November 16

Today is my last day in America. Tomorrow I will enjoy myself by wandering around three different airports. Each stop-over is perfectly timed so that I'm never given quite enough hours to leave the airport, although the hours are sufficient to allow the onset of boredom. In truth I don't mind just hanging around departure lounges. Bearded men roaming round airports by themselves give security guards something to focus on.

As it is my last day I should do a great deal of reflecting. On the country and so forth. But I don't want to. I just want to leave this hell hole for good and authorise some kind of fire bombing so the gormless blobs that live here can ignite and cook in their own BBQ sauce. Just joking! America is great. When British people talk about America they are unreasonable. They tend to accuse them of being one thing just to create the illusion that Britain is the opposite. So Americans are unnuanced and tasteless, while we have irony, sarcasm and a wide selection of cheeses in our supermarkets. Americans are unhealthy and wasteful, therefore British people do regular excercie, eat our five-a-day and recycle compulsively. We even have the cheek to criticise American film and music - often using the prefix "American" to denote something big, noisy and vapid.

To make matters worse we also enjoy comparing the worst of American culture to the best of British. Let's imagine the opposite were true and Americans did the same thing to us:

"Yeah, American comedy is the best," they'd say. "We've got Curb Your Enthusiasm and Arrested Development. You guys have Coupling."

British people must accept that they are not Stephen Fry or Howard Moon. They are Benny Hill, guffawing at men in drag. Clapping as women's clothes fall off to musical cues.

And stop comparing London to everything, British people. London isn't England. Ipswich is England. So is Slough, I've heard. Next time you're about to say how Nasville is great but London has better nightlife, at least reach for an analogy that exists in the same weight class. Like Bradford.

I'm not besotted by American mainstream culture. If I see Along Came Polly again in this lifetime it will be too soon. But American culture is subject to Clooney's Law. For every three Oceans movies, a Syriana will be born. I like this set up. If American TV executives find it impossible to produce the Wire without first inflicting King of Queens on the world so be it. The last time I looked behind my sofa there was not an American CIA operative forcing me to watch an Adam Sandler film every time I want to put on the Aristocrats.

And people the world over will always want to watch or listen to crap. Bunging up America's crap spewers will only result in crap-deprived world civilians going elsewhere for their crap fix. I don't know about you but I'm happy these people get to watch big-budget, vaguely-clever American crap instead of dodgy Italian or Russian crap. Banning Nickleback, although satisfying, would not result in Nickleback fans developing taste.

George W Bush's eight years in power provided British people with what seemed like the ultimate excuse to be snotty. Hanging chads or no, Americans elected a shifty gimp into the highest office in the land twice. This is surely conclusive proof that America is an idiot nation. No, it's proof that America is trusting nation. Bush did what Nixon did, and like Nixon he did it twice. They both charmed their way into power. Not charm in the traditional sense. Nixon looked like a squinty warthog and Bush can barely talk coherently. However Nixon's campaign said to the public "look, this guy may not be pretty but he's got moral fibre and he'll get America out of Vietnam". Neither of these things were true and he succeeded in this twice. Bush told Americans that he was a down-home sort of guy who didn't know much about fancy matters. He was a do-er. A guy that could get America out of a pickle by talking, and shooting, straight.

Just like with Nixon it was a sleight-of-hand trick of epic proportions. The man that people thought they had voted for eventually revealed his true form. There are of course plenty of die-hard W fans. People who like him simply because everyone else hates him. But Bush's White House bid in 2000 (in 2004 the war made it more complicated) relied on the sort of people who now hate his guts. These are normal Americans and they were tricked by clever politics.

These voters turned out for Barack Obama in 2008. I suspect pulling the lever on November 4 was an exquisite kind of deliverance for many of them. People in America would often apologise for Bush to me, people that had voted for him. It often felt awkward but Americans' propensity to admit their own mistakes is one of the qualities which endears the country to me personally.