It cuts both ways.
Americans who want to present some version of what America is, as just one set of beliefs and attitudes (like the bullshit we’ve had here in recent years with our thankfully just voted out neo-con national government carrying on about ‘Australian values’ are as if we all agree on what they are, when nobody does among real people), are just as far off the mark in missing the diversity of America.
For example, who has the better claim to representing the real America? The NRA or the ACLU? Aren’t they both American organisations, asserting the constitutional rights of Americans?
Here’s something I posted in another thread, the title of which shall remain a secret 
as some Americans confused a question with an allegation or call for support, which outlines the diversity of America and Americans.
Here’s the substance of a recent article by a senior Australian journalist, and former editor of the paper the article appears in, which confirms that comment from the outsider’s view.
Some particularly wise person once said that if you are going to write about America, you should do so after a short stay, maybe a few weeks, before you are overwhelmed by its diversity and the sheer size of the place, with all its contradictions, excesses and complexities.
I fear that I have failed to convey the complexity of America, but if I have failed I am not alone. My view is that most of the reporting of the place by most foreign correspondents — British, European and, yes, Australian — fails the complexity test.
This, of course, is not unique to the coverage of the United States. Shortly after I arrived in Washington, David Broder, the veteran Washington Post columnist, having spent a few days in Australia, mainly in Sydney, wrote a column in which he described a country that to me was barely recognisable.
Broder’s Australia was an earthly paradise, beautiful beyond imagining, with few economic or social problems, rich and prosperous and peaceful; Australians were friendly and unpretentious, larrikins it is true, but lovable larrikins, a country of men cut from the same cloth as the Crocodile Hunter.
Broder couldn’t get past the cliches and prejudices about the place that he had brought with him to Sydney. How much harder is it then, for foreign correspondents whose job it is to cover America to get past the cliches about the place they have grown up with and the prejudices they have brought with them.
The baggage we bring with us is considerable. American popular culture has long been globalised. And American junk food has taken over the world. For much of my time here, America felt like a giant movie set. And sometimes it felt as if I was in the middle of a TV sitcom. It is so easy and so tempting to describe and report on an America of gun madness, violence, junk food-fed obesity, scary religious fundamentalism, sickly sentimental patriotism and swaggeringly stupid politicians such as George Bush.
That America exists, no doubt, but it is not the whole story. It is not even half the story. Perhaps the best time I had in America was when I was able to travel across the country, to what is often described as the heartland — the Midwest and the plains states and the South-west.
I remember a Saturday night dinner at an old hotel outside a small town in Kansas where all the townsfolk, grandparents and their children and their grandchildren, gathered each week for a fried chicken feast, a place that felt as if it was still living in the 1950s, and where we were made welcome, we strangers, and even invited into people’s homes for a visit.
This happened everywhere, at baseball games, on train journeys, even in coffee shops; people offering hospitality and actually meaning it. Even in Washington, that most competitive of cities where everyone, it seems, is out to become a master of the universe, there was a real sense of neighbourhood and neighbourliness.
Once, when we had been away a few weeks travelling, we returned a few days before Christmas to find our front door decorated with holly and a note welcoming us back home. America is probably the most welcoming place in the world, where millions every year come to seek a new start and where there is no test of blood or tribal connections they have to pass to become Americans.
It is not without significance that, unlike Europe’s Muslims, America’s 2.5-million-strong Muslim community is highly assimilated, an economic success story and, overall, slightly more optimistic about America’s future than the general population, according to recent research by the Pew Research Centre. And an overwhelming majority of American Muslims — more than 90 per cent — are opposed to Islamic extremism.
Much of American popular culture is trashy, of course, and much of its commercial media is mindless and fixated on celebrity, but the best of American journalism — print and broadcast — is better than anything I have found elsewhere, British journalism included.
America is a place full of contradictions that it would take a lifetime to unravel. For instance, while the Bush Administration’s response to Hurricane Katrina and the drowning of New Orleans was inept and heartless, there was a great outpouring of generosity from Americans, who donated several billion dollars to support the mostly poor, black victims.
And tens of thousands of displaced people from New Orleans and the Mississippi coastal region were welcomed and resettled in cities in Texas that were not renowned for their history of great race relations.
I think that we foreign correspondents in America often deliver a cliched and a one-dimensional sense of this place, of this superpower that will play a major role in determining the future of all of us.
Me, I have grown to love the place, for all its failings. I will miss writing about it.
