I’ve owned this mug for twenty-five years now. Bought in the gift shop of the Metropolitan Opera in New York on my first ever trip to America, which I doubt I shall ever visit again. The mug, in art nouveau style, celebrates Pucchini’s La Bohème, which we might have seen there. I forget what we saw from the cheap seats, high up. The colours are badly faded after a quarter-century of machine washing, which suggests that its manufacture was cheap, though it has served me well through different places. Sometimes it disappeared for weeks on end into other people’s offices and I had to mark “property of Chris Bertram” in indelible marker on the base. But all sign of that writing has now gone.
Clinton was President then, and the Twin Towers still standing. We went to the top. Terrible things had already happened in Yugoslavia and Rwanda, but we didn’t think they might happen to us too, as now we do.
I was surprised by America, how cheerful people were and large the food portions. It all seemed to work and the buildings went upwards forever. We stood in the street and looked up, up, up. That journey made me see America as human and not just an abstraction of ideas and power. When 9/11 happened I got angry at my British friends who said they got what they deserved. Those were actual people in a place that really existed.
My youngest child got sick there on that trip. Appendicitis. Luckily we had insurance, which paid. We resisted their demand that one parent should fly back with the other child, not knowing if the operation had succeeded, or not. Lenox Hill Hospital was nice once you got past the ER with people shouting about gunshot wounds and others behind transparent screens demanding that you show that insurance. The nurses, mostly black, were friendly and made conversation with us about the NHS.
The mug is not all that remains. I have some amber cuff-links from the New York Public Library gift shop, a tie bought at Macy’s, photos (one with a banner behind us “CAPITALISM MADE FRESH DAILY”),the drawings our children made of the skyline and a cartoon book about the appendicitis. But the mug I see daily.
I’ve been back many times, visited many US cities: Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, Providence, Boston, Chicago, Madison, Tucson. But nothing quite matches that first glimpse of Manhattan out of a plane window, the immediate raucousness of the airport, the taxi ride from JFK, the first multi-decker sandwich with pastrami, the cacophony of different voices, colours, accents, possibilities. So much gone, and I will not return. But I still drink my morning coffee from that mug.
(Inspired by Jenny Erpenbeck’s “The Pressure Cooker” in her Not a Novel.)
{ 18 comments }
Ingrid Robeyns 07.09.25 at 7:59 am
This is both beautiful and sad. I’m in the state of mind thinking that “I will not return for the next couple of years”, hoping and believing this cannot go on forever and the USA will become safe against for outspoken progressives from other countries to visit. And of course, the real horror is on what this does to the country and those who live there, and how this evil ideology and power grab is also spreading to other countries, and supporting evil powers in other countries.
engels 07.09.25 at 11:31 am
I haven’t been to US since 2016. Sadly I don’t much in the way of souvenirs, apart from a plastic carrier bag from Gristedes (an eye-watering expensive NY minimarket) emblazoned with the silhouette of the twin towers and the words “always in our minds, always in our hearts, never forget what they did”.
Adam 07.09.25 at 2:11 pm
Evocative and melancholy. It echos how I feel about Europe with the rise of far right and neo-fascist political parties. Italy. Germany. Finland. Netherlands. Etc.
Here in the US at least my state (Michigan) and city (Detroit) on many levels are more salient to me than the national government. I’ve started to wonder if we’ll see more realignments towards state governments as the national government becomes less capable.
Doug K 07.09.25 at 2:55 pm
I remember immigrating to the USA, and the way the smothering fog of guilt and oppression from my native country, just lifted and dispersed, melted into air. This was common to many other countries, the same thing happened upon visiting Zimbabwe (in 1988 for the Amnesty International concert). The attraction of the USA was, I thought it could not happen here. But here we are living in a police state again, with rulers even more wicked than the managers of apartheid.
My brother in Australia and I were planning a retirement trip to fish in Alaska. Now he’s unwilling to travel here and we are thinking of Canada. It may be dangerous for me to cross the border back into USA though, might have to cross on foot over some mountain pass or river canyon.
“Another Country” William Plomer
‘Let us go to another country,
Not yours or mine,
And start again.’
To another country? Which?
One without fires, where fever
Lurks under leaves, and water
Is sold to those who thirst?
And carry drugs or papers
In our shoes to save us starving?
‘Hope would be our passport;
The rest is understood.’
Deserters of the vein
And true continuousness,
How should we face on landing
The waiting car, in snow or sand,
The alien capital?
Necessity forbids.
(Not that reproachful look!
So might violets
Hurt an old heart.)
