Flowers and Barbed Wire: Walking In American Cities

He sat, on a concrete wall, with all his grubby belongs, and his sleeping bag beside him, across from the convention centre in San Diego where I was among 7000 mathematics teachers attending an annual conference. He sat, yards from the Gaslamp District, and PetCo park, and a few hundred yards from the USS Midway, and the cruise ship dock, where, for a fee, families live out their Disney dreams in luxury cabins.

To borrow a phrase from Donald Glover: this is America. America is tourists on the Embarcadero, trendy restaurants in trendy areas, and shiny glass convention centres on waterfronts, sterile monuments to technology, progress, and of course, the promise of unfettered capitalism.

America the beautiful. America is beautiful. Canadians are raised to be wary of our monolithic and world-breaking neighbour to the South. We are raised also to consume its founding myths, fed a steady diet of American culture through t.v., movies, and other media. A mouse always knows what the elephant is doing.

For me, raised on Chomsky and the “alternative” sounds of modern music (and hip hop and the underground, and all of it), it was easy to be suspicious of America. All these myths, can they be true? I never believed in Disney prosperity gospel and unrestrained capitalism, but I did believe in the entrepreneurial spirit…