Americans are open, honest and friendly in this 'Englishman's view of America' but stereotyping is to be avoided as a general rule because although stereotypes must have some foundation in fact or else they wouldn't have come about, they are by no means laws of nature and cannot be applied universally.
Prof. Eagleton starts with language in his consideration of how he finds the USA. He makes a long list of Americanisms that 'not all Americans know..are fairly distinctive to their own brand of English' but I'm afraid I hear weird, awesome, feel comfortable with, have a hard time and many others of his collection regularly. They have fed back into English English through young people and a similar vocabulary has arrived through consultants who dress up the bleakest common sense as if it were science to sell it to gullible organisations who think it will improve them. I'm afraid we are not as divided by the same language as we might like to be although pants, fags and bums are three things that we do need to be clear about.
America, for Eagleton, is up-front, confident, unironic and loud- to summarize him very crudely- whereas the British are self-effacing, understated and apologetic. He brings in the Irish to make it a three-cornered comparison sometimes. They are unsentimental. Guinness is no longer Irish and no Irishman ever said Begorrah unless it was for the benefit of a tourist.
But the defining quality of America from which all else follows is the pursuit of money. They don't have much history, tradition or class and they don't care about that but they do care about money. Eagleton regularly refers back to previous accounts of America, by de Tocqueville and Dickens, and finds them very sympathetic to his view or possibly only quotes them when they are. But in books like these he is not the sort of philosopher that Kant or Hegel are, constructing closely argued chapters to establish general epistemolgical or phenomenolgical truths. He does a bit of refuting, applies a bit of logic and then arrives at a conclusion or generalization that we aren't necessarily inclined to take too seriously in the way that observational stand-up comedians do. Eagleton's entertainments qualify him for a high place among the Sean Lock, Dara O'Brian, Shappi Khorsandi, Alexei Sayle contingent of humourists.
Miserable people rarely get murdered.
is one of his Quod Erat Demonstrandums that might not stand up to much statistical investigation and would have been unlikely to be found in the Critique of Pure Reason.
On the way to arriving at such wisdom, though, he is good at identifying the shortcomings, absurdities and moral vacuousness of the aristocracy, the royal family, capitalism and the inordinately wealthy as well as Americans but Michael Jackson seems to be particularly getting on his nerves at the moment.
It is a book that made me laugh every few pages which I thought it would and which is why I bought it. Eagleton is well-practiced at this line of reductio ad absurdam by now and he works like a gadget that can be pointed at a subject and he will deconstruct it for you in this playful, half-earnest, half-derisory manner. A life spent perfecting this common sense, slighly contrarian method has not gone to waste. He finishes with several pieces of advice for America and Americans, which do seem to be sincerely and not ironically meant, for example,
There should be compulsory courses for all college freshmen in how not to mean what you say.
Most of it almost goes without saying but was never so well expressed. The problem with any of it is that if they took him at his word, it wouldn't be America anymore.
