That title is borrowed from an email doing the rounds at the moment, and that I received this morning. It starts off with a weak joke about how civilization began with the invention of beer and consequently humanity was split into two groups: Liberals and Conservatives. Liberals are credited with “[the] domestication of cats, the trade union, … group therapy … and the concept of democratic voting” (those evil Liberals) and are identified by what they eat and drink (tofu, sushi, French food, imported beer and white wine), by what they do for a living (social workers, journalists, hair dressers, Hollywood dreamers) and by either being women or woman-like. Conservatives, on the other hand, eat red meat and potatoes and have manly jobs like big game hunter, rodeo cowboy, lumberjacks, construction worker, corporate executive and soldier.

What struck me about this email was not how obnoxious it is, but how it fits nicely into the current received notion of what a Liberal is in this country. Liberals are the wine quaffing homos who want to live off the welfare state and Conservatives are the real people of America, the working johns who earn a living. So how did this happen? How did the American right manage to convince the working people of this country that they should look to the Conservatives to help them improve their lives?

The left are complicit in creating this image. George Orwell wrote that “the worst advertisement for Socialism is its adherents”, and it’s a sentiment that would spring to mind when I would be accosted by Socialist Workers (a political party in the UK) on the Holloway Road in London, screeching out their dogma in voices like sawing sheet metal. I felt the same disgust when I saw a man chalking ‘Bush Out’ in Union Square, but replacing the ‘S’ with a swastika, while the political puppeteers make ‘jokes’ about Bush and Cheney in high-pitched voices. These people seem to represent me and my beliefs in the popular imagination, but in fact do no more for me than grate my nerves.

Real, serious socialists (or leftists, or liberals – whatever you want to call yourself) need to reclaim the political arguments in this country and remind everyone who earns less than $100,000 a year that their interests are not best served by a party who wants to reduce the tax burden for the rich and free corporations of all those icky regulations that stop them from hammering every last drop of worth out of their employees before letting them free to fend for themselves in sickness or in old age. And the next time someone asks you how you feel about gay marriage tell them not as strongly as you do about America being below about thirty-five other countries in the infant mortality world rankings, below Cuba even.

We went out for a lovely meal on Saturday night, here in Brooklyn. It seems you have to spend real money to get a proper sausage in this town, but that’s OK – you can spend all the money you like in London and get nowhere near a decent burger. It was such a nice, mild evening that we decided to sit outside and we had a mostly pleasant time that was occasionally ruined by horn-honking drivers having their progress delayed by at least one fourteenth of a second by someone else pulling over. This is on Union Street, by the way, which is a two way street on which the opportunities to pass a double-parked car are frequent, especially at nine on a Saturday.

The excessive honking was one of the first things that struck me about New York when I moved here and I feel a little spasm of fury every time somebody parps at a light just gone green. And this phenomenon is not confined just to New York. I myself was the target of some energetic car quacking as I double parked in a sleepy loch-side village in Scotland, and on a Sunday. As I type this drivers audibly assault each other outside my apartment building. What’s the rush? Really, where’s the fire?

This is a bit of leap (there are smaller steps in my brain) but I think it’s all down to the American Dream. In its noblest form it’s a dream of equality, self-sufficiency and fairness, but like any good idea it can get tinkered around with just a little bit and made to mean the exact opposite of what it originally stood for. For lots of people the Bill of Rights has become a Bill of Entitlements. Gone are the responsibilities that go with freedom and instead they are replaced with what we are owed, and sod everyone else. Never mind that the parked car might be waiting for its owner to pick up an inhaler for a child who has to sing at his Grandmother’s hospital bedside, ‘So You Think You Can Dance?’ is starting in ten minutes! Or maybe I could just relax and enjoy my sausage.

Here’s a story about the Korean War: a group of British soldiers were under attack from a Chinese force. The British were outnumbered, surrounded, trying to hold an indefensible position. Whatever the details, the situation was dire. The British commanding officer radioed for reinforcements, explaining that he and his chaps were in a bit of a tight spot. The request for help was received by some Americans, who were close enough and in great enough numbers to come to the rescue. Despite this, they arrived too late and discovered most of their allies slaughtered.

This story is usually carted out to illustrate the language divide that separates the two nations, but I think it’s about more than just pants and trousers. Whoever received that message didn’t misunderstand its content, they misunderstood its tone; they missed the urgency. After all, when an American officer is under attack and is terrified that his men are about to be blown up and shot to pieces he shouts down the radio about asses getting whooped and things being FUBAR (I know Paul doesn’t like swearing in his blog so to explain: the last three words of that acronym are ‘beyond all recognition’ . Also, it may be a phrase from Vietnam but the point is still sound). A tight spot, for an American officer, is two burst tires on his jeep, not imminent destruction.

The point I’m lumbering towards here is that the British aren’t more brave or more calm than their American counterparts, they’re just more ironic. Emotions might be embarrassing to a British person but we’ve still got to express them, so we step to one side and point them out as we would an interestingly shaped hedge. This was demonstrated in every vox pop after the London bombings: we heard a calm description of a flash of light, a loud bang, screaming and it all being rather frightening. The odd thing is that these people weren’t pretending to not be scared. If you’d asked ‘But weren’t you terrified out of your wits?’ they would have answered ‘Yes, of course, it was absolutely dreadful’. You might have thought they were having you on but that would be to misunderstand the subdued tone of their response.

I was in London two weeks ago and everyone told me they were afraid to get on the tube, and that the atmosphere was strange and unsettling but frankly I didn’t feel it, commuting in the miniscule trains along with everyone else. There was less of a police presence than here in New York and I didn’t notice anyone with a rucksack attracting attention. I’m sure people who’d been in town for both sets of bombings still felt their disquiet but they had already begun to step to one side of it, a death-shaped puddle on the way to work.