Why is america so insular

American insularity, French insecurity. Of Canada, the country where I grew up, where my family still lives, where my wife and children are citizens, well, the Canadian core irrationality is an absence of irrationality. Canadians make a fetish of non-violent unexcitability to the point of making their country seem less vivid than it really is.

Apologetics are Canada's national form. When Britain made a wonderful show of its new self in its summer Olympic ceremonies - all those pop stars and NHS beds - Canada offered, when we did the winter ones, a sort of charming, apologetic anti-ceremony.

Don't ask for magic when you can have more moose and more Mounties. Same old Canada, and we know it, they said. The comic genius of Canada - and it is an almost safe bet that if an American is funny, he is Canadian - lies in the ability to play off this national habit of self-deprecation against the grandiosity of what we still call "The States".

This is also what makes Toronto the greyest of all the world's great cities. I am reminded of the beautiful Canadian model whom I heard once commenting on the opening of a La Perla lingerie store there: "That place is a real budget-buster. Canada is the most excellent of countries - and it must be an erotic country inasmuch as there are always more Canadians - but it usually finds amazingly resourceful ways to dampen the Dionysian side of human experience.

About Britain, and to conclude alliteratively, as I suppose I must, I think there the core irrationality is inwardness. I think of this as Greenwich Mean Time syndrome - the belief, that the time in the UK is the true time in the world, that British values and manners are the obvious norm for values and manners everywhere.

Just the way the world should be. The British alone speak without an accent, their view is obvious common sense, their grammar correct, and everything else is a variant. This inwardness is not always self-congratulatory, as in America, or tetchy and defensive as in France. It is often highly self-critical, "it is the fate of mankind to be like us, and what a fate that is! It goes hand in hand, too, with a perpetual capacity for embarrassment.

Embarrassment you feel yourself on behalf of others who are soon going to feel embarrassed. Anyone, a visiting American, for instance, who violates the British norms is likely to make himself seem foolish - and condescension, in theory, wards off the approaching embarrassment of the other guy.

To be sure, manners in Britain have changed more in the last three decades than those of any of the other nations I know. But this unconscious sense of centrality hasn't. The lout urinating in public on a Saturday night - you might convince him that there are other louts elsewhere who act otherwise, but he will still believe that his is the right, the only way, to be a lout.

Having now doubtless gotten myself banished from the four places I've called home - thankfully, I'm told that the Faroe Islands are a very welcoming place - I shall add at the end what I'm sure has been self-evident to you from the start.

The irrationalities of nations are inextricably linked to the permanent national virtues:. Our core irrationalities are who we are.

Can you name a single Latin American writer under 60? Weinberger sees a similar shift among poets. It just stopped being part of the community service of poets. Some point to a xenophobia emanating from official Washington since Sept. Bush, who has shown less curiosity about international culture than such predecessors as Bill Clinton and Teddy Roosevelt.

Others blame the media. Despite the renewed importance of foreign affairs to Americans, newspapers are still shuttering foreign bureaus and television networks have recently closed bureaus in Manila, Moscow and Beijing. But most see an American insularity long predating Bush.

Even with this strain in the national character, there were high-water marks of cosmopolitanism. We also lose a more general understanding. Consider them cultural CARE packages, precious news bulletins, breaths of air fresh or stale from diverse corners of the globe.

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We read John Grisham novels. Ask Britons to name the U. The British political elite loves the United States: Every political adviser here goes to sleep hugging a West Wing box set. Our pollsters and political scientists become feverishly excited when they can switch from talking about our own elections—which have six-week campaigns, and have been tediously designed so the party with the most votes gets to be in charge—to the byzantine madness of the Electoral College.

Right now, everyone here has strong opinions on Florida. China makes our toys, our clothes, and our anti-COVID personal protective equipment, but occupies a fraction of our mental bandwidth.

Nowhere is the American rhino more obvious than in social-justice activism. Here is one insignificant, but telling, example: In August, multiple stories focused on a photograph of the British singer-songwriter Adele with her hair in Bantu knots. Yet the controversy had an odd hollowness. One of the few named commentators quoted was Jemele Hill, a contributing writer for The Atlantic , whose tweet expressing mild exasperation with the outfit received 27, likes. Someone always is.

But prominent Black Britons, including the model Naomi Campbell and the talent-show winner Alexandra Burke, defended the singer. Sunder Katwala, the chair of the identity-focused think tank British Future, told me it was notable that when the British talk-radio station LBC discussed the controversy, it had to bring on the American writer Ernest Owens to make the case against the singer. Somehow, a man from Philadelphia had become the designated arbiter of whether it was appropriate for a British woman to wear a Jamaican-flag bikini and a hairstyle named for people in southern Africa.

The apparent absence of anyone in Britain who was truly outraged by Adele suggested to Katwala that there was something synthetic about the whole debate. He said he wondered whether it was an attempt by the British right to import American culture wars—which have benefited Republican politicians looking to drum up support among working-class voters. In the U. The wall-to-wall coverage of the Adele story and of other apparent outrages reflects a simple demographic and economic truth: There are six times as many Americans as Britons, so English-language publishers around the world are keen to serve the U.