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In Pursuit of the American Dream July 18, 2008

Posted by dodo in : Motel, Museum, Paris, Tour, USA , trackback

“Kis mah grits,” said the waitress, conversing with a regular customer as she served me up a 99-cent breakfast in the diner at Orlando Airport.

I was frequently to hear Americans exhorted to kiss each other’s fried porridge, in a parody that seems to be the last legacy of the Southerner who occupied the White House in the dark days before Ronald Reagan. Kissing grits has supplanted the fashion for kissing ass, which is surprising in an upwardly mobile society.

An hour later I was drinking (what else?) Florida orange-juice beside a motel swimming pool while the early-morning sun gently warmed away jet-lag. The lady on a nearby lounger ordered the waiter to put a slug in her juice.

“I always have screwdrivers for breakfast,” she confided to me by way of introduction. A strawberry blonde, she wore a two-tone lilac bikini over tanned cellulite. She was close to seventy years old. “Join me,” she invited, or possibly commanded. I joined her.

Travel GuidebookShe was from San Bernardino, I learned, visiting her son in Orlando. She stayed at the motel because “my daughter-in-law is a twennyfower-carat bitch who makes Joan Collins look like Miss Ellie”.

We talked travel. She loved Paris. The Pompidou Centre has more class than the “Louver”. The metro is so quaint, and the shops around the Shamps Ulysses are almost as good as those in Palm Beach or Beverly Hills.

She had done “Iddaly” but did not share my passion. Rome is badly in need of renovating. They should widen the streets of Florence and landfill some of Venice’s canals to put in a subway sytstem.

Conversation turned to politics. Jimmy Carter had been pathetic but she couldn’t support Reagan because of his policies on social security. She described herself as a “liberal conservative” and plainly warmed to my reminiscences of the Edward Heath administration.

Lunch in the motel’s coffee shop — fresh melon, lobster salad, ice cream — cost a little over five dollars. My single room, with a bed designed for Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice, was twenty-eight dollars a night. Notwithstanding a pernicious exchange rate, Florida is cheap.

Superficially, Orlando resembles Crawley or Milton Keynes, except that there are palm trees and no hills. The climate has plainly been modelled on the Garden of Eden. Florida is beautiful.

The people are bronzed, fit, not young but still active, and candid. My neighbour at the luncheon counter boasted equally of his golf handicap, a part-time job as superintendent of a condominium to supplement his pension, and three full-time girlfriends. He was sixty- four; the youngest of his girlfriends was fifty-seven.

Florida is bracing.

The epitome of the American Dream, in pursuit of which I had, after all, braved the airways over the Atlantic, can be experienced at Walt

Disney World, an exercise in total fantasy expertly stage-managed with scarcely an ugly glimpse of how anything works.

As well as all the souped-up funfair attractions designed to impose new limits of endurance on your stomach, there are mechanized pageants which glorify the past, present and future achievements of the land God gave to Mammon.

A cinema with a 360-degree screen affords an enveloping thirty- minute tour of the US, climaxed by a swoop across the Hudson River at twilight. Before you rise the towers of Manhattan, behind you Liberty bears her torch in the gathering darkness. A choir, in the style of the Ray Conniff chorus, sings God Bless America, and in the breathtaking splendour of the moment you are sure that He does.

On my last evening in Florida, after six gruelling days pursuing the American Dream from Disney World to Sea World, Epcot, Cape

Canaveral, two waxwork museums and an alligator farm, I chanced to dine in my first Stateside McDonald’s. A couple from Texas shared my table. Inevitably, we ended up talking politics.

The husband, a grizzled caricature of LBJ, was a staunch supporter of the latest elderly cowboy on Pennsylvania Avenue. He had a favourite word with which I hesitate to soil, but in his opinion Jimmy Carter had it between the ears and Ronnie Reagan is gonna drop it in large amounts on the Eye-ranians and the Commie Dagoes and anybody else who tries to put one over the US of A.

“Am I right?” he asked his wife in conclusion, “or am I right?” His wife nodded unenthusiastically.

I ventured to express nostalgia for the Kennedy era, the “New

Camelot”, when I, like many Britons, believed we were at the dawn of a second Renaissance.

The Texan heard me out. Then:

“Crap on the Kennedys,” he said vehemently. “And crap on the Pope,” he added, for good measure.

In my taxi next morning, en route to the airport, the driver’s girlfriend, a big, black, breezy hooker from Carter country, suggested from the front seat:

“Honey, whah don’t Ah clahmb over an’ sit theyuh in back with you-all?”

“My dear,” I told her, “you can kiss my grits.”

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1. Card USA - July 18, 2008

6.2 If paying by credit card or debit card, we only accept payment by such cards as showed in the Customer Application Form or as, otherwise notified to you by our customer services department. … Card USA

2. Las Vegas - July 18, 2008

If you have purchased a walk up ticket, proceed directly to the starting point (NBC Sweet Shop) no less than 10 minutes before start time of tour. … Las Vegas

3. Travel in France - July 18, 2008

Tours are conducted with passionate local multilingual guides who have proficient knowledge of history and art. … Travel in France

4. Belgium Hotels - July 18, 2008

The hotel is just a short walk away from many sites including Wat Phra Keo, government offices and one of Bangkok s original tourist budget establishments. … Belgium Hotels

5. Paris Drive - July 18, 2008

This way, you are not zipping across one end of the city to the other chasing NY tourist attractions. … Paris Drive


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