Americanism: Abroad

November 2000- On a morale-draining cold and damp night eight years ago, I was on a train between Bruges, Belgium and Amsterdam, the Netherlands. America was still in the mists of the suffocating grip of the first “indecision” as all eyes were on the Florida recount. Instead of spending the few hours catching up on much needed sleep after an exhausting international conference, I sat through an hour plus lecture on the irresponsibility and narrow-mindedness of America.

In the near decade since, I have spent 447 days abroad (yes, I recently counted) including in places that are neither as friendly nor as safe as the border of Belgium and the Netherlands. Over and over again, I found myself in situations where I was requested, with various degrees of assertiveness, to justify policies that I had no part in formulating. Without even realizing it, I developed a defensive attitude about being American.

In an interesting paradox, America is both admired and despised abroad. Surprisingly some of the harshest criticism would come from the citizens of America’s closest political allies, and without question the highest acceptance of my nationality I’ve experienced was in China.

My master’s program in London is incredibly diverse as are my friends. I asked a group of them on Tuesday, how many of them ever pretended to be a different nationality abroad. The question was met with complete silence. Unfortunately, many American travelers would understand when I say that at times when people asked me, “Are you American?” with that certain hostility in their tone, the question was easier to answer, “No, I’m Canadian” than the truth. It had nothing to do with a personal unwillingness to defend the principles and virtues of the United States but more to do with a disinterest in being verbally crucified for decisions of a very controversial administration…again.

The world is not to blame for their frustration because, truthfully, they have a significant stake in the American elections. The world might not pay taxes, but I certainly have no claim to say I feel policy decisions more than an Iraqi or an Afghan citizen on the most extreme side of that spectrum. Seeing an American on the street is the closest that many global citizens are going to get to the American politicians who make those sweeping decisions. After all, as part of the American collective, I did vote them into office.

All the above makes this past week that much more heartwarming. I went to class on Wednesday after the elections like every other day though I was significantly more tired. Standing in the hall before class, one of my Norwegian classmates tackled me in a giant hug and kissed me on the cheek. Her intense joy left her speechless, which is very uncommon for those budding orators in the political field.

That incident was hardly the only one. Throughout the day, classmates came up to me and patted me on the back or gave me a hug like I had just swam the English Channel, saved a baby from a burning building, or some other noble feat. I heard so many “Congratulations” that by the end of the day, I actually started to respond, “Thank you”. Even strangers, as soon as they heard my accent, would cheer me. I am certainly not talking only about the British; London is a smorgasbord of cultures and passport holders.

I’m not going to discuss policy alternations or the ramifications of U.S. party changes on the global arena. What I can say for certain, is that for once, it’s nice to be an American Abroad.

In the Beginning

This story begins like many others before it with one restless student in the middle of a city of very non-restless people. After six weeks among the Tories and Tom Fooleries of London, she hoped on a bus and traveled to a mostly unknown town called Oxford.

Upon stepping off the bus, the young explorer realized that she was wholly unprepared for this wilder corner on England. The friend whom she was supposed to meet was nowhere to be found, and everyone around her stared, knowing that she did not belong among the ivory spirals and skyward towers of Middle Academia.

Help arrived in the form of a brief orientation of the land of Oxford and a map. Before long the explorer set out in the chilling day on a quest to discover the mysteries of the fabled city. Our formerly London sheltered student crossed the bridge, and just like stepping through a wardrobe, she found herself in a completely different environment filled with curious characters. Researchers and academics hovered over stacks of sources like dwarves over their treasure troves; tattered facility members mumbled odd formulas; and guards as thick as trolls patrolled the entrances to the different colleges.

As she stepped among the marbled scholarly sanctuaries, a harsh wind pulled at the ends of her coat. The weather had been cold in London but nothing like the frigid Oxford air. It made her wish that she grabbed one of her heavy Chinese coats before heading out the door. The Winter Queen maintained a strangling grip on the bustling village. She clung to the bell towers and pressed down on the cobbled streets and gothic buildings with a disheartening cold that stifled laugher at the very thought and hastened travelers to their destinations away from the cold.

The girl pressed onward on her little journey. Every turn unfettered a new amazement. The adventurer passed under covered bridges with stain glass windows sparking in the determined spurts of sunlight that cut through the clouds. She wandered though the endless courtyards within the library complex until she wrapped around a knoll-shaped library wing. The girl even watched in resigned jealousy as students filed into the courtyard of what she knew to be Hogwarts and wondered cynically if future witches and wizards knew a shortcut to completing her upcoming presentation.

