I confess that apart from three exceptions my view of American talk is dictated by on-screen programmes and their participants. Americans talk a lot. Any one of their documentaries can be exhausting in its verbiage without being exhaustive in its incisiveness. American talk appears to be designed to conceal rather than to discover the truth. It seems very difficult to call a spade a spade.
An example recently was an American television documentary on the fiery deaths of seven American astronauts. The programme was designed to show what happened and what was done about it. Within the space of 60 seconds somewhere in the programme it became very obvious that what happened was a piece of foam coming off and ripping a hole in one wing. You could see the hole and it was significant. Upon re-entry this hole allowed the fire to begin.
However, the programme and its participants spent the entire time showing how heroic the leader of the ground team was, how they went through all the planned procedures with strength and courage - and yet how they had to suffer failure at the end. It became very apparent that the ground team and the programme pretended that the hole in the wing was not significant. There was a wish to blank out the implications. This may have been due to the fact that in their arrogant planning failure was not an option, and there was nothing to be done. But American talk can be based upon such spurious assumptions and shortcomings.
Then the inquiry into the disaster by yet another American hero, while blaming organisational failure, failed in itself to be specific with the public. Or perhaps it was the programme makers who had to be non-specific with us, so that a spade could not be called a spade and the wooden-jawed leader of ground crew kept his job. But we can be assured that there was much talk analysing and explaining irrelevant factors.
As for the three Americans who visited me, I had been warned in advance not to speak about American political matters with them. He was Republican, she was Democrat, and the daughter was apolitical, but it made no difference. After all the tears of joy and hullabaloo about Obama he was beginning to show what a flop he was, but we had to close our eyes to this unwelcome fact and not talk about it. Just as the ground team had closed their eyes and not talked about the hole in the wing.
