Coming to America - part one
My first view of the USA was Miami Beach. In 1977 I flew from South Africa to Miami on vacation for a few weeks. Miami Airport was the largest and most luxurious airport I had ever seen. I had seen many European airports before and most were plain and utilitarian.
I was picked up at the airport by my hotel's shuttle-service which was the largest and most luxurious pick-up truck I had ever seen. There was more than enough room in the truck bed for loads of luggage and the cab could seat eight or more and was plush and air-conditioned.
In fact, I had never experienced air-conditioning in my life until I came to Miami. I also had not experienced anything so hot as Miami in July - yep, I came in July because, in those days, Miami was cheaper in summer. No part of South Africa is as close to the equator as Miami so I had never before experienced such a huge and fiercely hot sun.
Nor had I ever before seen such tall buildings, such huge palm trees, such lush tropical plants and so much wealth and luxury. I was overwhelmed with an intoxication of sensuous pleasure. Everyone and everything was sun-drenched and exuding perfumes of coconut and frangipani. Only later did I realize that the beautiful perfumes of Miami Beach were the aromas of the ubiquitous tanning lotions.
I had an exciting and wonderful vacation and decided that I would be more at home in this land of milk and honey and coconut-oil tanning lotion than I was in painfully divided South Africa (and happier than I ever had been in old grey cabbage-smelling Europe where I had lived for 8 years.) So, the following year, I packed my bags and left South Africa for ever to live in the USA.
But, in 1978, Miami was not yet booming and there were no decent jobs so I headed west to California. I stayed with friends in Hollywood and Malibu. Hollywood was a nightmare of fancy clothes and fashionable people mixed up with the horrors of teenage male and female whores on the "Strip." Malibu was a purgatory of cocaine parties and twisted bisexual orgies. Los Angeles was like a car crash to me. I was fascinated and horrified at the same time. Eventhough I had lived in London for years, I felt like a country bumpkin among the debauched and predatory Los Angelenos.
Another friend invited me to northern California; to Berkeley. I lived there for a year until I realized that I had moved from one hell ruled by bisexual drug addict debauchees to another hell ruled by angry puritanical vegetarian lesbians. So I moved to San Francisco.
The first thing any newcomers to San Francisco see is Market Street which is basically an open-air lunatic asylum full of filthy street people in various stages of mental and physical illnesses who panhandle you aggressively all the while convulsing, twitching, scratching and cursing like demons. The fact that most of these street people are white is especially confusing. Seeing white people begging on the street really angered me.
Maybe it's because I was born and raised in South Africa where whites who do not not aspire to middle-class respectability are regarded as less than human. There are poor white South Africans - even in my own family but the branch of my family that were trailer trash were handicapped by being part black in a very color-conscious society.
Okay, so I don't like any welfare bums, black or white, but black welfare bums in the USA have been created by the failed policies of white liberal guilt. However white welfare bums have had every opportunity and no excuses for not getting good jobs and being prosperous.
So why do these white bums live like cockroaches? Beats me. I still do not have the answer to that and to this day, 27 years after moving here, I despise white Americans who are welfare bums and beggars. I have no sympathy for them and wish we could ship them to Mexico.
Let's make a deal with Mexico - we'll take one hardworking Mexican for every sick parasitic white bum we send to them. Or else let's put these ungrateful white meth-addict germs in jail for vagrancy and make them do forced labor - filling potholes and picking cherries or, even better, melting snow in Alaska so we can drill for oil. They disgust me and are a slap in the face of western history and civilization.
Okay, so California is weird. No one wants to get old or die. Think of Aldous Huxley's "After Many a Summer," a novel about a Hollywood millionaire with a terror of death, whose personal physician happens to be working on a theory of longevity which Huxley wrote when he came to LA in the 1937.
California is definitely not the USA. The big city types are all gorgeous and tanned and educated and rich and happy but most are in therapy or taking Prozac and Zoloft and have serious mental problems like malignant narcissism or very special hard-to-diagnose allergies. What a fake paradise!
Give me ordinary people doing ordinary things, living ordinary lives in ordinary small towns anywhere anytime. God save me from "special people" with "special rights" and "special needs" and "special spatial requirements." God save me from people who are insane enough to criticise the USA or imagine that there is some Utopia better than anything that we have here or anywhere else on earth.
Let's ship these ungrateful spoiled brat "special people" to Africa. Let them live there without air-conditioning, without antibiotics, without the rule of law, without the immense freedom and wealth that we enjoy here at a very small price.