As the sun set and a light rain began to fall, the girl scurried into a cozy pub thick with decades of memories of smoke and heated debates. The Owl and Child is known for once being the meeting place of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. The two great authors would sit together and discuss the surreal fantasies of their literary worlds and are the inspiration for this post. Maybe visiting the pathways and pit stops once patronized by such imaginative masters will provide a little motivation to a certain London weary girl…

Football vs Football

I am well aware that what Americans call football is to the rest of the world, frankly not. While the British have tactfully tacked “American” in front of “football” to clarify, Americans need a little wider variation. We have “football” and “soccer”.

Yet, nothing could possibly be so contentious between British English speakers and American English speakers than what is REAL football with the obvious exception being the proper pronunciation of aluminum.

The lexicon Cold War is typically restricted to off-hand comments and friendly banter, but on Sunday that good-natured battle between neighbors across the pond reached Cuban Missile Crisis intensity. The New Orleans’ Saints hosted the San Francisco Chargers in London, and one popular sports bar decided to broadcast the game along with a soccer match between two embittered rivals. The mingling of fans was about as harmonious as a Love Boat Reunion at a Marilyn Manson concert.

The establishment made the best attempt to separate the two crowds with the televisions on one side of the bar showing one game and the opposite end of the room showing the other, yet the bar was located right in the middle of the sports demilitarized zone. Who can watch either footballs without a beer?

In that contested territory I learned one very important fact about American football. The game is in fact, “wussy rugby” because they wear protective gear.

To be fair, the fan base did not fall straight down nationality lines. Many Americans enjoy soccer, and some brave Brits spent four hours trying to decipher such novelty terms as sack, on-side-kick, and excessive celebration penalty. Other than a group of chaps dressed as cheerleaders who probably would fit in comfortably at a Marilyn Manson Love Boat Reunion, both groups of football fans maintained the proper decorum expected at a London sports pub.

Although the question of which sport deserves the title might remain unanswered, football and football managed to coexist peacefully for one night at least.

London Cornerstone

London is known for many of its endearing features: grand architecture, sophisticated-sounding accents; the Queen; and of course, the corner pub with the same on-tap offerings and gruff cliental since before the locales grumblingly accepted the need for electricity. In fact, I’m not convinced that the Grand Masters of this city actually knew how to square off a block without a pub as the cornerstone.

Therefore, my expectation for my first London pub experience was high.

The Victoria is nestled among appropriately enough Victorian style row houses cuddling Hyde Park. Modern torches behind the line of outside tables divided my first impression from wondering if the pub had caught fire to hoping it had resisted the call to modernize through electricity.

The inside felt more like a stiff great aunt’s formal parlor than a place that serves alcohol. Dark wood and what would probably be considered valuable antiques in America packed the room. My friends and I waded through the crowd of hard-working lads who were in the mist of their evening commute via the neighborhood pub.

We found a cozy table near the fireplace and under the watchful gaze of a 1700s family portrait. Next to us, an older man straight out of Brigadoon stared hypnotically into his dark brew, maybe wondering how to return to his fabled village.

At this point I reached the crossroads of my pub experience: which pint should I order? Out of the seven on-tap offerings, I only recognized Guinness. I settled on a selection with London in its title, astutely deducting that the brew was a local brand.

As I enjoyed the surprisingly unusual flavors of the drink, my friend bust from the crowd from her trip to find the bathroom located at the top of a very narrow and twisted staircase. “You guys,” she said, “they have a library and a fireplace upstairs along with another small bar.”

It’s decided: I’ve stumbled into a Jane Austen book…I love British pubs!

The Chatham House Rule

I had a set routine on Christmas mornings when I was a little girl. I woke up at 4am and stared, shook, and organized the presents until my siblings and I were finally able to drag our parents out of bed at around 6am.

The wonder and anticipation of those two hours still lingers in my memory more than any of the actual presents. The toys were always fun, but the endless potential of what could be under the wrapping paper riveted my imagination.

Growing up in America, education is just something kids do until that pinnacle moment of freedom known as high school graduation. Of course, in my case, scholarly emancipation was at my college graduation. I probably had my parent’s “You WILL go to college” speech memorized back when I was separating the “clothes” presents from the “toys” presents under the Christmas tree. Education, though valued, was not considered precious since school was just something that you had to do.

Now that I’m older and spent some time doing something other than trying to retain facts for an upcoming test, I’ve realized the immense importance of knowledge.

The same little-girl-anticipation for what presents might be under the tree hit me as I attended a lecture last night by Lieutenant Colonel John A. Nagl, who is considered an expert on counterinsurgency and assisted two of the current great military thinkers in writing the Counterinsurgency Field Manual. My wonder was intensified since the speech was under the Chatham House Rule.

The Rule takes into account the importance of workers and researchers in the field of international relations need for the most current and “on-the-ground” information while still protecting the identity and affiliation of the speaker…in other words, don’t start quoting verbatim in dissertations what gets said, who says it, or even who else is in the room listening.

