Michelle Obama, Mitt Romney, and lots of parking trouble!

One of the advantages of living in Florida in election season is that the Romneys and the Obamas are always coming around, trying to woo everyone into voting for them! 

This is because Florida is a swing state (George W Bush won it by just 543 votes in 2000!) and has a very varied population, even for the United States.  In Florida you’ll find Cuban exiles, retired Jewish Americans, Mexican immigrants, traditional "cracker" types, African Americans, Scientologists, and there are even some British expats, I’ve heard!  It’s like a US Noah’s Ark, with two of every type of American (and others) crammed into a hot, steamy, swampy flat peninsula.  Okay, maybe I am going too far now.  But you get the message.

The bottom line is that the first lady, Michelle Obama came to town this Monday and my wife managed to get some tickets for us to go and see her talk at a rally!

It was all rather exciting and took a bit of organizing, as my wife had to leave work early, and we had a tennis practice straight after.  A further annoying complication was that it was a very popular event and so we couldn’t find anywhere to park on the day within a mile of the university venue.

Eventually, after driving around for about twenty five minutes and getting more and more desperate, we managed to find a metered parking space that allowed us 2 hours grace in return for a wallet full of dimes and quarters.

Consequently, we arrived at the venue later than we’d planned.  After negotiating the airport-style security, we gained entrance - but having arrived late, we were shunted into seats at the rear end of the indoor stadium.  It meant that for the most part we were viewing Michelle from the rear and had to view the big screens to see her face when she spoke.

 

But she is a good speaker with charisma, who projects and induces a lot of warmth.  Her talk wasn’t so much about trying to convert the unconvinced, but more of a rallying cry to the troops.  Michelle has wide appeal, but she is also a particular heroine of African-American womanhood and they were out in force.

The indoor stadium was packed!

Not the best view of Michelle - but at least there were large screens to watch!

After the talk, we headed back to the car.  We were well within the 2 hour parking period and feeling rather buoyed up by the talk until we reached the car and discovered that we had a parking citation stuffed under the windscreen wiper.  We’d been booked for facing the car against the stream of traffic, a petty offence for sure, and ordered to pay a 30 dollar fine!

Trying not to let it spoil our evening, we tried to forget the fine and went to practice our tennis.  It wasn’t until we arrived home that I switched on my computer and discovered the news about the secretly recorded video of Mitt Romney, where at a private fundraiser, he seemed to imply that 47% of Americans were dependent on government handouts and that they would vote for Barak Obama regardless of what Mitt said or did, so Mitt didn’t care about them.

The Romney scandal seemed big.  It was like he’d self-destructed.  It almost felt like the election was over before it had even really begun.

British TV vs American TV and how I watch BBC iplayer in USA

Having sampled some of it on my multiple trips across the pond, I must admit that one thing that I wasn’t looking forward to when I finally started living in the USA was American TV.  I am almost ashamed to admit this, as time and time again, when it comes to British TV vs American TV one of the cliches that you read and hear is British expats saying is how bad American TV is and how much they miss Coronation Street, Bruce Forsyth, the X Factor etc.  It all sounds a bit sad and pathetic to me.  For me, it wasn’t the soaps, or Brucie, or the British talent shows that I was worried about missing: it was the channels like BBC 4 TV, where you can watch a documentary about the history of the British Skiffle Movement, the story of evolution since Darwin, or watch a live performance of Shostakovich’s 8^th Symphony. 

Maybe I am sounding like some sort of cultural snob, but I certainly don’t want to give the impression that I am knocking all American TV.  America does do some marvelous documentaries, the ones by Ken Burns springs to mind.  But American public television relies on donations, so quality documentaries are relatively few and far between, especially for a country of this size.  In terms of comedy and drama, however, American TV excels and two of my favourite shows: Curb Your Enthusiasm and House MD are produced here.  (95% of American TV is utter dross, of course, but that is true of British TV too, in my experience.  But I find it generally doesn’t matter, as you can usually avoid the dross with a handheld device known as the remote control.)

