America – what are you becoming? I have been to the States twice. The trips were good in different ways, but I won’t be going again, at least not for four years or so.
An easy principle to flourish, making a stance about something you weren’t going to do anyway. But I’d love to return one day, finances and upended geopolitics permitting.
The first trip, featured before on this ledge, was with my university friend John. A week in New York, a seven-day drive of 3,000 miles to Los Angeles, delivering a car, followed by a week in LA and San Francisco.
John died in 1999, aged 42, a departure that cast a shadow familiar to anyone who has lost a friend. The memories now belong only to me as John cannot join in, or heckle or say it wasn’t like that, not on that day, but they are good memories.
If that holiday was a taster course in all things American, the second was a more traditional dish, a family break in Orlando with my wife’s parents and her sister and family, taking in Disney World.
The children, young then, a little less young now, still talk about those days in Florida.
Both holidays left a good impression of America, of places visited and people met. It’s easy to forget just what a great country America was before the Tango gangster set about recasting it in his own misshapen image.
I’d love to return, to hire a camper van and explore the natural wonders and the great cities, the canyons and the galleries, the coasts and the craft breweries.
All those deportations and detentions are putting me off. And I am not alone, as the US travel and tourism industry are likely to miss out on billions of dollars this year.
Why would you now wish to visit a country that confined British tourist Becky Burke, 28, for 19 days and then removed her in chains, “like Hannibal Lecter”, according to her parents?
Becky was arrested half way through a backpacking trip across North America. When released she was, according to parents Paul and Andrea Burke, of Monmouthshire, “traumatised” after being taken in “leg chains, waist chains and handcuffs”.
A quote issued to the BBC illustrates heartless bureaucracy at work. The statement from the Northwest ICE Processing Center ran as follows: “All aliens in violation of US immigration law may be subject to arrest, detention and, if found removable by final order, removal from the United States regardless of nationality.”
Becky’s arrest and detention came from what appears to be a misunderstanding of her accommodation arrangements. She had organised free accommodation for helping host families “around the house”.
Helping around the house must clearly be the actions of an “enemy alien” in today’s America. An easy mistake to make once you have whipped up a braying mob.
Sometimes spouting off about strength is a kind of weakness, a bully boy idiocy that foolishly foresees no bad consequences.
Whether you like the States or not, it has great influence on the world, and at present that influence seems only to be for ill. “Make America Great Again” is an inbred, parochial cry for a country once mostly respected in the world.
Off-and-on-again tariffs have put paid to that. As have Trump’s “kiss-my-ass” approach to diplomacy. And his attack on the academic freedoms, and the finances, of America’s great universities.
Why on earth did Sir Keir Starmer invite mad king Donald here for a second state visit? Crawling to Trump will lead nowhere good.
As for trade deals, that will be fine, so long as it doesn’t end up with us having to import chlorinated chicken and other American delights. Coq au Chlorine? Thanks, but no.
If the US is out of bounds for travellers young and old, it is encouraging that the EU appears to be paving the way for British and European 18 to 30-year-olds to travel and work freely. If the US is closing borders, Europe should open theirs.
Young people should travel and explore different cultures, and many young Europeans want to visit Britain. We should invite them here openly and often.
My now dented appreciation of America is partly based on those two trips eons ago. Alongside long being dunked in American culture, from TV and films to music and literature.
Where is Mark Twain when you need him? Long gone but still here in the following quote: “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts.”