Mike Pilewski writes about life, politics and culture in the United States
Some Americans who live on the coasts, or travel between them, refer to the middle part of their continent as “flyover country”. The states where most of the farming and mining take place aren’t, in their view, worth seeing from the ground. Last week we learned that Minneapolis, Minnesota, definitely belongs to flyover country. A Northwest Airlines plane to that … >>
I was in a foreign city, watching TV with some friends I’d made there. We’d gone through the channels and had stopped at one that was showing a movie. After a few minutes, a girl in the group said, “This must be a French film. All they’re doing is talking and eating.” She was right. “If it were an American … >>
One of Aesop’s many fables is the story of two snobs, the town mouse and the country mouse. The town mouse goes to visit his cousin, who lives in the country. The town mouse doesn’t like the simple food he’s offered, so he invites the country mouse to visit him in the city. There they eat sweet things, but the … >>
If Barack Obama had told me he was going to Ghana, I would have warned him. The country is a dump — parts of it quite literally. In the late 1990s, I knew it as a place where very little functioned as it should have. The currency was worthless. Families often had 10 or even 14 children. Garbage was simply … >>
Ordinary Americans, and members of Congress, needed a deep breath to think about spending another $787 billion to get the derailed US economy back on track. Only one-sixth of the total was for projects in infrastructure and science, but a small item received an undue amount of attention. It was a $1.3 billion subsidy for Amtrak, the national passenger rail … >>