Growing up, I could see the US was deeply uncool. Now, it’s dynamic and culturally confident
My grandfather’s job took the family from Kent to Los Angeles when my dad was just old enough to stay in the UK for university. If he had been a bit younger, I might be writing this in an American accent.
For most of my life, I have considered this a narrow escape and not only because I could have been called Todd. It is hard to overstate how uncool America was when I was growing up in the 1990s and 2000s. They were gun-toting fatties who voted for George Bush. We were the land of Oasis and David Beckham and there were two dollars to the pound. There would have been no Cool Britannia for poor Todd, who would have been bewildered by many of the concepts in Harry Potter. Todd was not an aspirational figure.
Not anymore. As the reports this week show, the US economy has a full spread of sail while Britain languishes far behind. These are years of plenty for Todd. He is sitting in an enormous chair in a large house. He has a car or two. He earns twice as much for the same work, but let’s face it, he doesn’t do the same work. Todd might be a journalist, but he has probably tried to get a job in one of America’s many growing industries. He maintains the coolant pumps at an AI server farm, or works in Elon Musk’s customer complaints department, for which he is paid $200,000 a year.
Todd can be confident in his culture, too. You can’t open a paper anywhere without learning something about Taylor Swift. When I was a child, American films and series were still mediated by British channels. Now they are piped in directly through YouTube, Netflix, Amazon Prime and Disney+. Even where social media is Chinese, as with TikTok, the trends from it are American. The Booker Prize shortlist, once a gallery of British talent, this year comprises two Americans, a Canadian, two Irishmen and a lone Brit. Todd need have no sense of inferiority.
Sure, Todd worries about healthcare and guns, like the latest horror in Maine. He might be alarmed by a resurgent Trump, although I suspect he is a die-hard MAGA-type with a mullet. But he lives in a dynamic country with its own energy supply, abundant land and natural resources, removed by thousands of miles from the nightmare in the Middle East, and other looming global issues that feel more immediate in Europe. He might not know much, but he is happy. Todd does not envy Ed and neither will his children.
Source: Telegraph
