An Innocent Abroad

When Charles Dickens visited America for the first time in 1842, he came as the representative of an older, richer culture, anxious to report the idiosyncrasies and oddities of the New World rather as one might recount the cute ways and endearing perceptions of small children. When Auberon Waugh arrived, 127 years later, conditions had changed somewhat. Possibly there is still a market in England for quaint and patronizing tales of American life, but ifsoitis not an appetite which the English can nowadays afford to indulge. No Englishman visits America unless heisona currency fiddle or unless he hopes to get something out of the natives or, happiest of all arrangements, unless Americans, from the bottomless depths of their hospitable natures, are paying for him.

I came at national review’s invitation, for which I shall be eternally grateful, to spend a month in the United States as their guest and report as an English conservative on what I saw. Don’t ask me why national review thought this a good idea. In San Francisco, I have been told, there is a restaurant which offers its customers the spectacle of bare-breasted girls swinging from ropes. Perhaps I was to fulfill a similar role. Inevitably, the quest for entertainment in the world’s richest country produces some far-fetched ideas. Or I might have been part of America’s Jeffersonian syndrome, somehow connected with overseas aid and the decision to ban germ weapons. Finally, I decided that I was probably part of that enormous American industry catering for the national appetite in deprecatory self-analysis. I was to prove for conservatives what Pinkville and Sharon Tate’s murderers did for liberals. Next in the series, after America through the eyes of an English conservative writer, would be America through the eyes of a Finnish Presbyterian oboe-player, then America through the ears of a blind, monoglot Ukrainian cobbler.

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Auberon Waugh

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When Charles Dickens visited America for the first time in 1842, he came as the representative of an older, richer culture, anxious to report the idiosyncrasies and oddities of the New World rather as one might recount the cute ways and endearing perceptions of small children. When Auberon Waugh arrived, 127 years later, conditions had changed somewhat. Possibly there is still a market in England for quaint and patronizing tales of American life, but ifsoitis not an appetite which the English can nowadays afford to indulge. No Englishman visits America unless heisona currency fiddle or unless he hopes to get something out of the natives or, happiest of all arrangements, unless Americans, from the bottomless depths of their hospitable natures, are paying for him.

I came at national review’s invitation, for which I shall be eternally grateful, to spend a month in the United States as their guest and report as an English conservative on what I saw. Don’t ask me why national review thought this a good idea. In San Francisco, I have been told, there is a restaurant which offers its customers the spectacle of bare-breasted girls swinging from ropes. Perhaps I was to fulfill a similar role. Inevitably, the quest for entertainment in the world’s richest country produces some far-fetched ideas. Or I might have been part of America’s Jeffersonian syndrome, somehow connected with overseas aid and the decision to ban germ weapons. Finally, I decided that I was probably part of that enormous American industry catering for the national appetite in deprecatory self-analysis. I was to prove for conservatives what Pinkville and Sharon Tate’s murderers did for liberals. Next in the series, after America through the eyes of an English conservative writer, would be America through the eyes of a Finnish Presbyterian oboe-player, then America through the ears of a blind, monoglot Ukrainian cobbler.