US and Iran

It is, I suppose, a cliché, but one never explained, that these days, what with the spread of population everywhere – and I mean the spread, more than the increase, the huge and steady exodus of poor farming people on every continent from the country to the cities – with that, and the universal spread of the motorway, the supermarket, the roadside eatery, it's often hard to know which city you're in, or for that matter, which country.

I remember a year or two ago arriving in a city airport after an exhausting flight, telling the cab driver where to go and then slumping back into a snooze. When I woke up, I saw blocks of high-rises on the horizon, clover- leaf ramps going off the freeways on to other freeways, tall, skinny lamp posts with those saucer lamps on top, metal dividers between the traffic, the lanes and, for a moment, I thought I was on the outskirts of Chicago. I looked round for the long lake front and its park. It was not there, I was coming into Paris. 

A famous economic geographer, the late J. Russell Smith, once wrote that if you blindfolded any competent geographer, put him on a train and, hours later, took off the blindfold, he ought to be able to look out the window and tell you what people did for a living, what was the average family income, what were the local crops, simply on the basis of the characteristic soil, the fencing, the buildings he passed, and so on. But even old Russell Smith, a cat-like observer who could have spotted these things in the dark, I think he'd have a rough time today knowing where he was. 

I've just come from a quick circular tour, or rather, a jagged safari, round this country and at night especially, there was no way of telling whether I was entering Atlanta or Detroit or, except for the fleeting silhouette of vegetable palm trees, Miami. Dallas, I knew, from the occasional cottonwood trees like little ghosts leaning against the concrete. 

Dallas is on the flat, Texas plain, a plain which goes on for six hundred miles before the land begins to undulate and roll up to the foothills of the Rockies. Today, Dallas is THE burgeoning city of the south-west, with a million people and the likelihood of one and a half million by the turn of the century, which happily I shall not be here to see. In any part of it, it looks like a new city being built – splendid new structures going up next to empty lots and I must say that, between them, Dallas and Houston have more examples of really exhilarating modern architecture than anywhere I know. 

Dallas even has a shopping centre which covers two or three city blocks (streets) and looks like a one-storey art museum, great spaced horizontals of beautiful stone. It's the only shopping centre I've ever seen where no shop signs of any kind – no grocery, no restaurants, no wines or spirits, no neon flashing lights – defile the outside. The shops and their accompanying catchpennies are presumably on the inside of the compound. 

I was asked in Dallas if I remembered my first acquaintance with the city and I certainly did. It was in 1933. A friend, another English student, and I had been driving along the bayou country of Louisiana and out on to the unending plain of Texas and we'd timed things so that we'd arrive in Dallas for a comfortable dinner. Dallas was a new and an exciting prospect for me for the absurd youthful reason that it was the theme of a blues by Fats Waller. 'I've got the Dallas blues,' he sang, 'the Main Street heart disease.' And went on to yearn some more for 'that Texas town that never seen ice or snow'. 

By the way, the last three winters, they've had single falls of the stuff and are gloomily predicting, as practically everybody else is, that the world's prevailing winds have shifted and pretty soon they'll be wearing igloo boots and be out with the reindeer. 

Well, off on the horizon, back in 1933, we could see strange fires licking the sky but then the two-lane highway gave out. They were only just building the first all-cement continental highway grid and a familiar sign came up, 'Detour'. The detour took us off on a dirt road, upgraded with regular lateral ridges of bumps at one-foot intervals. We called it, in those days, a 'tin roof' or 'washboard' road and you could either go gingerly over the bumps at five miles an hour or try and hit the tops of the ridges by going at thirty. Anyway, we drove through the night on an 80-mile detour, a loop, which brought us back to within only a mile or two of where the cement – the pavement – had ended. 

The horizon was closer now and the fires flaming across the horizon looked like Dante's Inferno. They were simply burning off the natural gas that leaked from the ground. Everybody knew in those days that natural gas had no usefulness at all. I wonder what the present-day quotation is for Texas natural gas. 

Well, in those days, and for long afterwards, you always knew where you were approaching any town by, quite apart from the trees and the landscape, the small billboards were characteristic of that part of the country and nowhere else. You'd see a sign advertising 'Polands for sale' and knew you were in Iowa. 'Ten miles to Ma Jenkins and her famous boysenberry pie' meant you were in the state of Washington. Signs for chewing tobacco, you were coming into the Carolinas. 'Prepare to meet thy God' was a sure indication that you were anywhere in the Deep South, in the region that Mr Mencken irreverently dubbed, 'the Bible belt'. 

