The Lost Continent - Bill Bryson [63]
Mt Airy was out in the Germantown section of the city. It had a nice settled feeling to it, as if people had lived there for generations – which is in fact the case in Philadelphia, Lucia told me. The city was still full of the sort of neighbourhoods where everybody knew everybody else. Many people scarcely ever ventured more than a few hundred yards from their homes. It was not uncommon to get lost and find that hardly anybody could reliably direct you to a neighbourhood three miles away. Philadelphia also had its own vocabulary – downtown was called centre city, sidewalks were called pavements, as in Britain – and peculiarities of pronunciation.
In the evening I sat in Hal and Lucia’s house, eating their food, drinking their wine, admiring their children and their house and furniture and possessions, their easy wealth and comfort, and felt a sap for ever having left America. Life was so abundant here, so easy, so convenient. Suddenly I wanted a refrigerator that made its own ice-cubes and a waterproof radio for the shower. I wanted an electric orange juicer and a room ionizer and a wristwatch that would keep me in touch with my biorhythms. I wanted it all. Once in the evening I went upstairs to go to the bathroom and walked past one of the children’s bedrooms. The door was open and a bedside light was on. There were toys everywhere – on the floor, on shelves, tumbling out of a wooden trunk. It looked like Santa’s workshop. But there was nothing extraordinary about this; it was just a typical middle-class American bedroom.
And you should see American closets. They are always full of yesterday’s enthusiasms: golf-clubs, scuba diving equipment, tennis-rackets, exercise machines, tape recorders, darkroom equipment, objects that once excited their owner and then were replaced by other objects even more shiny and exciting. That is the great, seductive thing about America – the people always get what they want, right now, whether it is good for them or not. There is something deeply worrying, and awesomely irresponsible, about this endless self-gratification, this constant appeal to the baser instincts.
Do you want zillions off your state taxes even at the risk of crippling education?
‘Oh, yes!’ the people cry.
Do you want TV that would make an imbecile weep?
‘Yes, please!’
Shall we indulge ourselves with the greatest orgy of consumer spending that the world has ever known?
‘Sounds neat! Let’s go for it!’
The whole of the global economy is based on supplying the cravings of two per cent of the world’s population. If Americans suddenly stopped indulging themselves, or ran out of closet space, the world would fall apart. If you ask me, that’s crazy.
I should point out that I am not talking about Hal and Lucia in all this. They are good people and lead modest and responsible lives. Their closets aren’t full of scuba diving equipment and seldom-used tennis-rackets. They are full of mundane items like buckets and galoshes, ear-muffs and scouring powders. I know this for a fact because late in the night when everyone was asleep I crept out of bed and had a good look.
In the morning, I dropped Hal at his office downtown – correction, centre city – and the drive through Fairmount Park was as enchanting in the morning sunshine as it had been at dusk. All cities should have parks like this, I thought. He told me some more interesting things about Philadelphia: that it spent more money on public art than any other city in America – one per cent of the total city budget – and yet it had an illiteracy rate of forty per cent. He pointed out to me, in the middle of Fairmount Park, the palatial Philadelphia Museum of Art, which had become the city’s top tourist attraction, not because of its collection of 500,000 paintings, but because its front steps were the ones Sylvester Stallone sprinted up in Rocky. People were actually coming to the museum in buses, looking at the steps and leaving without ever going inside to see