Borges said that he had been given the impression that the US was such a fabulous place that when he first visited this country, he was shocked to learn the there were flies here.
I had a similar experience. My first memories are of San José de Costa Rica, where my parents were learning Spanish at school and I was absorbing it from the caretakers at home, like you do when you're two years old. We then made a brief trip to the US and boarded a ship to Buenos Aires from New York. My parents adapted well to Costa Rica and then to Argentina and loved it, but of course they talked a lot about family and conditions back in the US. They made it sound as though it were the epitome of all that is good. People were honest, you could leave the doors at home unlocked, everything was clean. The shopping was great after World War II.
They also talked about growing up in rural areas, not having electricity, churning their own butter, and riding horses. It all sounded very old to me, growing up in the beautiful industrial and commercial center of Rosario, which had pretty much all the latest. I envisioned my parents' childhood in black and white, whereas mine was in color.
Later I realized that the contrast was country versus city, more than US versus Argentina. My parents grew up in sparsely populated areas where they were known to everyone around and thus had few opportunities to get in trouble and not have everyone know about it. That sort of thing makes one circumspect and careful. No one robbed from them as they grew up because they were out in the country and in the Great Depression most people had very little or nothing of value anyway. But on the trip to New York I mentioned, as we neared the great metropolis, someone stole one of our suitcases, the one which had my beloved record player in it.
Nevertheless, my parents emphasized a thoroughly ethical way of life. So when we came to the US for our first year-long furlough, expecting most people to be like my parents, I was shocked to hear about what was going on in Little Rock. The president sent troops to the city to ensure that African-American children could enroll in the previously all-white neighborhood school. People also talked in hushed tones, tones which implied a certain amount of concern if not fear, about Senator McCarthy. It was not particularly a happy time in the mid 1950's here. Neither was it in Argentina, where Perón was deposed shortly before our furlough and the military government which succeeded him rounded up and sent several dozen of his supporters to the firing squad.
Based on the attitudes and reactions of grownups, I intuited that not all was well in either country. It was the beginning of my developing what the anthropologists call cultural relativity.
On our second furlough, soon after arrival, the country was gripped by an expectant fear as the Cuban missile crisis unfolded. Not long after, at the University of Alabama, governor George Wallace could be seen standing in the door to block African-Americans Vivian Malone and James A. Hood from entering classes. President Kennedy had to send troops to make him back down. Civil rights leader Medgar Evers was assassinated shortly thereafter. Later that year Kennedy was murdered in the neighboring city of Dallas. We were told that Lee Harvey Oswald killed him, but I had heard a TV interview with the doctors at Parkland Hospital describe the wound in the back of the president's head as an exit wound. That interview has disappeared and never heard from again. History was repeating itself and I found myself juxtaposing the ideology of American exceptionalism with the reality of racism, political bullying, assassinations, and covering up of the truth. The US was certainly no worse than Argentina, but how much better was it, really? For me it was an open question into which I put a lot of thought in subsequent years.
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