with the guns and the iced tea, but Donald Trump’s second term, surrounded as he is this time with people who are evidently even thicker and nastier that him (mostly fished from the water treatment plant of Fox News) is for me a step too far.

There’s Pete Hegseth with his alarming Christian tattoos and his alleged love for a bottle of scotch who runs the reassuringly renamed ‘Department of War’. The worm-brained Robert Kennedy: the ludicrous secretary of health who doesn’t believe (‘believe’!) in vaccinations. Kristi Noem is the Secretary for Homeland Security – she’s the one who wants to deport all the Latin farmworkers with her reprehensible (and masked) ICE goons (she’s best known for shooting her puppy because it wouldn’t ‘heel’). Then there’s the top two officials at the FBI, Kash Patel and Dan Bongino, who between them have no previous experience at the law enforcement agency (Bongino used to be a far-right radio host). The eccentric Christian extremist Mike Huckabee is Trump’s ambassador to Israel… and so on: a plethora of the inept and dangerously appointed. Then there’re the current purges against ‘the radical left’ Democrat party – a damp and strangely feeble group that could kindly be described in European terms as centre-right. The late Charlie Kirk said of them: ‘the Dems believe everything God hates’.

Such a young country run by such old-fashioned conservative values!

Of course, I can still visit the USA (after all, I’m tall and pink and have a nice anglo-sounding name, plus I’m too old to be much of a nuisance anyway). Just remember not to say anything silly and make a point of glaring sternly at anyone who looks even slightly Latin.  

Anyway, I’ve decided. I’ll be staying home this year. I wish to avoid the minor threat of ending up in Alligator Alley or Guantánamo.

I’m told that I’m not the only one who thinks like this.

On the bedside table I’ve got Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath to re-read.

I’m pretty sure that I can manage just fine this year without a Hershey Bar.