My first impression of the United States was… not great. I remember watching scraps of paper packaging blow unobstructed down the street in the late-summer breeze, corner trash bins overflowing twice their volume, crumbling concrete, cracked bricks, and peeling paint. Most of all, I remember the persistent smell of urine.

I had visited the United States before. Growing up in Montreal, my family made occasional cross-border shopping trips to Burlington and Plattsburgh; I had skied at Jay Peak and Smuggler’s Notch in my youth, and scaled Tuckerman’s Ravine at Mount Washington as part of a college rock climbing weekend. I spent an epic weekend in Manhattan, checking out the 80s punk scene at CBGB in my late teens and raced in the Verge New England Cyclocross Series in my 30s.

But there is a difference between the fleeting superficial encounters of amusement and tourism and actually experiencing America as it is. So, the first opportunity that I had to form a real impression of the United States only came when I moved south of the border to study for my PhD at Rutgers University in New Jersey.

George W. Bush was in the White House then, Urinetown had only recently wrapped up its Broadway run, they were still playing Zero 7’s “Destiny” in the chillout rooms of New York clubs, and I had never even heard the name Barrack Obama. And within hours of stepping out of the car, signing my lease, and settling into my new American life, all I could think of was Raymond Chandler’s great line from The High Window: “From thirty feet away she looked like a lot of class. From ten feet away she looked like something made up to be seen from thirty feet away.”

From ten feet away, America smelled bad and looked like it had been badly improvised and then patched together with duct tape only long enough to pass the most cursory inspection. The lease for my overpriced apartment had been typewritten with parts xxx-ed out, or crossed-out in pen, with emendations (I had to initial each one) in the margins. My landlord informed me that he would not accept my rent in the form of a cheque or bank draft, it had to be in cash, and only in $20s and $50s.

I remember sitting in the Social Security Administration office in New Brunswick, NJ after a first official meeting with my dissertation supervisor. I needed my “social” to received my fellowship stipend, so I dashed over and waited in line. And waited. The building must have been an example of cutting-edge institutional architecture when it was built around 1948. By the 21st century, it felt cramped and downright dystopian, with sad people from marginalized communities, or who had been marginalized by social and institutional neglect, waiting for hours on card-table chairs with torn leatherette covers for a representative of the US government to come out and incomprehensibly yell their names. Always with the yelling in America.

My first impression has not changed after almost two decades in the United States. I have lived in New York, northern and central New Jersey, Boston, and Chicago, in arguably the greatest cities in “the greatest country in the world.” The infrastructure is literally falling apart – one train on the commuter line I took in Boston burst into flames as it crossed the Mystic River two years ago – the roads have potholes that can house entire families, average life expectancies are in freefall and, as my spouse noted this weekend as we tried to use public transportation to get home from a night on the town, nothing really works.

My spouse had a particularly jarring reaction, as she had just returned from a business trip to Singapore. Not only is the Southeast Asian island city state a futuristic techno paradise (which cyberpunk author William Gibson perhaps justifiably called “Disneyland with the Death Penalty” thirty years ago), but it works. If an escalator breaks down in a public place, it is repaired within the hour. If an escalator breaks down in a public place in New York, Chicago, or Boston, it stays broken-down, and a crew might get to it sometime next October. Not to fix it, mind you, but to look at it.

Okay. I am not being fair. The United States is not the only, or even the most run-down, ramshackle country in the world. Decay and decrepitude are endemic in the post-industrial countries of late-stage capitalism; to a great extent, it is their nature to have failed do deliver on the bight-shiny utopian promises of the Future Shock 1970s, at least for most of their citizens.

Many countries in the Global North have gone through their phases of decline and deterioration. A stroll through the streets of London will acquaint visitors with the extent to which the sun has set on the British Empire – if it ever shone at all – in every rusted iron railing and crumbling façade. As I walked from the British Museum, through Covent Garden, and down to the Thames some years ago, I kept muttering to myself “this is the heart of Anglo culture? This is ‘swinging London?” as I tripped over shattered pavement and broken glass, and dodged trash and vomit on the sidewalk.

