AA Gill is away by A. A. Gill

Author:A. A. Gill
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 2005-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

WEST

One of the culs-de-sac that a travel writer has to continually watch out for is the pervasive assumption that poor people are intrinsically nicer than rich ones. It looks silly in print but on the ground, in the dust, it‘s more seductive. A fond belief that poverty is synonymous with dignity, that kindness, politeness and humor as shown by the less privileged is somehow quantitatively more valuable because they come tempered by hardship. And there‘s the balancing assumption that all those things that come from rich people are consequently worth less because they‘re bought and paid for with such ease, that their happiness is less real because it‘s sullied with money and possessions. What we end up with is a cartoon version of the Sermon on the Mount. An unhealthy belief that poverty is of itself ennobling because riches are demeaning.

Economically and spiritually, this is a eugenic nastiness yet I‘ve noticed it curling up in my own writing from time to time. Indeed, the people I‘ve collectively liked the most often do have lives I couldn‘t suffer for a day but I think you can love the poor without loving their poverty. This unhealthy dichotomy arises through the natural guilt of being a First World visitor with a return ticket. And because the stuff of travel writing is so often a consequence of poverty. Those street markets and shanty towns, the hand-woven basket and the exaggerated care for meager things. After a time it‘s an inescapable conclusion that the rich eat the poor. And the richest, most powerful and wasteful country in the world-America-takes, like so much else, the lion‘s share of loathing.

For many habitual travelers, hating America is a given. Not just America at home, but the detritus of America abroad. The States are the font of all ignorant interference, all destabilizing of delicate cultures and economies. America is the cause and the symptom of what‘s going wrong. Of course the people on whose behalf travel writers feel this righteous ire adore America. They may not care for its alternately tentative and strident foreign policy, its splashing about in the rest of the world like an excited toddler-but they love its baggage. Its films, its music, its clothes, the cigarettes and soft drinks: its sheer profligacy. If you‘re poor, the most joyous thing in the world is waste. Well, it would be, wouldn‘t it? When it comes to America, I‘m with the poor I just love it.

In my father‘s study there‘s a framed photograph of a group of cowboys posed in that way cowboys always seemed to adjust themselves for formal portraits. Straight backs and languorous limbs, guns fingered with a pre-Freudian ostentation. They‘re my cousins four generations back. Three Yorkshire brothers who left the farm and went to Wyoming to raise cattle and horses next to Buffalo Bill. They prospered and their children went on to raise motorcars in Detroit.

It was through my grandmother that I first learnt to admire America. Her brother had emigrated, and after the war when England seemed a shabby exhausted place he would send food parcels and luxuries.

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