(Trying to) Accentuate the Positive

I approached the stranger. He was carrying a pile of meat, and teasing a small boy in American-accented English.

“That’s not very nice,” I said dutifully.

He looked at me incredulously. Then we both smiled.

“Whereya from?” he said chuckling.

“States.”

“No way,” he replied. “I was sure you were from England … what with the accent and all.”

My grin turned to grimace. I felt a cool breeze waft over my body, and I don’t think it was the open poultry freezer I was leaning on. It’s bollocks, I tell you. While my voice may not be as folksy as cowboy-actor Sam Elliott’s, as plaintive as Jimmy Stewart’s, or as gangsta as Rudy Giuliani’s, I don’t talk Brit.

How do I know? Because I listen to my monotonous accent hover in the air like stale cigarette smoke on a daily basis. And the lack of character in my intonation is normal if H.L. Mencken’s old-timey The American Language is to be believed. “We are, in brief, a somewhat snuffling people,” he writes, “much more given to catarrhs and coryzas than the inhabitants of damp Britain. Perhaps this general impediment to free and easy utterance … is responsible both for the levelness of tone of American speech … and for the American tendency to pronounce the separate syllables of a word with much more care than an Englishman bestows upon them.” In other words, my voice’s benign cadence is part of my identity as an American, dammit!

I will admit, after arriving in Berlin I often feared that I sounded like a Radio ad for my country’s most recent Imperialist dabblings, no matter what words I said. So, I overcompensated, not by aping Peter O’Toole or Terence Stamp, but by agreeing with everything my new Europals said. There we’d be, sitting around sipping pastis and munching caper berries, and they’d be grinding out a new asshole for America. I’d just nod my head in the affirmative. “Why in sam hill do you think I moved to Berlin?” I’d say, and we’d all clink our glasses together as the strains of some alt-country band from Arizona or Illinois played in the background. Then I’d listen to them bash Hollywood movies or tell me all about the time they visited the U.S.

“Where’d you go?” I’d ask.

“New York,” they’d say. Then they’d light an American Spirit which always seemed to be the prelude to a long list of things learned about America and Americans after visiting Manhattan for 10 days.

I’ve decided that nothing helps a person discover latent patriotism (I use that loaded word in the most simplistic way possible) more naturally than living in a foreign country. In fact, I’m pretty sure that even the most jaded and cynical expats among us discover, from time to time, moments of pride in our birth country. Some Americans might’ve felt it at Berlin’s Obama rally, while others might feel it when they’re remember the town they grew up in or a trip to Yosemite or some other pretty place like that. Mind you, I’m not talking about jingoism or nationalism. I’m talking about the kind of pride one feels when their team scores a goal in the World Cup or they see California say something like, “Well, lordy, we don’t care if you’re both packing a vagina, come on down and get hitched if you wanna.”

The sad and embarrassing thing is that at some point in my life I began to confusingly think that it is impossible to separate the ability to feel esteem for my roots from my loathing for government (current and past). The two ideas got all twisted up with each other when all along they should have remained irrevocably divorced in my peanut brain. Thankfully, I believe I’ve finally learned that while America’s political philosophy is surely no less corrupt than Cosa Nostra, to say that I’ve met some Texans who seem like decent folk is not to give George Bush my seal of approval. Only now, as an expat, am I beginning to acknowledge that it’s not embarrassing to say that the US is OK, especially in comparison to any European country. America, after all, was created from European laws, customs and people. I’m not sure if it’s living in Berlin that’s got me thinking this way or if I’ve just grown wiser with age or if I’m still pissed off that I had to spend almost a full week without telephone and internet access at home because of the boneheads who run Kabel Deutschland. Whatever it is, I’m going to take a break from breaking my country’s balls for awhile.

What’s probably worse than the above confession is to admit that I’ve spent years stripping my voice of its Oklahoman roots. As a kid I was embarrassed by the way my family in New England teased me about my twang, and I bought into the convention that some accents are smarter than others. During my first year at a Connecticut boarding school (on scholarship, thank you) I began to rapidly alter the way I spoke in order to fit in. It was an insecure and immature thing to do. Same as it would be if I all of sudden started speaking in a British accent. In retrospect, I sure would have loved it if when I approached that stranger in the supermarket the exchange had gone a little more like this:

“Where ya from?” he would ask chuckling.

“Oklahoma.”

“Yeah,” he’d reply. “That’s what I thought.”

Instead he figured me for English.

Don’t get me wrong. Despite its recent reputation as a country filled with lager-swilling yobs who run around slicing-and-dicing each other with knives (Over 22,000 slashings in 2007, according to the Telegraph); despite the fact that a couple of weeks ago the British Foreign Office released a report that provoked headlines like “Drunk and abusive Britons wreak havoc in Spain as 2,000 are jailed”; despite the fact that that when I lived in London someone actually said the words ” ‘appy birfday mate” to me, I revere many things British. To wit:

• My wife, champion of my world, is a citizen of the United Kingdom.
• Three of my five all-time favorite writers are British (I’ve only just discovered Wilkie Collins, so that might change).
• Reeves and Mortimer, Peter Kay, French and Saunders — all British.
• And, if my half-Welsh wife lined up Angelina Jolie next to Helen Mirren and said, “You’ve got 20 seconds to chew face with one of them,” I’d toss a Polo mint into my mouth and unapologetically give Mirren’s 62 year-old lips a ride based solely on the way she delivered the line “Try the cock, Albert. It’s a delicacy, and you know where it’s been,” in the Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Their Lover.

Indeed, at the end of the day, there are aspects of the British Isles that are absolutely fabulous, what? But me talking like Jools Holland ain’t on, and I swear on Gary Cooper’s grave, I’ve never done it except in fun. Sure, the American government can be offensive and embarrassing, and so can I and a lot of my countrymen. But, jimminy christmas, I’m Made in USA.

It says so on my passport.