This is that other country
We two populate,
Land of a brief and brilliant
Aurora, noon and night,
The stratosphere of love
From which we must descend,
And leaving this rare country
Must each to his own
Return alone.
Sandwichman 07.09.25 at 4:48 pm
I was born in San Francisco. Grew up down the Peninsula. Left for Canada during the Vietnam war and didn’t return for six years because I was a fugitive from injustice. I am a Canadian citizen but retained my U.S. citizenship and have a current passport. I doubt I will ever visit the U.S.A. again.
Kevin 07.09.25 at 7:50 pm
Obviously people can make their own choices, but as an American, living abroad, who has lived on multiple continents and spent time everywhere from Iran to North Korea, I honestly don’t understand the sentiment. As Chris notes, “they got what they deserve” from folks who treated Americans as an abstraction on 9/11 was not an uncommon statement in elite, progressive spaces overseas. Frankly, it is a form of bigotry.
Drawing on that sentiment, there is an incredibly stereotypical treatment of America and its policies by progressives abroad. “I’ll never go to America because of abortion policy” – but you are ok going to Brazil, or heck, Ireland or the UK five years ago? “I won’t go because of their treatment of gay and transgender people”? So you are “never again visiting” Japan and Korea, neither of which allow gay marriage or recognize an “X” gender on passports? “I won’t go because of government statements about racial minorities and immigrants”? So Switzerland, where it’s illegal to build a minaret, is out? Austria, where the leading party in the last election has an active platform of banning all Muslims? Italy, where the PM accused Nigerians in the country of ritual cannibalism? Sweden, where the governing coalition literally has a Nazi-descendant party? Denmark, where your family heirlooms are seized from asylum seekers? Canada, where the second largest province doesn’t allow you to wear a hijab if you work as a bus driver or teacher? Australia, which maintained prison camps on remote pacific islands for asylum seekers?
I don’t get it. And I know I’m not reading the Crooked Timber room – where the modal belief is that there won’t be another free election (I will bet my entire life savings that this is incorrect, by the way).
engels 07.09.25 at 9:50 pm
I don’t get it.
Speaking only for myself, it’s not a principled thing, it’s a “I don’t want to sit in economy class for eight hours only to find I have to fly straight home (if I’m not held/interrogated in between)” thing—I had enough of that in Israel a few years ago, thanks.
Akshay 07.09.25 at 10:50 pm
Kevin@6, the problem is not that the US is uniquely evil, it isn’t, the problem is that the country wouldn’t allow us to enter safely. There has been story after story of ICE just randomly detaining and abusing Canadian or EU tourists for fun, then deporting them. Why take the risk?
After that French scientist, who got refused entry because he had criticised Trump online, got international attention, Rubio actually generalised the policy of checking everybody’s social media feed. ICE also forcibly checks your phones, as in the recent case of the Norwegian kid who got detained, strip-searched, roughed up and deported, for having a silly Vance meme on his phone.
Pretty much everybody at CT will have bashed Trump online, or, worse, opined that Crimes Against Humanity are crimes, even when committed by Israel, and that genocide is bad. Rubio has been quite clear this is not acceptable for “aliens”. So why would I, a brown-skinned person, risk the Khalil treatment, when I might as well do tourism in Canada instead?
And the Democrats, even if they win the next election, will also refuse entry to any foreigner who thinks Palestinians are humans. With very few exceptions, their Congresspeople too give Stalinesque ovations to Netanyahu. So they won’t change this policy, anymore than they changed the GWB-era GWOT legislation.
As for your life savings, what do you think the $75billion budget for ICE, an unaccountable MAGA paramilitary organisation, is for? That’s the size of a largish European army, aimed at an ever increasing list of undesirables. What democracy has continued functioning with an unaccountable partisan paramilitary this size, which can be effortlessly aimed at harassing political opponents (“for aiding illegals”), suppressing minority votes, etc?
Who will stop them from making elections free, but unfair? The cops? The lawless SCOTUS? The ones which abolished the Voting Rights Act?
Honestly, I think US Federal employees have a duty to strike and shut down government, rather than hand over democracy to a $75billion Brownshirt army.
John Q 07.10.25 at 1:56 am
What Engels said.
I was refused entry to the US due to a paperwork mixup when Obama was in office and ICE was bad enough then. I managed to get it sorted out and returned later, but I’m not taking any more risks.
Barry 07.10.25 at 2:18 am
Today somebody that the modal new DOJ employee after 9/11 was a person who joined to prevent another 9/11. The modal new ICE employee will be a person who looked at Trump’s policies, and wanted more of that.
J-D 07.10.25 at 2:56 am
The use of the expression ‘free and fair elections’ should mean that ‘free’ and ‘fair’ are two different things and that it’s possible for an election to be free but not fair, and if that’s so then it is something that’s important to be alert for.
