JiK and Ivor have just reminded me of some of the notions I encountered when I spent six months in Columbia, SC. In Oz, we're used to being distant from most of what people in other places regard as the centre of their various universes and we have to learn to understand 'where they're coming from', or at least where they think they're coming from. Having travelled in some interesting places outside Oz and even having visited some of the centres of the known universe (but not yet the USA) I was familiar with various notions of 'the centre vs the periphery' and how that affected both those people and my own sense of location.

It wasn't until I'd been in SC for a while that I became intimately aware of the particularly American version of Washington DC as the modern equivalent of Imperial Rome, with some aspects also of The Forbidden Palace in Beijing. It was only a couple of trivial items that pulled the scales from my eyes; both were part of the daily dead forest that lands on so many front porches in the US. One was describing Barossa Valley wines as the best wines from New Zealand and the other was a Lands End description of a woollen jumper (as we call them) as being made of the very finest Italian merino wool. For those not in the know, the Barossa Valley is just north of Adelaide in South Australia (I've not calculated how many thousand nautical miles west of New Zealand) and Italians wouldn't recognise a merino if it covered them (obscure agricultural jest) but they do buy our fine micron wool and spin really fine woollen yarn to make lovely clothes. Which they sell to the US and elsewhere. And most of the people reading the mail order catalogues know very little (and some care even less) where they come from so long as they can have them.

The same thing happened in Rome (the one with the Vatican) and is one of the marks of an imperial (not to suggest 'imperious') outlook. And before anyone gets too hot under the collar about my critique, which meant not unkindly, most Americans can't really be blamed. The social constructs by which they as individuals engage with the wider community highlight the local several orders of magnitude more powerfully than any engagement with the wider world outside USA. And this means it is very difficult for most of them (mere mortals like most of us) to come to grips with 'trivial' details of that outside world. And on top of that the differences in scale are huge; even in 1992 there were more military veterans (27 million, I recall) in the USA. That was almost 50% more than the entire population of Australia at that time.

So I suppose it's natural that not as many people in the USA as us outsiders might wish have the familiarity with and acceptance of the outside world that we say we'd like (and we've got our own ignorami too). Most 'catters I've read, by virtue of their interests in traditions and sources, I suspect, seem to be blessed. Long may it be so.

Cheers, Rowan