Which brings me to my actual problem.  My difficulty isn’t with the quality of the American TV programs that you get, it is with all the bloody adverts!  They are loud and they go on for ages and ages.  In fact, American TV can sometimes seem like one long series of adverts with occasional breaks for the programs.  It really is that awful!  I know now why Americans have a reputation for channel hopping, they are trying desperately to avoid being bombarded to death by all the endless ads. 

Anyway, back to my beloved BBC (who incidentally, don’t show any adverts in the UK).  After messing around with various free proxy servers and getting no joy, I found a free program that enabled me to get BBC iplayer in USA called Expat Shield, by tricking the BBC computers into thinking that my laptop is in Scotland, rather than Florida.  We also bought a new flat screen TV with a socket it in the back so I could put my laptop through it.

But after all that, the irony is that I hardly watch BBC iplayer or live British TV that much.  The truth is that I can watch the world news on BBC America, all my favorite British comedies like The Mighty Boosh and Never Mind the Buzzcocks are available on Youtube, and big events like the Royal Wedding and the European Cup Final are shown on American TV.  Plus there is always Netflix to stream movies and the library to borrow DVDs from.  Still, it’s reassuring to have the BBC option, I guess.

The Perils of Writing a British Expat Blog

Living in the USA and being a British expat blogger is generally fun.  But there are perils too associated with writing a British expat blog.  Probably the hardest thing for me sometimes is finding the balance between how you treat your homeland and how you treat your host country.  If you appear to treat either of them too unfavourably, people get upset.  Even praising one country can appear to damn the other in some eyes.

I could, of course, make my opinions and humour (humor?) as bland as possible and avoid all possibility of controversy, but that’s not me, and frankly, I personally prefer to read an expat blog where someone actually says something.  Experiencing the expat blogger’s impressions, opinions, viewpoints is the whole point reading a blog, methinks?

I guess one of the things that can make things awkward is that many Americans and Brits tend to have fairly two dimensional views of each other, regardless of whether it is positive or negative, especially if they have not traveled to the other country.  Brits can find amusement in American naivity of Europe, but the British idea of America can be a simplistic amalgamation of New York, the Deep south, and the Midwest bible belt, with no real idea of how these places fit together (or don’t fit together, as the case may be!) 

Some subject areas are certainly thornier than others for a British expats blog writer.  I think at some point I will have post a blog about my impression of American politics.  That is almost bound to annoy some people.  In general terms, I must say that British politics seems rather civilized compared to the raging cauldron of hate that is often modern American politics, where even the blandest of statements by a politician can kick off a fierce argument between left and right.  Americans are certainly committed to the idea of democracy and their constitution, but I am not always sure as an outsider that their system works very well, not at present, anyway.

As well as politics, there are other American and British differences.  The whole concept of America as a nation state is different from most places in the world for a start, including Britain.  You don’t often find me quoting Margaret Thatcher, but she said that Europe is founded on history and America is founded on philosophy and that is absolutely true.  Americans will argue until their blue in the face about what exactly the their constitution means and how much it is fixed and how much it is a living document open to change.  It’s important because in some ways, the constitution *is* America.  If you aren’t in keeping with the philosophy espoused in the constitution, you can be labeled un-American, a concept which is essentially alien to the Brits, who don’t have a constitution and are British by virtue of being born there regardless of any beliefs – sure, you can be labeled unpatriotic in the UK, but you could believe in communism, or some other form of totalitarian system that is contrary to mainstream British values and still wouldn’t be called “un-British”.

Whatever you think of it, America is certainly an interesting place.  Millions of diverse people sharing an area of land with nothing in common apart from that they are all supposed to agree to a few basic tenets.  Going back to Thatcher, she described Bolshevism as a big social experiment.  I kind of think of America that way too.