So we live in a country that is falling apart thanks to the oncoming recession caused largely by irresponsible banks (or banks at least looking like they were acting irresponsibly, but how many of the bastards have actually fallen yet?), our national health system is in a bad way, our education system is churning out imbeciles who can't even pass NVQs, and our government is trying to install CCTV on every street and issue us with ID cards (at our expense, naturally). We can be arrested and held for up to 28 days without charge on suspicion of terrorist activities. Gangs of thick cunts lurch about the streets bellowing incoherent gobshit at one another and passers by and injecting themselves with heroin and hopelessness as the the third generation of their families to live off the benefits system. But do you know what? I'd rather live here than in the US. The more time I spend on the internet, the more I see that the cultural divide between we Brits and the US is far wider than I used to think.
We, for example, take our NHS for granted a little bit. In Britain, if you get hit by a car and break a leg, an ambulance will come and take you to a hospital, and yes, you might have to wait, but a team of doctors and nurses will check you over and fix you up as best they can. And do you know what it costs you? A bit of tax off your pay. That's all. No quibbling, no argument, if you're ill, they will try to fix you. You'd be forgiven for thinking that access to free healthcare is a basic human right. You'd be wrong, but you'd be forgiven for thinking it nonetheless. In the US, however, there is no free health care. You have to have medical insurance, like motor insurance for the body, except it costs more and the companies will wriggle out of paying for it even more often than they do with motor insurance. If you have medical insurance, then you get access to healthcare, but it puts up your premiums because now you've had to make a claim. Or, in the case of one poor woman who was diagnosed with cancer of the thyroid, the insurance company lets her get treated, racking up a bill of over $70,000, and then tells her that she isn't going to get it covered by the insurance as she clearly already had the cancer when she began her insurance policy and it was therefore a 'pre-existing condition' that she failed to declare (despite not knowing she had it, obviously, but that's no defence when dealing with rapacious scum of the fucking earth insurance companies to whom profits are far more important than people's lives). She recovered from the cancer, but the couple were reduced to poverty thanks to the debt they owed the hospital for the treatment. And there's the rub, kids. If you can't pay, you're in for a whole world of financial hurt. Granted, there is some small provision for very low income children and their families, but it's not well implemented and so many people fall through the holes it is scary, and this article demonstrates the attitude of even some surgeons towards uninsured people - a 5 year old boy with an open fracture in this case, for fuck's sake. In 2006, for example, there were over 40 million people in the US with no insurance at all. If they were hit by a car, they would basically be billed by the hospital for the work, and would probably lose their homes paying for their accident.
And there's another reason to be grateful for living in the UK. Especially at this time whilst the world is being ground under by the relentless advance of the recession and more people are being made redundant every day, isn't it comforting to know that the government will give you £64 a week to buy your food and pay your bills, and the local council will pay for some of your rent and council tax? I lost my job in December, and am (just) able to maintain a nice flat in a nice place, with room for my kids and my hobbies, and I am here on the internet, typing away. I've been trying to get something else because, lovely though the freedom is, it does get a little boring sometimes and I could do with the money for a new PC, but the point is that for the last six months I have been able to keep a roof over mine and my childrens' heads. In the US, I'd be on the streets. Homelessness happens very easily in the US. Oh, there is a system to work through, housing projects filled with human detritus, gangs and drug peddlers, but all too often redundancy basically means you're fucked. No rent equals no home. Get the fuck out of my apartment, and no, I don't give two soggy shits that you have nowhere to go.