That price is respect for the Constitution, respect for your neighbors and self-respect. If you can't pay that price, then you don't deserve to live in the USA.
I was picked up at the airport by my hotel's shuttle-service which was the largest and most luxurious pick-up truck I had ever seen. There was more than enough room in the truck bed for loads of luggage and the cab could seat eight or more and was plush and air-conditioned.
In fact, I had never experienced air-conditioning in my life until I came to Miami. I also had not experienced anything so hot as Miami in July - yep, I came in July because, in those days, Miami was cheaper in summer. No part of South Africa is as close to the equator as Miami so I had never before experienced such a huge and fiercely hot sun.
Nor had I ever before seen such tall buildings, such huge palm trees, such lush tropical plants and so much wealth and luxury. I was overwhelmed with an intoxication of sensuous pleasure. Everyone and everything was sun-drenched and exuding perfumes of coconut and frangipani. Only later did I realize that the beautiful perfumes of Miami Beach were the aromas of the ubiquitous tanning lotions.
I had an exciting and wonderful vacation and decided that I would be more at home in this land of milk and honey and coconut-oil tanning lotion than I was in painfully divided South Africa (and happier than I ever had been in old grey cabbage-smelling Europe where I had lived for 8 years.) So, the following year, I packed my bags and left South Africa for ever to live in the USA.
But, in 1978, Miami was not yet booming and there were no decent jobs so I headed west to California. I stayed with friends in Hollywood and Malibu. Hollywood was a nightmare of fancy clothes and fashionable people mixed up with the horrors of teenage male and female whores on the "Strip." Malibu was a purgatory of cocaine parties and twisted bisexual orgies. Los Angeles was like a car crash to me. I was fascinated and horrified at the same time. Eventhough I had lived in London for years, I felt like a country bumpkin among the debauched and predatory Los Angelenos.
Another friend invited me to northern California; to Berkeley. I lived there for a year until I realized that I had moved from one hell ruled by bisexual drug addict debauchees to another hell ruled by angry puritanical vegetarian lesbians. So I moved to San Francisco.
The first thing any newcomers to San Francisco see is Market Street which is basically an open-air lunatic asylum full of filthy street people in various stages of mental and physical illnesses who panhandle you aggressively all the while convulsing, twitching, scratching and cursing like demons. The fact that most of these street people are white is especially confusing. Seeing white people begging on the street really angered me.
Maybe it's because I was born and raised in South Africa where whites who do not not aspire to middle-class respectability are regarded as less than human. There are poor white South Africans - even in my own family but the branch of my family that were trailer trash were handicapped by being part black in a very color-conscious society.
Okay, so I don't like any welfare bums, black or white, but black welfare bums in the USA have been created by the failed policies of white liberal guilt. However white welfare bums have had every opportunity and no excuses for not getting good jobs and being prosperous.
So why do these white bums live like cockroaches? Beats me. I still do not have the answer to that and to this day, 27 years after moving here, I despise white Americans who are welfare bums and beggars. I have no sympathy for them and wish we could ship them to Mexico.
Let's make a deal with Mexico - we'll take one hardworking Mexican for every sick parasitic white bum we send to them. Or else let's put these ungrateful white meth-addict germs in jail for vagrancy and make them do forced labor - filling potholes and picking cherries or, even better, melting snow in Alaska so we can drill for oil. They disgust me and are a slap in the face of western history and civilization.
Okay, so California is weird. No one wants to get old or die. Think of Aldous Huxley's "After Many a Summer," a novel about a Hollywood millionaire with a terror of death, whose personal physician happens to be working on a theory of longevity which Huxley wrote when he came to LA in the 1937.
California is definitely not the USA. The big city types are all gorgeous and tanned and educated and rich and happy but most are in therapy or taking Prozac and Zoloft and have serious mental problems like malignant narcissism or very special hard-to-diagnose allergies. What a fake paradise!
Give me ordinary people doing ordinary things, living ordinary lives in ordinary small towns anywhere anytime. God save me from "special people" with "special rights" and "special needs" and "special spatial requirements." God save me from people who are insane enough to criticise the USA or imagine that there is some Utopia better than anything that we have here or anywhere else on earth.
Let's ship these ungrateful spoiled brat "special people" to Africa. Let them live there without air-conditioning, without antibiotics, without the rule of law, without the immense freedom and wealth that we enjoy here at a very small price.
That price is respect for the Constitution, respect for your neighbors and self-respect. If you can't pay that price, then you don't deserve to live in the USA.
posted by Joubert at 6:29 AM
The Alliance
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