Roger Bennett - Reborn in the USA

To Jamie Glassman, with eternal thanks for his lifelong patience, love, humor, and friendship. And willingness to run up his parents phone bills.

O, let America be America again

The land that never has been yet

And yet must be

Langston Hughes

I used to want to be a real man

I dont know what that even means

Jason Isbell

Contents

I was born, reared, and raised on American soft power. A bloke who grew up in the murk of 1980s England inhaling everything American I could lay my hands onthe movies, television, music, books, clothes, and occasional pair of knockoff Ray-Bans that made the United States my light in the darkness. America existed almost as an alternate planet to me, a place filled with possibility and promise, where life seemed to be lived with a different gravitational pull. One that could not only sustain existence, but empower joy, hope, love, and laughter, even if much of that laughter was clearly of the canned variety.

All of this fueled an inner life that had a substantial influence on my identity. At different times in my youth, I have tried to boost my fragile self-confidence, or at least minimize my deep sense of self-loathing, by persuading myself:

I am Don Johnson.

I am Walter Payton.

I am John Cougar Mellencamp.

I am the Beastie Boys Ad Rock.

I am Tracy Chapman.

Notions I made real in a way, by moving here, and becoming not only a citizen, but a gent who in his own mind loves America more than Bruce Springsteen loves America. Someone who adores nothing more than to travel across this great nation, reveling in every regionally specific hot chicken wing, barbecued rib, or corn dog it can provide. New York. Louisville. Charlottesville. Nashville. I savor all the villes.

I know some of this will sound trite. A love of a nation based on the largely fictional stories, images, and myths it peddled about itself. Having lived in the United States for more than half my life now, I am keenly aware that The Love Boat, Pretty in Pink, and Miami Vice are not the real America. I also understand the real America has flaws, like every nation. But that knowledge does not diminish the awesome power these images held over me as I was growing up, because they were so vastly different from the grim everyday reality I was exposed to. This was the power I acted upon, moving here, shaping my life, and changing my familys destiny.

All of this feels almost implausible now from the perspective of the America in which I now write. Over the past year, the coronavirus pandemic, Black Lives Matter movement, and the toxicity of the 2020 election have created the impression we are a nation that is divided, chaotic, and racked by fear. I reeled upon reading a Pew Foundation study that discovered only 46 percent of Western Europeans currently hold a favorable view of the United States. At a time when the world cries out for the kind of global leadership that once enchanted me, Americas soft power has imploded.

Months lived in lockdown give plenty of time for the mind to wander. I have spent a lot of mine digging deep into memories of an era when the United States felt very different. Looking on from across the ocean, the United States appeared to me a beacon of such courage, tenacity, and wonder that it changed everything I thought was possible about the world, and gave me the confidence to chase those possibilities with the passion Tracy Chapman once sang about fast cars. As such, this book is a love letter to America, a place that has played roughly the same role in my life as ballet dancing did for Billy Elliot. It is also an investigation into whether it is possible to be what you are not, to be shaped throughout adolescence by a country you have never set foot in.

Ultimately, I attempted to write this book in the spirit of the love, hope, and optimism I believe will prevail. I came of age with the Stars and Stripes and the Manhattan skyline painted as a mural on my bedroom wall and ended up moving here. I still believe the act of becoming an American citizen is the single greatest achievement of my life. I now live on the Upper West Side of New York City. On my dining room wall is a photo of my great-grandfather Harris, clad in the uniform of the Russian army, in which he had been forced to serve. He is the man who had first boarded a boat believing he was setting sail for the United States, only to end up in Liverpool, England, by mistake, setting off my familys obsession with the United States. Alongside it is another photograph, a black-and-white image of a thick-necked, savage-looking bloke whom family lore has as my great-great-great-grandfather. No one can remember his name. The photograph used to be one of dozens that graced my grandfather Sams living room. I loved to point to it when I was a kid and listen to my grandfather tell me all he knew about this man, the sum of which amounted to He was the one who once fended off a murderous Cossack to save our family. He was the Cossack Killer.

My greatest hope is that in five generations time, my NBC network head shot will similarly hang on one of my descendants dining room walls. They will look up occasionally during family meals shared together and when asked, point at it with mouths still full. We cant remember his name, theyll say, but we do know hes the one who first moved the family to the United States of America.

Roger Bennett

New York City

December 2020

New York City, March 8, 2018

The drabbest of surroundings can often conjure the most magical of scenes.

I say this to myself as I slump into a cracked plastic seat in the bowels of a government building in the southern tip of New York City along with close to four hundred other unfortunates. A veritable United Nations of races, ethnicities, backgrounds, and classes. All of us are at different points of the patience-grinding bureaucratic labyrinth that is the United States citizenship process.

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services waiting rooms are designed to control people who have to wait a very, very long time. Practical. Functional. Purpose-built to numb the senses and control and command through boredom. Every room smells of stale sweat and cleaning product. Each is a different shade of shabby beige, broken up only by the reds, whites, and blues of the randomly scattered eagle-filled posters screaming Securing Americas Promise battling for attention alongside those that bark No Cell Phones in handwritten Sharpie.

Although there are several hundred people waiting, the entire room is almost silent. There is the sound of muted feet on government-issue linoleum. A can of soda clattering out of some nearby vending machine. A pencil being ground in an automatic sharpener. Despite the humdrum vibe, there is a palpable feeling of nerves and fear. To be a visitor in this room is to have survived countless rounds of interviews, background checks, and fingerprinting biometrics in the two years or more of the American citizenship process. We are so close to our personal promised land, yet as everyone is intensely aware, one mistake, slip of the tongue, or wrong answer and it could all end.

I am, I hope, at the last step of the naturalization process, the Citizenship Test, and have been ushered into an antechamber cordoned off from the bigger waiting room, a holy of holies open to the dozen or so candidates who are similarly at the final stages. I am wearing a suit and tie in a craven effort to project as much polish as is humanly possible while being perched on an orange plastic seat, alongside two fellow applicantsa pair of Mexican gents in grease-stained chef smocks, one sporting a hairnet, as they whisper, giggle, and occasionally take turns to knuckle-punch each others biceps. We all snap to attention the moment a harried-looking, plump Department of Homeland Security employee lollops into the room. He reaches the doorway, and after slowly pulling out a lectern that had been hidden there, wedges himself in behind it. De Roon... Leenaert De Roon he calls out, while flicking lazily through a sheaf of papers.