In the 70 weekly columns
compiled in I’m a Stranger Here Myself,
Bill Bryson makes commentary on the various pitfalls, advantages, or just plain
eccentricities he observes while living in America again after 20 years in
England. Bryson has an interesting
position in composing his editorial, in that he was born in America and has
spent a significant amount of time in both American and British culture and
therefore, has the credence to make such commentary. He utilizes this powerful position in tandem with the
liberty of the clown to express the, sometimes very real and insidious,
problems with modern American society without warranting persecution for his
opinions.
I’m
not sure how effective Bryson’s social commentary is in prompting change,
although it did prompt me to reflect a bit more on the big issues of
immigration, health care, the national debt, etc. which I may not always keep
in mind. Admittedly a bit out of
touch, Bryson equates fundamental and detrimental flaws in American cultural
and political infrastructure to the loss of kitschy highway attractions and
motels full of character and bedbugs.
I think he is very much aware of the ridiculousness of giving these
various topics the same weight of gravity, and this is why I don’t view these weekly
installments as merely Bryson’s jaded critique of the changing American
landscape (in all senses of the term), but also as an attempt to put his own
identity back together.
Bryson says in his first column ‘Coming Home’
that, “Coming back to your native land after an absence of many years is a
surprisingly unsettling business, a little like waking from a long coma”
[2]. In the same way that Rip Van
Winkle wakes up and finds himself in an America that has altered drastically
because of the Revolution, so does Bryson ‘awaken’ from his extended slumber in
Great Britain and returned to a changed American landscape. I saw this comment as indicative of the
great discomfort that Bryson actually felt in returning to a place he
mistakenly thought he knew. As he
says, the label of ‘American’ was how he identified himself for two decades—but
he wasn’t even sure what it had come to mean in his absence.
These
columns are Bryson’s way of coming to terms with the world he now finds himself
in, while also establishing (or re-establishing, to be more accurate) his own
beliefs in the face of this change.
In this way, he uses his humorous observations to both cope with the
hardships of life, as well as question them.
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