Burger

AMERICA EXISTS AT MANY levels. It's a real nation of people with geographic territory and a federal State, it's the constantly self-referenced ideal of constitutional self-government, it's a historical tradition of progress and of dynamism, it's the religious-liberal experiment of shining lighthood and citizenship in the city on the hill, it's the artificially bright lights of Hollywood. It also exists of course as a culinary-industrial tradition admired and imitated around the world, for example by Khrushchev, who ate a hot dog and declared the sausage 'good, but not enough'.

Down the road from my office lies what will always to me be the America Burger shop. It has a name but that's irrelevant; it sells burgers with chips and soft drink, American-style, it plays Bon Jovi, it plants the Stars and Stripes on its food. So far as I can tell it has no American employees whatsoever. The food is bad for me and more expensive than it really has any claim to be, but I love it and return, and I return, and I return. A meat pattie, barbecue sauce, mayonnaise, tomato, lettuce, curly chips, soft drink, please.

Australians are inescapably culturally linked to the United States; how could we not be sharing the Pacific and the post-war alliance? Even earlier the two societies found a common settler-colonial self-belief, and it's no accident that Australians looked across the Pacific to set up a House of Representatives and a Senate in our federated country, then put it in a Capitol architecturally drafted by a pair of Yanks. Our self-regard is American, our provincialism is American.

So when our neighbours across the Pacific do... whatever the hell it is they're doing, it's a profound break not just in a relationship but in our own self-conception. Are they really going to do the little-green-men trick and annex Greenland? Withdraw thoroughly from the world? Everyone thinks through the practical questions of where it might leave Australia politically and internationally---nowhere good---but maybe of more salience is where would that level of isolationism leave us, culturally?