A Scotsman abroad

I would be an even worse person if I stepped away from the blog for a week without drawing attention to Alex Massie's lovely meditation on what it's like to be a foreigner in America. Excerpt:

In that respect, DC was the most provincial place in America. New York City, of course, was very different. There, one sometimes felt it was required to be a foreigner to fit in with the ceaseless ebb and flow of city life. Most importantly - and most refreshingly - nobody gave a damn where you were from or what you had done before. All that mattered - and perhaps this is a foreigner's fancy - was what you were planning to do once you were in the United States and, more specifically, New York City. New York, in that respect, offered a blissful anonymity. Nobody, it seemed, is really an outsider in New York City. That, of course, is one explanation for the thrill of the city. It's a place for reinvention just as, I suspect, Beijing or Shanghai must be to thousands, perhaps millions, of Chinese.

And in one respect New York is America writ small: it is a self-contained unit, large enough and sufficiently confident in itself and its culture as to be able to absorb or, if it chooses, ignore any outside influence. Paradoxically it is an open yet hermetic society. That's its genius. Even today, at its best it is too busy with the business of being New York - or, to extrapolate, America - to worry too much about anything else.