If Only They Didn't Speak English: Notes From Trump's America

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Jon Sopel tries to explain the madness of Trump's America with an elegant sense of stoic bewilderment. He is the author of If Only They Didn't Speak English: Notes from Trump's America and A Year at the Circus: Inside Trump's White House . The road and transport infrastructure is awful- John Kerry, visiting Haiti remarked that the state of the roads was better than in Washington! An awful lot of words have been published as a result of the disastrous 2016 election and having read a decent chunk of them, I can say with confidence that these are some of the best. In If Only They Didn’t Speak English Sopel examines the current state of the US and the way Americans see the world.

Even smaller churches (such as a one room Methodist chapel I stumbled upon in Derbyshire) are lovely. This book helped me to further understand some of the background as to why and how American culture is now what it is. Some are no real surprises if the reader is familiar with American culture already, but some are stark reminders of what is Important to Americans, which might seem strange to us Brits.Amazingly how dead heroes of America’s ‘bloody Sunday’, who fought for their civil rights can be put on a par with men who lost their lives in Vietnam, Iraq or Afghanistan. It is difficult to understand why the richest country in the world denies so many of its citizens basic health care - the most expensive and least efficient health system in the developed world (MATERNAL MORTALITY rates like theirs would have many of us donating to Oxfam, if we didn't know it was US, and therefore a deliberate choice by government, not lack of resources. Though Americans may see this as an America-bashing book, to my mind it does an excellent job of pointing out the differences between the USA and the UK, including those instances where he feels Americans and America are superior. And yet, if your drug of choice is manufactured by one of the big drug companies and advertised on TV, it seems that you can get addicted to it with impunity. Jon Sopel’s book is a 90% state -of - the - nation USA in which the key themes; Race, God, Guns, are intelligently observed, but were written before the Trump phenomenon, and do not reference the specifics of Trumpism.

One of my favourite parts was when an American described the UK as, “socialist and overly governed…” It just shows that there are misunderstandings on both sides and anything which can help two countries, which share so much, understand each other more, has to be a good thing. He has reported from all around the world, of course, but he is correct in saying that we could understand the US better if we consider it as the foreign country that it undoubtedly is to us. I’ve never attended a literary event where the raising of hands from the audience was so immediate, so sustained. I assume it was plugged on BBC Radio 4 or Newsnight or somewhere, otherwise I can’t think that I would have heard of it. Sopel is also funny about the amount of drinking that appears to go on during Washington get-togethers: almost none.A chapter about paranoia and drug addiction, which goes off on a tangent about Muslim extremists, travel bans etc.