And that whole thing about the land of the free? It's bullshit. We might think that our police are draconian when dealing with protests and shooting Brazilian plumbers on a London Underground train, thinking he was a terrorist, but compared to the US, our police are harmless sixties style Nick-Berry-esque bobbies relaxing in front of a pub fire and enjoying a bawdy joke with the locals. In the US, a woman in her seventies was tasered by a traffic cop because she was being 'difficult' and was 'resisting arrest'. No offence, but if you can't control a 72-year old woman without delivering a massive electric shock and thus running the risk of actually killing her, you shouldn't be on the fucking police force. In the US, a patrol car actually pulled up and told a man sitting on his own garden fence, talking to a saleswoman, to get on the ground and put their hands behind their heads, and repeatedly told them to stay away from the area and off people's property. Why? He was black. And so was the saleswoman. The man, unfortunately for them, turned out to be an officer in the LAPD, but what if he hadn't been? In the US, the Patriot Act means that FBI agents can access your home, your computer, your place of work, and take whatever they want and not even tell you that they have been, they can tap your phones, read your private emails, open your mail - all in the national interest, of course. It's the war on terror, you see. They can also arrest you and you just disappear into a Guantanamo Bay style non-prison for the rest of your life, held without reason or charge until you eventually break down and confess to something you never did, or until you die of old age. Detained indefinitely due to secret evidence. The US is becoming more and more like the government of 1984 with every step it takes.
And don't even get me started on religion. We're a nice, cosy, mostly secular country. Apart from the door-knocking Jehovah's Witnesses and Morons - sorry, Mormons - we don't really have many tub-thumping evangelical types. The Archbishop of Canterbury accepts evolution and science, and for the most part the religious in the UK do tend to keep to themselves. Even the born-agains, who, although they can't help dropping Jesus' name into conversation and wearing clothes 20 years too old for them (beige slacks and cable-knit sweaters, and Laura Ashley floral print dresses with slingbacks...shudder), tend to just go to church and mingle with their own. In the US the religious are fucking insane. They really are. They are never off the media, spouting hatred against gays, or muslims, or atheists. They believe, quite genuinely, that the Earth is less than 20,000 years old and take the biblical creation story literally. In Texas and several other states, it is even in the state constitution that you can't hold public office there if you don't believe in a supreme being. Seriously. Although there is ostensibly a seperation between the school system and religion, in many states they don't even bother to pay lip service to that, and if you don't want to say prayers with the school basketball team, you'd best have a fucking thick skin because you will be branded as 'that disgusting atheist' and excluded from the team, ostracised from classmates, and even treated dubiously by teaching staff. Think I'm kidding? Check it out. Scary, isn't it?
And then there's the politics. You thought the Conservatives were a bunch of openly arrogant money-grubbing cunts hell-bent on grinding the faces of those on below average incomes into the dirt to line their already full pockets? Even Thatcher looks like a kindly aunt compared to the average Republican. They don't even have the shame to hide their corporate connections like our right -wingers do. I think that many of the American right would gleefully go back to feudalism and reinstitute serfdom just so that they could drive around the grubby peasantry and piss champagne at them from the open windows of their gas-guzzling limousines, driving over any not fast enough to get out of the way. Watching the Houses of Parliament in this country is bad enough, like watching a bunch of dribbling, witless public school cock-sockets acting as though they were still in a playground somewhere, but in the US it escalates wildly. Political campaigns reach histrionic levels. Whenever I see Republicans in particular getting all emotional in speeches I am reminded of Hitler's Neuremberg Rally. They also have this habit of shouting down their opposition in a way that even a hardened Tory would quail at.
And scarily, the media stands firmly behind them in some cases. Fox News are one of the worst offenders, misrepresenting news stories and effectively telling the country what to think, and employing rancid fucking dogsuckers like Bill O'Reilly to shout at anyone who doesn't buy the party lie that the US is the greatest country in the world and if you believe it did bad things then you are a TRAITOR and should go live somewhere else. Again, here's an example. The US media also have an appalling track record of ignoring news about what their governments' policies are doing to the rest of the world in favour of homegrown smokescreens. Sociologists refer to the media as gatekeepers of information, deciding what the people see and what they don't see, and nowhere is this more clearly politicised than in the US. Check out these covers of the same issue of Newsweek. Newsweek has now been bought out and apparently is improving, but this is just an example of how blind and blanketed the American people are being kept. And even then, half of the public were against the war in Iraq, despite this kind of news filtering.
