As a Brit who's visited a few times, to me it seems that America is both the glittering future and a banana republic at the same time, overlaid on top of one another. There's no ceiling and no floor. Lots of places have glaring poverty right round the corner from the tourist parts, all round the world. Unfortunately there was a spate of British tourists getting shot in Florida because they'd taken a hire car to the wrong part of town.
The American media hegemony exaggerates everything as well. We're more likely to hear about bad events in the US because they're great at filling news channels.
>As a Brit who's visited a few times, to me it seems that America is both the glittering future and a banana republic at the same time, overlaid on top of one another
Would you describe an ex-mining town in northern England or the midlands as being the latter without the proximity to the former?
There is a lot of material decay in Britain, and it tends to increase as you get further from the Shard, but the highly central government means there's little opportunity for places to achieve the banana republic status of autonomous, large, corrupt political units. Certain places have seediness and violence; I might call out Bradford and Nottingham. But ultimately we might be poor but at least we don't have mass shootings; the only two events which might register on the American scale are Dunblane and Bloody Sunday.
As a Brit who's visited a few times, to me it seems that America is both the glittering future and a banana republic at the same time, overlaid on top of one another. There's no ceiling and no floor. Lots of places have glaring poverty right round the corner from the tourist parts, all round the world. Unfortunately there was a spate of British tourists getting shot in Florida because they'd taken a hire car to the wrong part of town.
The American media hegemony exaggerates everything as well. We're more likely to hear about bad events in the US because they're great at filling news channels.