In Canada, the country of my birth, road and infrastructure quality is so bad, particularly in the province of Quebec, that it has been a running gag for at least a generation. In Montreal, the 1976 Olympic Stadium, which was never fully completed, was finally paid-off to the tune of C$1.6 billion dollars in 2006, making it the second-costliest sports venue in history, three decades after it opened. The concrete structure has been crumbling since it opened, and a 26-by-39-foot concrete slab fell off in 2012.

The United States is not alone in being the shell of a forgotten promise, but two things make it different. The first is that the decay is most evident in shared public spaces and services. In addition to the Dante-esque experience of the Social Security Administration – Purgatorio rather than Inferno because, after all, there is a way out – American pubic space is more than tattered at the edges, it is frayed right through the warp and weft. Any place through which people pass, or where they interact as citizens is almost guaranteed to be a circle of torment.

There is the state of public transportation, even assuming that there is public transportation available, the shambolical, improvised airport security lines that have not improved, and in fact have deteriorated, in the last two decades. Any government office, like the DMV in any state and any city, is a scene of abject chaos, with endlessly shouting and screaming civil servants evidently at the end of their emotional ropes, peeling paint, and barely-legible, photocopied notices adorning walls, pillars, and windows held up by endless generational strata of masking tape.

The less said about the United States Post Office, the better. I have never entered one where the heating functioned in the winter or the air conditioning in the summer. In one heavily-trafficked location in suburban Boston during the height of the Coronavirus pandemic, postal workers improvised isolation screens out of cellophane and marked social distancing lines on the floor with colored duct tape. Even the local Target took more substantial and serious precautions – and had cool “please respect social distancing” decals on the floor, to boot.

Yet, in other post-industrial countries of the Global North which “have seen by Time’s fell hand defac’d/The rich proud cost of outworn buried age,” public spaces like transportation hubs and sites of government service are maintained, functional, even pristine. The Queensway through Toronto might be no better than New Jersey’s Garden State Parkway, but any Canadian Social Insurance office is a model of efficiency compared to any Social Security office. Whatever one might think of Britain’s regional rail system, it is not the SEPTA, and Paddington Station is a futuristic paradise compared to Philadelphia’s makeshift 30th Street Station.

… And French Post Offices resemble nothing so much as the tony boutiques meant to attract upscale customers passing through the Oculus in lower-Manhattan – all soft lighting, open space, clean lines and efficiency.

Britons, Canadians, the French, and everyone else in the Global North are well aware that the Thames smells bad in summer, the Ville Marie Expressway in Quebec was, until recently, held together with cement patches and chicken wire, and that it can take a year or more to get home or office Internet service installed in Paris, but at least they have the good manners to feel a little shame and embarrassment about it. Canadians say “sorry” a lot, and often about the state of the roads.

In America? Not so much. Everyone, including expat Canadians, has just gotten used to it. If you have to wait for an hour while your train sits just outside of Newark Penn Station because signals have broken down and rail traffic between New York City and pretty much all points west is impossibly snarled, people take it. There will be profanity, of course, but it’s business as usual.

It makes sense. In America, public spaces and services meant for them, the others. It is a kind of lowest-common denominator thinking: Only people who do not drive cars take public transportation, the Social Security Administration is a place for people who collect Social Security and those who need a Social Security number to work – you know… People who don’t already have one. The public purse is filled with private taxes and many Americans who have cars, jobs, and who don’t rely on social programs recoil at the very prospect of using public funds to provide adequate services for those who do. At best, they can be convinced to do the bare minimum.

Anyone who has waited for a bus in Houston, ridden San Francisco’s BART, or interacted with any level of government to meet basic needs knows well how bare that minimum really is. Ideas of social equality and collectivity – the basic notions of the social contract – which inspire other countries and societies to provide all citizens with shared public spaces and services with at least a modicum of dignity, are largely unknown in the United States. This is the land of “I got mine, and if you don’t, then that’s just tough shit” – perhaps not a universal sentiment, but certainly a dominant one.

That is all well and good. Different societies address questions of equality and justice in different ways, and I knew, as I stepped into its dirty, potholed streets almost two decades ago, I had to respect America’s choices. If it works for them, it works for them and I, as a recent immigrant to what my ancestors had called die goldene medineh, could only accept the peculiarities of the United States. I knew what I was getting myself into.

What I was not prepared for was that so many Americans, like kings sitting on piles of garbage, really believed, and continue to believe, that the United States is “the greatest country in the world.” I mean… Really?!

