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\nNot long ago, a curious artefact of American culture suddenly went viral: a short promotional video for a casual dining chain called Sizzler, once one of the most popular in the country. \u201cAll across America, a song of freedom rings, a song that\u2019s growin\u2019 stronger every day\u201d, declares its soaring ballad. \u201cThat\u2019s the Sizzler way: get a little freedom in your life.\u201d This startlingly unironic song plays over similarly earnest footage of dogs chasing frisbees, hard-hatted construction workers frowning at blueprints, and sailors smooching their girls at sunset, all intended as a promotion of the restaurant\u2019s then new buffet feature.<\/p>\n
Though the video\u2019s sensibility feels closer to the 1950s than the twenty-first century, it dates from 1991, the year of the first Gulf War. \u201cMostly what I remember of this war in Iraq was singing on the school bus\u201d, writes Suzy Hansen in\u00a0Notes on a Foreign Country<\/i>. She sang \u201cGod Bless the USA\u201d by Lee Greenwood, at whose MTV clip \u2013 an even more crudely sentimental piece of red-white-and-blue mythology than Sizzler\u2019s \u2013 she recalls tearing up. Like me, she grew up in the suburban America of the 1980s and 90s, and there received the standard-issue education of our generation, its lessons haphazard and strangely contextless. \u201cHistory, America\u2019s history, the world\u2019s history, would slip in and out of my consciousness with no resonance whatsoever\u201d, she writes of herself on the cusp of adulthood.<\/p>\n
Her outlook began to sharpen when she left her blank hometown of Wall, New Jersey, for the University of Pennsylvania. She later found a job at the\u00a0New York Observer<\/i>\u00a0and worked there until the age of twenty-nine, when she won a two-year writing fellowship from the Institute of Cultural World Affairs. Created by the globally minded son of an American plumbing parts magnate, the ICWA fellowship, in the words of a prospectus from the programme\u2019s foundation in the mid-1920s, sends holders abroad to attempt the task of \u201cinterpreting a people, or a group, to itself and to others\u201d. Or, as Hansen more bluntly puts it, \u201cthe committee wanted to see what would happen if they dropped an ignorant person into a foreign place\u201d.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n