by a man who has spent his entire life apologizing for Waffle House and would now like to retract every word of it

Here is a thing I have learned this summer. If you want to know what’s wrong with America, turn on the television. Any channel. Doesn’t matter. Within four minutes a man in a very expensive tie will explain, with the gravity of a surgeon delivering bad news, that the country is finished. Divided. Angry. Circling the drain.

And if you want to know what’s actually going on in America, turn the television off, get in a car, and drive somewhere. Anywhere. Preferably somewhere with a gas station the size of a regional airport.

Because this summer, a few million foreigners did exactly that. And the reports coming back are not what the man in the tie predicted.

Let’s start with the Scots, because you always should. Several thousand of them arrived in Boston wearing skirts, which in Boston in June is a bold thermal decision, and marched into the city making a noise that I can only describe as a goose being fed through a vacuum cleaner. Bagpipes. Hundreds of them. And here’s the thing. Boston, a city that has spent two hundred and fifty years being suspicious of anyone in a uniform, stopped dead in the street and listened. Then they were let into Fenway Park, and the Scots sang, and by the end of it the locals were reportedly begging them to stay. Grown men from Southie. Begging. I have been to Boston. Nobody from Boston has ever asked anyone to stay. They ask you to leave, and they say it with their whole body.

Then there were the Germans. Now, the Germans are a serious people. They build serious cars and take serious holidays and have a word for the specific sadness you feel when a train is eleven seconds late. So they landed, rented cars, and drove. Not to the monuments. Not to the museums. They drove to Taco Bell, and then they drove to Buc-ee’s, and at some point a German man stood in front of a wall of beef jerky the length of a football pitch and simply ran out of words. Bass Pro Shops did the same thing to him. I imagine him standing under a fibreglass largemouth bass the size of a Volkswagen, weeping quietly, wondering why nobody had told him.

Nobody told him because we assumed everybody knew. That’s our problem. We think Buc-ee’s is normal. We think free refills are a basic human right, like breathing. We have never once considered that a man from Gothenburg might arrive here, drink a Coke, watch a teenager silently bring him another one for no money at all, and feel his entire understanding of economics collapse.

The Swedes, incidentally, spent a portion of their trip on a quest for the recipe for ranch dressing. They went home without it. Good. Some things we keep.

A Frenchman, meanwhile, was quoted as saying air conditioning deserved its own verse in the anthem, and honestly, why doesn’t it? We sing about rockets. We sing about bombs. We never sing about the thing that actually makes Houston habitable in August, which is a big grey box on the side of the house that hums.

The Norwegians turned up in New York and did yoga in Times Square, which is roughly like meditating inside a pinball machine, and then, as far as I can tell, turned an escalator into a longship and rowed it. I don’t know how you row an escalator. But I know that somewhere in New York a Norwegian child discovered In-N-Out and is now, weeks later, still there, and no one can get him out.

And the Japanese did the thing the Japanese always do. They stayed after the match and picked up everyone else’s rubbish. Except this time an American football player, a very large man who is paid a great deal of money to run into other very large men, saw them, went and found a bin bag, and joined in. Nobody asked him. Nobody filmed him for a sponsor. He just did it. That’s the bit that got me, if I’m honest.

In Kansas, a town of a few thousand people learned enough Arabic to welcome the Algerians, and the high school marching band learned their song, and five hundred locals turned up to play it. In Kansas. Where they have, historically, not had a lot of Algerians.

So here is what I want to say to everyone watching from abroad, and to everyone here who’s stopped looking.

This is the real America. Not the version on the news, where everyone is furious about everything and the only footage is of people shouting. The real one is a Waffle House at one in the morning with the hashbrowns done four different ways. It’s a gas station in Texas that sells brisket by the pound and has the cleanest toilets in the Western Hemisphere. It’s a stranger in a Braves cap who talks to you for twenty minutes at a bus stop because he’s decided you’re his friend now. It’s loud, it’s enormous, it’s frequently ridiculous, and it will feed you until you can’t stand up.

Come and see it. Get a car, because you’ll need one, and drive. Drive until the trees change and the accents change and the barbecue changes its mind about sauce. You’ll be welcome. Truly. We’ve been throwing the door open for a very long time and we’re not about to stop now.

Just one thing. This is our house. It’s a strange house, with too many flags and not enough roundabouts, but we love it, and we’d ask that you love it the way it is rather than the way you’d have built it. Respect the culture. Respect the way of life. Take your shoes off if you’re asked and eat what’s put in front of you.

Do that, and we’ll fill your glass again. For free. Every time.

The whole world came to dinner this summer. And the strangest thing happened. Nobody wanted to go home.

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This piece was inspired by a song called “Welcome to the Land of the Free” by Jason Stills. I’ll be honest with you. It made me tear up, which is not something I do, and not something I’m going to discuss further. It’s on YouTube, naturally, because everything is. Here’s the link. Go and listen. Then come back and tell me you didn’t: https://youtu.be/Ft2mlNqHjYM?is=a9LEQY1YsHJDnQev

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