Cheerio, America

DEPARTING British journalist Kevin Connolly, who covered the USA for the BBC for the past 3 years, recently wrote a witty “Farewell, America” column worthy of Alexis de Tocqueville (shown left):

On writing: "American writing, for example, beguiles and exasperates in equal measure. Its newspapers - with one or two exceptions - are awful. Endless sub-clauses roam across prairies of newsprint in search of the point, like homesteader wagons on the Oregon trail circling around a knackered old buffalo."

On gun ownership: "Show [Europeans] a gun, and we picture a muscular ne'er-do-well in a balaclava menacing an elderly sub-postmistress. An American is more likely to visualise a plucky homesteader crouching between an overturned sofa in a burning ranch house, preparing to defend his family to the death."

On manners: “America was first into the world of over-effusive politeness ... [For example] they could speed up their journeys to work by not insisting on holding every elevator for everyone who wants to catch it as though it was one of the last helicopters leaving the roof of the Saigon embassy in 1975."

Ha! How true. Connolly shares Tocqueville's talent for getting at the essence of American culture. Read the entire column here.