How about today? Well, driving in one part of Dallas I passed, in succession, three signs on the highway. One said in big, Tudor-Gothic letters, 'Shakespeare Disco'. The next sign, right alongside, 'Scotland Yard Inn' and then we turned off on Pickwick Lane. Have the Texans then a deep yearning for English literature and its associations? No! I think they're just like everybody else in our restless world. They have a yen for somewhere else and if they can't get there, they'll import it in imagination and, you might say, in effigy. 

In London, for instance, many restaurants that you'll see are called, something like, 'Kentucky Pancake Parlour' – now that would be a puzzle in Kentucky which is famous for its horses, for Bourbon whisky, for cornbread and for chess pie. Pancakes are a national dish and I don't mean pancakes the size of a dinner plate eaten on Shrove Tuesday, but little, dollar sizes they call them, silver dollar size, eaten at breakfast with sausage patties and maple syrup which is a wonderful thing when it's tapped from a Vermont maple tree and a ghastly liquid when they add some essence to hot water. 

I noticed more than ever on this trip the regional hankering for some other region or country. On Cape Cod, in Massachusetts, a restaurant called, 'The Monterey' and in Monterey California a restaurant called, 'The Cape Codder'. This tendency becomes hilarious when there's more to the yearning than the name. I mean when the proprietor seems to believe that what people in New Mexico want more than anything is a restaurant which serves Florida jumbo shrimp and pompano, a fish which, like any other fish, is fine just out of the water, but which is rubbery and useless when it's been frozen and, as they always boast, 'flown in'. 

Lately a fashion has hit the country for some of the staples of Mexican food, especially tacos and I must say every time I go to England I'm saddened by the fate of the noble hamburger which grilled, not fried, from pure fillet and a couple of inches thick is a delicious thing. In English restaurants, fried on a griddle, it tastes like a one-eighth of an inch patty made of cereal, dog food and pounded concrete. 

Well, I'm sure there are people wondering why I talk about these tiny fashions in a world – in a country, anyway – which everywhere has two awful things on its mind, Iran and Cambodia. But I did say that this itch to be somewhere else or to be enjoying what is supposed, wrongly usually, supposed to be the essence of somewhere else, is well-nigh universal. I hear that the Arabs are building an exact replica of Harrods somewhere in the Middle East. 

It has, I think, something to do with the vast expansion of the travel business and the endless titillation of their folders, as also with the mass marketing of frozen and canned foods which can bring you lobster tails from South Africa, melons from Israel, chilli con carne already bottled in Texas. But I think it has to do more with a general reaction of frustration against the complexity of life in our own neck of the woods, in every neck of the woods. Maybe people stay sane by clutching the romantic illusion that somewhere else, as the tourist agencies never tire of assuring you, life is simpler, more tasty, more relaxed. 

I've just been riffling through one drawer that I keep loaded with maps of old travels and the folders I picked up at the time. One invites me, and I took him up on it, to romantic – fabled is their favourite word – fabled Iran. The other begs you to plunge into the mysteries and charm of Angkor Wat and Cambodia. We never made that because even 14 years ago, the authorities saw the word 'journalist' on my passport as my occupation and it was a fatal entry. They thought it better I don't go there. 

Well, I wouldn't have talked about this strange cult of believing in greener pastures elsewhere, if I'd not noticed sharply, once again, how people in different parts of this continent, like you in your small or big corner, are primarily interested in themselves and next, in being somebody simpler, more romantic. However, on quite a lot of radio and television shows of the newsy, talking kind, two things were always brought up, two related anxieties that may safely be said to be American national anxieties. 

One was Iran and the baffling problem of what to do with the Ayatollah Khomeini, the other was the first sad seeping into the consciousness of Americans that, in this matter, they've been pretty well left to battle it alone. Where, an article today asked, where are our allies? Where is the voice of outrage coming from NATO? 

I think I know the answer. America could get by without Iranian oil, just. Several countries of Europe could not. Japan, not at all. He has got us, to coin a phrase, over a barrel – a barrel of you know what!

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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