A friend sends this http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jul/12/jimmy-carter-womens-rights-equality interesting piece of religious news. I hadn't seen it because I am still in San Francisco, where the religious mores of the rest of the nation don't really hold sway. In Borders Books they have The Origins of the Species in their favourites section. In Kansas you'd need a paper bag and a special order.
And yet I feel torn by the European familiarity of San Francisco - its rationalism and secularism and public transportism. Being European in outlook is not - it seems to me - the future for America. Americans can learn things from Europeans but the essence of America - even if it involves weird notions of Biblical denial of womens' rights - is somehow more brutally vivacious than the jaded options over the Atlantic. So many European tourists here: poor things they have travelled ten hours to come the only part of America that isn't American. They'll go home knowing nothing.
Sorry to be so unreliable a contributor in the last few weeks of my time here - instead of blogging, we have been contributing to the Californian economy in a heartfelt bid to save it from itself.
Enjoyed LA and noted the owners of powder blue Bentleys seemed to have been unaffected so far by the economic crisis.
San Francisco is so European in contrast - prickly dislike of motor cars that stops you turning left or right when you want to and encourages you on to public transport. It's even cold and grey: we could be home already.
As for America's future - this country is full of space and youth and and hope. The rest of the world can seem so jaded in contrast. When people carp at America I think of the Robert Frost poem The Importer - sometimes reviled as racist and certainly not fashionable nowadays - that hits back with wit and, to me, wisdom.
My dear friend Lexington is leaving America to live in cloistered seclusion in Hampshire and write occasional columns about what's left of British industry. His parting shot is typically brilliant, though I think he and almost all other commentators on America fail to make the really difficult link between the God-awful screw-ups (Iraq etc) and the staggering ability of the place to revivify and refresh and keep pulling the world in the right(ish) direction.
The whole point of America is that you CAN fail. Really badly. And America itself does, regularly. But the failure - the harshness and the unfairness and the ugliness of much of American life - is what drives the place ever forward. So come on Adrian (whoops - let the cat out of the bag) let's add the third cheer...
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