Link to article
This is my favorite part of the article:
This whole thing is like a vicious cycle at the heart of what should be social life in America. Feeling threatened, breeds distrust, breeds hostility, breeds a kind of alienating distance. And so above all in America, I feel alienated. I don’t feel like a part of society. Nobody does, because it doesn’t really exist. What does it mean to be American? It means to be an individual and self-reliant and all the rest. What does the American Dream mean? A house and two cars on a pretty cul-de-sac. It’s about distance from everyone else.
I find it really, really hard to exist in that kind of milieu. It’s disturbing, all that distance. It’s not normal. Not to talk, know, be familiar with people. The hostility was incredibly…bad…for me creatively. Like a constant low level whine of antisociality, grating in the ears, coming from everywhere. It’s not good for the soul to live this way. The European way — in fact, the way of everywhere else I’ve ever lived — is knowing people. Just stopping and having a long talk and before you know it, there’s an afternoon gone by. It’s enjoyable. And it’s natural, because we humans are curious and social and empathic beings. Having these faculties stifled normatively, as a kind of upside-down social construction, is really, really weird. It’s just unpleasant to live in a society where people aren’t really allowed to express themselves, where they’re always a little rude, because they’re always feeling threatened, because, well, you never know what might go wrong.
