I’m watching a new BBC series, “Stephen Fry in America,” interested in seeing a look at my own country from the outside eyes. So far, it’s a pretty standard travelogue with short vignettes; still, I am feeling an appreciation for the vastness and diversity of our country — and so far, he’s only in New England.
I also feel the bizarre bipolar nature of our national character. As a people we are both incredibly generous and extremely selfish. We are diverse yet xenophobic. We aspire to great things yet we seem to hate intellectual pursuits.
It’s a huge country, with mountains and plains and deserts and beaches and Arctic wastes and swamps and cities and forests. And incredible contradictions.
In Boston, Fry meets Harvard pastor and professor of divinity Peter Gomes, a black, gay, Republican Baptist who sums us up thus:
“We dislike complexity, so we will make simple solutions to everything that we possibly can, even when the complex answer is obviously the correct answer or the more intriguing answer. We want a simple yes or no, or a flat-out this, or an absolutely certain that; and the notion that God could have two thoughts simultaneously, and people dear to him who don’t look or talk like us, is just hard for many Americans to believe.”
