Email from the edge: I Am Soooo in America by Noemi Lopinto

As I write these lines, a medium-sized robot bug on wheels is being driven by remote control by two Chicago boys, Christopher, 11, and Andrew, 9. The bug looks like a dolphin on wheels, complete with flashing pink side lights and, blurps and bleeps as it crashes into table legs and tears up the persian rug on the floor. I just finished eating a "watermelon bomb cake", a la Martha stewart, listening to Mom gently tease her younger son for not being able to make his own breakfast pop tarts all by himself. If I haven't put on five pounds in the last week of eating and driving, driving and eating, I'm the Queen Mum. My daily caloric intake here in the last week in the Land of the Free would kill a small hippo. Bacon for breakfast, burger king for lunch, watermelon ice cream bombs for supper. I'm not sure, but I think I saw a carrot, once, through a plate glass window of a department store as we drove through Milwaukee. As soon as you step through customs the wealth of this country tempts and teases you, offering succor in exchange for pacification. To hunt up a salad was just too much work. Sure, I may never poo again, but to have insisted on vegetables would have put my hosts at a distinct disadvantage; there just weren't any around. With the exception of the one trip we took to the "whole foods market" in downtown Chicago. There I saw a smorgasbord of things organic and new age, and because this is America, they were piled high to the ceiling. Pyramids of all varieties of home-grown and exotic vegetables sat heavily next to packages of organic meats, frozen and hanging on runways from the ceiling, like dry cleaned clothes. Every single time I come to the US I leave fatter, more constipated and hyper from lack of exercise. Two days ago, my hosts and I woke up, had an enormous bacon and pancake-out-of-the-box breakfast ( in which the pancakes were fried in the bacon grease, just for a little extra Death). Then we piled into cars to drive twenty minutes to go look at a pioneer church, which was very nice. I stood for ten minutes to walk about the church. Then we piled back in the car, came back to the cabin and had lunch. I suggested a swim, so we piled back into the car to drive for twenty five minutes to the Iron-lake falls, which were very pretty, but unswimmable. For fifteen minutes we tried anyways, and all four of us were sucked into the rapids, dragged across all manner of sharp rocks, and spat out into an eddy of water which was inhabited by an enormous, proliferating colony of leeches. We peeled the leeches off each other's butts and piled back into the car where we drove another twenty minutes back towards the cabin, and when I suggested we go swimming in an actual lake where one could actually move of one's own accord, one of my hosts said: "I think that's quite enough activity for one day." Here I showed some resistance, and went swimming by myself, walking back to the cabin an hour later.

The people I stayed with were intelligent, compassionate people. I liked them. I don't know if it was a function of having a commie Canadian in their midst, but there were alot of political discussions, every day. Politics and movies. People really are at their most comfortable when they are discussing Tom Cruise's new arm-candy or how much Star Trek sucked. Those discussions lasted hours. Politics on the other hand, was discussed with passion but in brief spurts. People can only handle so much without getting depressed, and we were all on vacation. Still, I managed to get into a discussion with my version of one of Satan's minions: a would-be republican senator.

We were all taking part in the Crystal Falls, Michigan annual Bass Festival Parade. Our mascot was a giant chicken head strapped to the top of a '64 buick. As we waited for the parade to start, a black pickup truck pulled up right in front of us, sporting an enormous sign with the ubiquitous stars and stripes which read: Ed Hooper for senate- Concerned Christian Conservative. Part of our gang was Dave Cullen, a writer for The New Yorker. He commented that the three K's must have been taken.

I took a photo just for shock value, a kind of Canadian inner giggle, and watched the Hooper Clan pour out of the truck. Everybody, even the women, wore mullets and had the same angular, plain faces and blue jeans. A man I assumed to be Hooper junior sat in the driver's seat sucking sourly on a cigarette, his pocked skin mottled in the 40 degree heat. He looked straight ahead, never taking his eyes off the dashboard or his arm off the window of the door. Hooper Senior saw me take the picture and came over to win a potential voter, his Colonel Sanders tie flapping in the breeze. "Nice sign, isn't it?" said he. His face darkened somewhat when I shrugged. I explained that I was Canadian and had taken the photo "because we dont see things like that in Canada." This was as diplomatic an explanation as I could muster. The real truth would have been: because you personify what frightens me most in the world, not to mention that your haircuts are just too much.

My people from the chicken brigade stared intently as the Canuck socialist faced off against the right-wing conservative. Hooper segued into a speech, possibly out of habit. He said he wanted to get into the Senate to help clean up the messes left behind by the Clinton adminstration. He said the Oval office, the throne of American power, had been defaced . Ronald Reagan, he said, used to put on his jacket before entering that room and sitting in his chair, "and you know what Clinton did there." Hooper said the secret to American power, to its ability to defend itself and others was the army, which was being starved by the government. He quoted some statistics, which I don't remember, something about how 70% of government spending goes into social programs. I'm not an expert on this issue, so I let that pass, saying simply that the American military was the strongest and most funded in the world, so far as I knew. He began to sing the "free market" song, saying that all of America's taxes were paid for by 1% of the population, and that businesses had to be free to make as much money as they wanted, without constraints, and people would be happy. I said not everybody wanted to own or run or work in a business. He mentioned something about how socialism didn't work, he said there were lineups in the hospitals in Canada and I said that was true, because corporations had been freed from paying taxes like the rest of the population. I told him how medicare used to be paid for mostly by large corporations, and with free trade agreements with the USA, we had lost that revenue and now the population was paying the bill. He said that proved socialism didn't work. I said no, it proves that corporations will avoid financial and social obligations if you let them. He said that socialism was a cousin to communism, in the same tone that one would say that marijuana leads to psychosis or sex leads to AIDS. I said yes, that was true, but that capitalism was a cousin to monarchy, and it didn't look like the US was going to build its own Windsor Castle any time soon.

It was a polite conversation, but we were stalemated. I didn't make the same associations as he did, and so in a sense our communication was limited. We wished each other a good day and went our separate ways. Just this poor guy's luck that he had to fall upon the one bona fide socialist in the entire state of Wisconsin. Afterwards, I felt like I had met my arch nemesis, one of the Bad Guys, the ones I dream daily of decimating in argument.

Another American cultural phenomenon: a leftover of America's fundamentalist biblical leanings can be found in the signs pasted anywhere and everywhere, and on any given topic. They are authoritarian, agressive and antagonistic. "Buckle up- IT'S THE LAW!". Or three words with giant bars across them: "suicide/ abortion/ euthanasia- God FORBIDS IT". Or, on a construction site: " Kill a road worker and face a 10,000$ fine OR SEVEN YEARS IN JAIL." prior to this, was killing construction workers a national sport?

later,

Noemi.

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