leifw

I enjoyed this piece by former BBC North America editor Justin Webb reflecting on what America is as he departed after 7 years in the States.

In more than seven years of life in America, I have come to value - to love, actually - the stolid, sunny, unchallenging, simple virtuousness of the American suburban psyche.
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When selling a home in America, you have to pretend that you do not live there. No, you have to pretend that no-one lives there. Or ever
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The English understand that we are all falling down. Dust to dust, we intuit. Americans do not. They have not got there yet.
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And yet for all the ugliness, the deadening tawdriness of much of the American landscape and the tinny feebleness of many of its politicians - for all that nastiness and shallowness and flakiness - there is no question in my mind that to live here has been the greatest privilege of my life.
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But if Sonia Sotomayor is to make it big, there must be something creating the drive, and part of that something is the poverty of the alternative, the discomfort of the ordinary lives that most Americans endure and the freedom that Americans have to go to hell if that is the decision they take. This is the atmosphere in which Nobel Prize winners are nurtured
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I feel crazy going back to the old world. My five-year-old daughter Clara, who is the proud owner of an American passport, agrees. She says she intends to leave home, at around 12-years-old, and return to her native land. I do not blame her. If you are willing to chance your arm, if you back yourself, if you want to live the life, America is still the place to be.
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