Suddenly, all those mysteries hidden behind official lines and press releases are obtainable to be unwrapped. The excitement of real knowledge and not just the fragments and filtered pieces from journals and newspapers is available. I was hearing it from an expert…in person…under the Chatham House Rule so neither uniform nor loyalties would not keep him from speaking his honest opinion…

While the Lt. Colonel didn’t actually say anything that commonsense and basic reading between the lines could not also provide, the possibility filled me with the same excitement as when I was a little girl.

In fact, I’ve applied to be a member of the actual Chatham House here in London. Who knew it could be so exciting to be a student.

Among Giants

I knew coming into this program that I would come across “The Credentials”: people that have accomplished such amazing feats that I could have spent every day since my high school graduation watching Jerry Springer reruns and be about as close to their stratosphere as I would be actually putting in effort.

The intimidation-by-default begins with my professors. For anyone curious, knighthood titles come before academic titles. I know that now since I have a Sir Dr. as one of my instructors. I have heard of knighthood but never actually met anyone who has ever been in the same room as a queen (any queen to my knowledge), let alone have one hold a sword anywhere in the vicinity of major arteries.

Another professor was a foreign reporter in Afghanistan during the war with the USSR and then in Russia during the collapse of the Soviet Union. He is considered an expert in Afghanistan although he was kind enough to not assign his books as part of our encyclopedia thick booklist. In essence, sitting in his class is like getting the book-on-tape version of the material.

Another professor apologetically canceled class for next week because the “President” of Chechnya invited her to the opening ceremony of a new Mosque, and she hates to turn down official invitations.

The material is just as daunting. The one class’s overview read like a laundry list of everything that I don’t know: Unresolved conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh (“Think I missed that class”); Disintegration and Reconciliation in Tajikistan (“I know where that country is on the map!”); critical assessments of events in Andijan, Uzbekistan that took place in May 2005 (“huh?”); the increasing influence of China in Central Asia and Xinjiang (“oh, oh, oh! I was there. Finally, I know something”).

My fellow classmates carry their own level of prestige. In one small class we went around and introduced ourselves. In the class is a Columbian drug enforcement officer, two UN staff members, a former peacekeeper in Rwanda and the Congo, two Norwegian soldiers who just returned from Afghanistan, a PriceWaterhouseCooper partner, a State Department officer…oh and me.

Someone much smarter than me, most likely my mom, told me once that regardless of what everyone else has done, if they are sitting in the same room as me, than they are at the exact same point in their lives as I am. When it became my turn to introduce myself, nobody chuckled or refused to meet my eye. I was even taken by surprise when my professor, one of the stratosphere-hovering Credentials, said, “Oh, Miami University in Ohio…good school; I’ve been there.”

I was accepted as a peer among them. Although this year is going to be insanely difficult, I have a feeling that it will all be okay.

Survivor: London

Being an avid reader and writer, I love bookstores and libraries. I can confidently say that I knew my undergraduate library as well as any of the part-time student librarians. I wonder through the stacks like a grocery shop, aimlessly picking up anything that looks interesting or odd.

I was positively giddy when I found King’s College’s library resembles a castle equipped with its own black cast-iron gate and garden. The hundreds of steps to reach the postgraduate study cubbies in the tower didn't even faze me. To add to the excitement, I felt like I stepped into an Escher painting when entering the bookstore near University College London. The converted old building has crisscrossing stairs leading to very specialized sections.

The book list for ONE class could probably substitute for a winter jacket considering its thickness. Armed with that guide, I forged through the stacks at both the bookstore and the library.

Thinking I had electronically requested a title now out of print, I confidently marched up to the check-out desk at the library. “I’m sorry, we only have two copies and both have already been check-out. You are in the queue. There are people waiting for the book before you.”

Two copies! As an undergraduate, the library was only heavily visited around finals. King’s classes only started this week. My devious classmates snuck in and reserved copies before me. Flipping through the pages and pages of readings, I wondered if any of the books were actually available. We have reverted to academic scavengers fighting each other for scraps of knowledge and dissertation resources.

At the bookstore, I thought that I was just searching in the wrong section. Should I be looking in Current Affairs, Security Issues, International Development, War History, or the dozens of other sections within the politics area of the mega store? I notice a title on my list in the arms of a girl scanning the same section. “Excuse me, where did you find Civil War is Not a Stupid Thing?”

The girl glanced up from the lower shelf, and we recognized each other simultaneously. She is in my class (i.e. competition). “This is the only copy.”

She notices that I was clutching Global Governance and the New Wars. Before she can ask, I say, “Only copy.”

We chat about the difficulty of finding books and how the prices on Amazon are the same between the British and America sites and just the dollar and pound signs have been switched. As two of the only American girls in the class, we come up with a book sharing scheme (an alliance!) although we both put orders in for The Fragmentation of Afghanistan. Some resources cannot be shared.

It appears survival of my postgraduate education will take a lot more (resource) strategy than my undergraduate degree.