This is hardly a universally-held belief, either. The experiences of the last couple of decades, from the Great Recession of 2007-2008, the farce of American government and politics since the beginning of Donald Trump’s presidency, and the ongoing collapse of American democracy has shaken the confidence of many. It’s hard, after all, to claim that the United States is “the greatest country in the world” when, only two years ago, it almost fell in a totalitarian coup.

Around then, a YouGov survey found that only 50 percent of Americans believed that the United States was “the greatest country in the world,” a startling figure until to you realize that only 31 percent believe that it isn’t. That means that 19 percent aren’t quite certain, or think that the United States might be “the greatest country in the world” but aren’t willing to go on record about it.

And that shouldn’t be surprising, since the fact that America is “the greatest country in the world” has been a matter of either faith or common sense for almost two centuries, at least since John Lewis O’Sullivan (the coiner of Manifest Destiny) said aloud what every American, or at least every white American, was thinking in 1839: “America been chosen; and her high example shall smite unto death the tyranny of kings, hierarchs, and oligarchs, and carry the glad tidings of peace and good will where myriads now endure an existence scarcely more enviable than that of beasts of the field. Who, then, can doubt that our country is destined to be the great nation of futurity?”

That arrogance is a matter of American faith however the doubters and skeptics might waffle. When pushed, even they will almost always hold out for a smidgin of American greatness, pointing to rock and roll (perfected by the British), basketball (invented by a Canadian), the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor (sculpted by a Frenchman), and the great technological innovations of geniuses like Nicola Tesla (a Slovenian) and Alexander Graham Bell (a Scot, by way of Canada) as evidence. It is both admirable and touching how even skeptical Americans love their country but, when their backs are against the wall, they will invariably insist on American greatness. For those on the left, America is a kind of utopia manqué, but a kind of utopia nonetheless.

That is because the idea that the United States is “the greatest country in the world” has been repeated so often that it has become hegemonic. Richard Nixon said it, so did Ted Cruz. Michelle Obama famously declared “America is the greatest country on earth” in response to then-candidate Trump, echoing her husband’s language in his last State of the Union Address. President Biden who, in 2017 assured us that “We are by far the greatest, powerful, decent nation in the world” has kept repeating that line almost as an afterthought, even after the attempted coup that almost kept him from the White House. Just last September, the president, gesturing to the slapdash renovations in dilapidated Logan Airport declared to visitors from beyond America’s shores that, when repairs are complete, “you’ll know you’re in the 21st century in the greatest country in the world and one of the finest cities in the country.”

Sure, Joe. Sure. I am one of those visitors from beyond America’s shores, I even lived in Boston for three years, and have come in and out of Logan many, many times. Sure.

For those of us who do come from or continue to live in parts of the world that are not the United States – that is, 95.75% of the world’s population – this kind of American narcissism and arrogance, which holds that all other countries are in perpetual competition for second place is both comical and annoying. It is the kind of juvenile snottiness that one normally hears from one’s spoiled teenaged nephew at family gatherings, and that you normally dismiss with an eyeroll and a sigh. What harm can come from letting Americans believe that their rundown, dirty, rusting country, with trash in the streets, where the homeless who can’t afford exorbitant city rents live in encampments under bridges, and where people die of treatable illnesses because they can’t afford to pay for treatment and medications, is “the greatest country in the world?”

Let them have their illusions.

Yet, this myth of American greatness animates a rising totalitarianism based on the principle that might makes right and which persecutes the poor, the different, and the marginalized, and is exporting its example around the world. It has infected the rest of the world with regime change and drone strikes by a fleet of thousands of robotic killing machines. It is a myth that tells Americans that, if no other country can come close to American greatness, then this is as good as it gets; those Americans, from subaltern and marginalized communities, the poor, and the others, who work tirelessly to improve their country, can only be whiners and ingrates.

Illusions of grandeur can be very dangerous, indeed.

My first impression of the United States was not favorable and, all these years later, it hasn’t changed. I can only hope that my American friends, whom I love like my own countrymen and family, would take a moment to see their country through my eyes and maybe accept that fact that there is no prize for believing that you’re “the greatest country in the world.”

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Photo © Matthew Friedman