Mid Atlantic Dither

One of the questions I am asked most often is "so do you want to stay here?"

I always get a bit irritated by this question. I mean, if I didn't want to stay, why would I still be here? It's not like I am Tom Hanks in Terminal. But Americans are very proud of their nation, and I guess that there is an element of fishing for compliments: in other words, whatever their views on immigration, Americans rather like knowing that people are willing to swim the Rio Grande/hurdle electric fences/entertain marriage proposals from WhartonStalkerGuy in order to live in their country. So usually, when I get asked this question, I nod and wave vaguely around me and reply "of course, who wouldn't?"

However, I must confess that this question has caused me quite a lot of private thought. If immigration issues, jobs and family were all equal, on which side of the Atlantic would I really want to live? Where is my rightful geographic destiny?

Lots of Americans here in Middleofnowheresville think that Britain is the best thing since sliced bread. As far as I can gather, this has a lot to do with the fact that Americans in Middleofnowheresville are all in love with Tony Blair. The gun toting folks out in the rural areas which surround town love it that he is the no1 ally of the US armed forces, not some effeminate European pussy ( the Daily Regress doesn't talk much about Cherie and her lifestyle guru..)
Then the folks in town, who are the ultimate granola eating birkenstock wearing liberals, think Blair is great because he never invokes God in political speeches (again, the Daily Regress doesn't report how that's just because his media handlers won't let him talk about God). Townfolks have this image of Britain as an organic, crime-free, pro-choice nirvana with - and where they get this bit from I have no idea - excellent state schools.

The bizarre thing about this is that when one actually lives in Britain, one is hard pressed to find groups of people sitting around congratulating themselves on the fact that GM foods are labelled, or that very few murders happen with guns, or that the House of Lords isn't threatening to ban abortion. Living in Britain is about gas prices four times as expensive as in the US, six month waits to have cancer diagnoses, getting your house burgled three times in a year, and putting up with public transport strikes every other fortnight. Plus of course, moaning about the miserable wet cold gloomy weather.

The true benefits of living in Britain are things that Americans in Middleofnowheresville don't know about. The Archers, and those brown paper bags of cook chill Indian or Chinese or Thai food you can get from just about any supermarket on the way home from work. The Style section of the Sunday Times. The ability, if one so wishes, to go on booze cruises to Calais with a £1 token from the Daily Mail. Cider. Shoe shops. 25 days holiday. Cheese that comes from cows.

I do remind myself of these benefits. And I also think about the benefits of living here, because there are also quite considerable. A great climate. Nice friendly people. IHOP. J Crew. Crate & Barrel. College football. 200 cable TV channels. Funnel cake and string fries.

It really is a dilemma, and it's been causing me a lot of trouble. There's really no easy way round it - or so I thought.

Then I discovered Project Implicit. If you have ever heard of a book by Malcolm Gladwell called Blink you will already have an idea of what this is all about. A bunch of psychologists here at UVA, along with Harvard and Washington, have got this online research project going to test social implicit cognition, that is, your subconscious feelings and attitudes which you might not even know you have.

They test this by something called the implicit association test (IAT), which tries to discover what automatic subconscious associations you might have between concepts (eg science or arts) and attributes (eg male or female). One well known variation of this is the Race IAT, which shows that most people have a subconscious automatic preference for white over black. There are also IATs for just about every other preference dyad you can imagine: since discovering Project Implicit I have discovered I prefer cats over dogs, southerners (US) over northerners, and gun control over gun rights.

So you can imagine I was pretty excited when I discovered that Project Implicit has websites targeted at specific English speaking countries, including the UK, and that one of the UK IATS specifically attempts to discover your subconscious preference for the UK versus the US. Perhaps now I could attempt to tap the subconscious side of myself to find out which side of the Atlantic I should be on, and not have to do meditation like Seattle Treeza told me to.

I took the test. It involved sets of sequences of words and images flashed up onto the screen. In the first sequence, you had to press E on your keyboard every time you saw an image or word representing the US (GW mugshot, Stars and Stripes etc) or a positive word like love, enjoy, happy, glorious. Whenever you saw a UK image or word, or a negative word like hate, despise, evil, horrible, you had to press I on your keyboard. Then it was swapped over, and the US were the bad guys, the UK the good guys. So I pushed keys like a lab rat for five minutes, then pressed the space bar and held my breath. What would be the truth, the answer to my geographic destiny?

"You have very little or no automatic preference for the United Kingdom over the United States."

In other words, we have PhDs and we don't know either.