In summary, then, the whole American Dream thing is bullshit. In reality it's a nation ruled by a wealthy elite and their accompanying fundamentalist Christian ministers who absolutely will not relinquish their power, supported by an ultra-right-wing government that openly uses unconstitutional practices 'in the national interest' against its own citizens. A massive number of the people of the country don't get access to healthcare, and as the recession deepens and more companies go out of business or downsize, more and more families there will end up homeless. Not only that, but they are lied to and shouted down by their own media. I do honestly think that most of the American people are probably nice enough. It's their government and their institutions that scare the piss out of me. Still, if we must find a bright side, at least the US has marginally better track record with women's rights than Somalia.
We, for example, take our NHS for granted a little bit. In Britain, if you get hit by a car and break a leg, an ambulance will come and take you to a hospital, and yes, you might have to wait, but a team of doctors and nurses will check you over and fix you up as best they can. And do you know what it costs you? A bit of tax off your pay. That's all. No quibbling, no argument, if you're ill, they will try to fix you. You'd be forgiven for thinking that access to free healthcare is a basic human right. You'd be wrong, but you'd be forgiven for thinking it nonetheless. In the US, however, there is no free health care. You have to have medical insurance, like motor insurance for the body, except it costs more and the companies will wriggle out of paying for it even more often than they do with motor insurance. If you have medical insurance, then you get access to healthcare, but it puts up your premiums because now you've had to make a claim. Or, in the case of one poor woman who was diagnosed with cancer of the thyroid, the insurance company lets her get treated, racking up a bill of over $70,000, and then tells her that she isn't going to get it covered by the insurance as she clearly already had the cancer when she began her insurance policy and it was therefore a 'pre-existing condition' that she failed to declare (despite not knowing she had it, obviously, but that's no defence when dealing with rapacious scum of the fucking earth insurance companies to whom profits are far more important than people's lives). She recovered from the cancer, but the couple were reduced to poverty thanks to the debt they owed the hospital for the treatment. And there's the rub, kids. If you can't pay, you're in for a whole world of financial hurt. Granted, there is some small provision for very low income children and their families, but it's not well implemented and so many people fall through the holes it is scary, and this article demonstrates the attitude of even some surgeons towards uninsured people - a 5 year old boy with an open fracture in this case, for fuck's sake. In 2006, for example, there were over 40 million people in the US with no insurance at all. If they were hit by a car, they would basically be billed by the hospital for the work, and would probably lose their homes paying for their accident.
And there's another reason to be grateful for living in the UK. Especially at this time whilst the world is being ground under by the relentless advance of the recession and more people are being made redundant every day, isn't it comforting to know that the government will give you £64 a week to buy your food and pay your bills, and the local council will pay for some of your rent and council tax? I lost my job in December, and am (just) able to maintain a nice flat in a nice place, with room for my kids and my hobbies, and I am here on the internet, typing away. I've been trying to get something else because, lovely though the freedom is, it does get a little boring sometimes and I could do with the money for a new PC, but the point is that for the last six months I have been able to keep a roof over mine and my childrens' heads. In the US, I'd be on the streets. Homelessness happens very easily in the US. Oh, there is a system to work through, housing projects filled with human detritus, gangs and drug peddlers, but all too often redundancy basically means you're fucked. No rent equals no home. Get the fuck out of my apartment, and no, I don't give two soggy shits that you have nowhere to go.
And that whole thing about the land of the free? It's bullshit. We might think that our police are draconian when dealing with protests and shooting Brazilian plumbers on a London Underground train, thinking he was a terrorist, but compared to the US, our police are harmless sixties style Nick-Berry-esque bobbies relaxing in front of a pub fire and enjoying a bawdy joke with the locals. In the US, a woman in her seventies was tasered by a traffic cop because she was being 'difficult' and was 'resisting arrest'. No offence, but if you can't control a 72-year old woman without delivering a massive electric shock and thus running the risk of actually killing her, you shouldn't be on the fucking police force. In the US, a patrol car actually pulled up and told a man sitting on his own garden fence, talking to a saleswoman, to get on the ground and put their hands behind their heads, and repeatedly told them to stay away from the area and off people's property. Why? He was black. And so was the saleswoman. The man, unfortunately for them, turned out to be an officer in the LAPD, but what if he hadn't been? In the US, the Patriot Act means that FBI agents can access your home, your computer, your place of work, and take whatever they want and not even tell you that they have been, they can tap your phones, read your private emails, open your mail - all in the national interest, of course. It's the war on terror, you see. They can also arrest you and you just disappear into a Guantanamo Bay style non-prison for the rest of your life, held without reason or charge until you eventually break down and confess to something you never did, or until you die of old age. Detained indefinitely due to secret evidence. The US is becoming more and more like the government of 1984 with every step it takes.