But then, the use of the expression ‘checks and balances’ should mean that those are two different things, and I’ve got no idea which are supposed to be the checks and which are supposed to be the balances.
Charlie W 07.10.25 at 9:32 am
#6: The problem is that about a third of adult Americans voted for the current US administration, and another third did nothing to stop it. While the correct response was a society-wide mobilisation against the GOP and their candidate. So it looks as though something is deeply broken there; something that ‘social media’ and ‘gerrymandering’ and ‘voter suppression’ and the like won’t explain. I think it will take a foundational shift in attitudes held by all Americans to get to a better place, and in the meantime there will be an equally deep scepticism held by people in other countries about America and Americans. Even the liberal ones.
Adam Roberts 07.10.25 at 12:56 pm
Not entirely on-point re: the substance of this (excellent) post, but I’ve been trying to work out the books in the background, blurrily captured in the image. I can see two of Pat Barker’s First World War trilogy (really good novels: I’m surprised they’re not more widely discussed) and a Simone Weil, I think “The Power of Words”, in penguin. To the right of the mug, the spine has the livery of the in-the-news-at-the-moment “The Salt Path”, but may not be.
Chris Bertram 07.10.25 at 3:09 pm
@Adam wrong Simone! Simone de Beauvoir, The Blood of Others, which has somehow inserted itself in the middle of the Barker trilogy. To the left in green in Alexander Baron’s There’s No Home, and the book to the right is Christopher Brookmyre’s Quite Ugly One Morning.
MisterMr 07.10.25 at 3:57 pm
@Charlie W 12
“So it looks as though something is deeply broken there; something that ‘social media’ and ‘gerrymandering’ and ‘voter suppression’ and the like won’t explain.”
In the USA there is very little turnout and those who vote are extremists partisans; in the EU I think the situation is slightly less bad but we are moving in that direction.
Why is it so? I think the main culprit is first-oast-the-post voting systems, that kill smaller parties until there are only two, thus reducing appeal for all those people who can’t identify with either, and increases partisanship.
Gerrymandering and voter suppression IMHO are parto of the problem of f-p-t-p systems, that make this posssible.
Social media probably also have an echo-chamber effect and increase partisanship.
I think the smart feasible move (that doesn’t rely on everyone becoming enlightened magically) would be to change the voting system to a more proportional one.
There is also the very big problem that the USA and the EU are going to be in relative economic decline for a while, and this doesn’t help with internal politics.
Tom Perry 07.12.25 at 11:12 pm
”Mother, I write to inform you that my battalion has been posted to the defense of a salient near Ypres. The fighting here is more terrible than words can describe. All the trenches are ankle-deep in water, and one can scarcely place his feet without stepping on the remains of our fallen comrades. Not a man here knows whether he will be alive or dead in a hour. I miss home all the time and fear desperately I may never return. If I fall in battle, please give my love to Bess and Little Jeff.”
Mother: “That’s nice dear, be sure and put the cushions back on the couch before your father gets home.”
Chip Daniels 07.13.25 at 1:41 pm
This essay, in its simple truthfulness, cuts deeply.
Born in 1960, and I must have been 6 or 7, a precocious reader, seeing some silly factoid about how there was more of something something in America than anywhere in the world and I exclaimed it to my mother who scoffed and said “of course, America is the biggest and best at everything.”
And the way she said it! As if just everyone knew that like the sky is blue.
And even if you got past the chauvinism and even once I learned about the checkered history of my country, even allowing for its dark underbelly, there is still so much to celebrate, the towering edifice of our education system, the interlocking alliance of industrial technology and government support creating the remarkable middle class.
And I’ve lived long enough to see it washing away, crumbling bit by bit. And most painful, to see so many people I used to admire and respect expose themselves as snarling ugly caricatures.
I still hope that we will emerge victorious and overturn much of the current damage, but there are things which will never be repaired, not within a lifetime. No nation can ever rely on America assurances about anything, since we have demonstrated conclusively that we are always just are a handful of voters in Wisconsin away from utter depravity.
It will take a while I think, for us Boomers to pass from the scene and the understanding of our nation as “biggest and best at everything” to be replaced with the understanding that America is, in fact, just another nation like the UK or France or Germany, wonderful in some ways, not so much in others but really, not so exceptional after all.
engels 07.15.25 at 2:19 pm
Hope he enjoyed Times Square.
Irish tourist jailed by Ice for months after overstaying US visit by three days: ‘Nobody is safe’
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jul/15/irish-tourist-ice-detention
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