"AMERICANS . . . MORE FOREIGN THAN ANY PEOPLE . . . "

Paul Theroux, Deep South: Four Seasons on Back Roads, with photos by Steve McCurry (Boston & New York: An Eamon Dolan Book/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015) ("While all roads in America are pretty much the same, and predictably smooth, American places and its people are distinctly different and pose other problems. The roads in general represent effortless and standardized pleasure, even with traffic, which no one wants to hear about. This makes the abrupt arrivals, and encounters, somewhat surrealistic--in one day, driving from my house on Cape Code, an abode of familiarity, and on the same road, at nightfall, finding myself in an utterly different landscape, among people who, while polite enough, did not want to be known." "In Africa and China and India and Patagonia, the locals seem grateful to be visited by a stranger. This is the drama, the color, the encounter in the familiar travel book. But in the United States, a visit by another citizen is not an occasion to rehearse traditional hospitality, or to utter the Arabic formula 'Salam aleikum ya dayf al-Rahman! Peace upon you, guest of the Merciful One!' or the Hindi version, 'Welcome! Atithi devo Bhava! The guest is God!'" "One is more often greeted with suspicion, hostility, or indifference. In this way Americans could be more challenging, more difficult to get acquainted with, more secretive and suspicious and in many respects more foreign, than any people I have met." Id. at 23.).