And don't even get me started on religion. We're a nice, cosy, mostly secular country. Apart from the door-knocking Jehovah's Witnesses and Morons - sorry, Mormons - we don't really have many tub-thumping evangelical types. The Archbishop of Canterbury accepts evolution and science, and for the most part the religious in the UK do tend to keep to themselves. Even the born-agains, who, although they can't help dropping Jesus' name into conversation and wearing clothes 20 years too old for them (beige slacks and cable-knit sweaters, and Laura Ashley floral print dresses with slingbacks...shudder), tend to just go to church and mingle with their own. In the US the religious are fucking insane. They really are. They are never off the media, spouting hatred against gays, or muslims, or atheists. They believe, quite genuinely, that the Earth is less than 20,000 years old and take the biblical creation story literally. In Texas and several other states, it is even in the state constitution that you can't hold public office there if you don't believe in a supreme being. Seriously. Although there is ostensibly a seperation between the school system and religion, in many states they don't even bother to pay lip service to that, and if you don't want to say prayers with the school basketball team, you'd best have a fucking thick skin because you will be branded as 'that disgusting atheist' and excluded from the team, ostracised from classmates, and even treated dubiously by teaching staff. Think I'm kidding? Check it out. Scary, isn't it?
And then there's the politics. You thought the Conservatives were a bunch of openly arrogant money-grubbing cunts hell-bent on grinding the faces of those on below average incomes into the dirt to line their already full pockets? Even Thatcher looks like a kindly aunt compared to the average Republican. They don't even have the shame to hide their corporate connections like our right -wingers do. I think that many of the American right would gleefully go back to feudalism and reinstitute serfdom just so that they could drive around the grubby peasantry and piss champagne at them from the open windows of their gas-guzzling limousines, driving over any not fast enough to get out of the way. Watching the Houses of Parliament in this country is bad enough, like watching a bunch of dribbling, witless public school cock-sockets acting as though they were still in a playground somewhere, but in the US it escalates wildly. Political campaigns reach histrionic levels. Whenever I see Republicans in particular getting all emotional in speeches I am reminded of Hitler's Neuremberg Rally. They also have this habit of shouting down their opposition in a way that even a hardened Tory would quail at.
And scarily, the media stands firmly behind them in some cases. Fox News are one of the worst offenders, misrepresenting news stories and effectively telling the country what to think, and employing rancid fucking dogsuckers like Bill O'Reilly to shout at anyone who doesn't buy the party lie that the US is the greatest country in the world and if you believe it did bad things then you are a TRAITOR and should go live somewhere else. Again, here's an example. The US media also have an appalling track record of ignoring news about what their governments' policies are doing to the rest of the world in favour of homegrown smokescreens. Sociologists refer to the media as gatekeepers of information, deciding what the people see and what they don't see, and nowhere is this more clearly politicised than in the US. Check out these covers of the same issue of Newsweek. Newsweek has now been bought out and apparently is improving, but this is just an example of how blind and blanketed the American people are being kept. And even then, half of the public were against the war in Iraq, despite this kind of news filtering.
In summary, then, the whole American Dream thing is bullshit. In reality it's a nation ruled by a wealthy elite and their accompanying fundamentalist Christian ministers who absolutely will not relinquish their power, supported by an ultra-right-wing government that openly uses unconstitutional practices 'in the national interest' against its own citizens. A massive number of the people of the country don't get access to healthcare, and as the recession deepens and more companies go out of business or downsize, more and more families there will end up homeless. Not only that, but they are lied to and shouted down by their own media. I do honestly think that most of the American people are probably nice enough. It's their government and their institutions that scare the piss out of me. Still, if we must find a bright side, at least the US has marginally better track record with women's rights than Somalia.
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