I was told way back when (1993) that there are taboo subjects in American conversation that I shouldn’t bring up. These subjects neatly coincided with the things I most wanted to talk about, so I found myself pretty quiet in America. Until I discovered shuffleboard, Twinkies and The Simpsons, and was officially declared safe to talk with.
In my new permanent resident guise, I have yet to have any taboo conversations with an American. So absent are these subjects from the typical conversation that most of the time I don’t notice we’re not talking about them. And yet if we turn on the news, they’re pretty much all there.
Most of the conversations I have, and are present for, with family members and friends in the US are blandly competitive; there is a tacitly understood angle that any conversation is batted up in the big blue sky to be caught, run with, and won. These issues are quick and easy wins, as they center around the everyday subjects you learn to speak first when learning a new language: how much, where can I, why didn’t you etc. My role in these conversations, as the new kid in town, is to lose. If I mention having gone somewhere, it will be made clear that I should’ve taken a different route. If I buy something, I will have gone to the wrong store, paid the wrong amount and that I should return it. If I mention a desire to do something slightly different, for example bag my own groceries or use my own bags, I will be labelled insane.
Some of the time, I am tempted to avoid these conversational competitions by hiding my shopping (and my lack of plastic bags) or to create an alternative version of my day/weekend so that there’s no room for debate. But for the most part, I’m content to play it straight and lose the chat, because what’s up for grabs here is…well, nothing. The competitive edge that Americans are so eager to display, it’s like a kitten playing with a ball of yarn. You know one day they might give you a scratch, but right now? They’re harmless.
That said, I do prefer my conversations with complete strangers, given that they don’t know which route I drove and frankly don’t care. And I honestly admire the American capacity to find anything to talk about. The best example of this is elevator conversation, something the UK has the good grace/ burning shame not to attempt (given it may require eye-contact, and to be honest, we don’t need to make friends right now).
My favorite elevator chats range from the inane:
- On asking someone wearing a Michael Jackson T-shirt, “Michael Jackson fan?”
To the intrusive:
- On standing beside a toddler in her stroller and telling the father, “She has the most beautiful eyes.”
I’d be irritated in equal measure if someone said these things to me. To the first, I would say, “No, I hate Michael Jackson, and I wear his face on my shirt so that if it turns out he really faked his own death like I read on the Internet, I don’t forget to kill him for real”. To the second, I would…yeah, I would play that one pretty cool, probably just a nod, because that lady sounds like a maniac and I don’t want to risk her going berserk in the elevator.
Outside of elevators, I find the conversation can be more constructive.
I waited in the American Tire Company showroom this morning while they fixed a flat tire (2 in three days, including a flat on I-65, which was interesting) and the TV is on, inevitably on the news, post-bin Laden.
There is one other person waiting, like me, and sitting in the chairs, like me, and watching the TV, like me. After 5 minutes, the gentleman turns to me and asks me questions about the story.
When I know the answers:
- Thursday
- Navy Seals
- 40 minutes
he’s impressed, as if I might be something special. And I wonder at first, is he a plant, put there by the well-meaning US government to build the confidence of new immigrants? Because he’d know the answer to each question if he’d been paying the slightest attention.
And I realise he hasn’t been watching the TV. He’s just looking in the general direction. All these years sneering at the constantly turned-on TV sets, and as it turns out, most people aren’t watching it. Do they leave their TVs on for company? For something else to contradict?
Once American Tire Company fix my tire ($18 – they showed me what caused the puncture, leaving me wondering whether they had a box of those pins behind the counter), the very first thing the cashier says to me is, “You think it’s really him?”
There was no segue. I genuinely have no idea what she’s talking about. I respond, “Sorry?”
“Bin Laden. Do you think he’s really dead?”
“Yes…don’t you?”
She gives me a medium-heavy sigh. “I don’t know what to believe these days.”
These days? As if there was a time when governments didn’t lie? Or as if an economic recession has caused us to question everything, which is perhaps a helpful route to go down. I could almost enjoy the idea that American naiveté has given way to American cynicism; it makes me feel more at home. But the idea that the Government is spending each day thinking up new and more painful ways to lie to us, this is no less black and white than believing the United States has never put a foot wrong.
I tell her that the Government wouldn’t take the chance of lying about killing bin Laden, given the risk of him popping up somewhere to prove him wrong.
This is the kind of mundane logic that conspiracy theorists take offence at. And I think conspiracies surrounding 9/11, birth certificates or alien abductions flourish in the US I think partly because that kind of special knowledge, the delicious secret, it’s a level of one-upmanship that some Americans can revel in (not you – you wouldn’t do that – I mean the other Americans. But you knew that already, right?)
The cashier tells me she’s worried about the terrorists, that “America can never win because the terrorists, they’re willing to kill themselves for their cause”.
I feel bad for anyone worrying like this; I’m just not used to them doing so and then telling me the card-reader is ready for my PIN.
I also feel bad for myself; I don’t understand how I’m supposed to close this conversation. The only Tennessee gambit I’ve gleaned that suits every possible piece of bad news is a rueful shake of the head and “Well, it is what it is.”
So I pretend I’m at work. I tel her that 9/11 was ten years ago and the United States has done a great job of defending itself since then. I then tell her that the uprisings in Egypt and other Arab countries show us that people who might have bought into al Qaeda’s message before want something very different; they’re fighting for an end to dictatorship. They want democracy, the very thing America stands for.
Retreating into my own black-and-white, if I’d had a flag, I would’ve unfurled it then.
Especially conceited of me to think it’s my job to help that woman sleep at night, I know I would’ve felt less empathetic if her question had been along the lines of, “Do you think he was really born in Hawaii?”
But it wasn’t, and I find myself telling her and others in this slightly-less-confident country that they’re going to be okay. And although I find these fears – of terrorist acts in small towns, socialists taking over the government etc – depressing, given they distract from far more worthy concerns like health and education, I do like the conversation.
And I reckon, from time to time, given my keenly competitive instincts, I might choose to win one of them.
Difficult Second Novel 
Well, I would have thought another acceptable closing gambit in Tennessee is “Fool me once…”.
I think that’s Texas, but you’ve been here longer than me 🙂