MM: I'm a political person. When we decided to move to the States I wanted to move somewhere south of the Mason-Dixon because that was where I perceived the real, on the ground, politics to be happening. It's post-LBJ America I'm interested in—watching the Civil Rights and Immigration legislation making the changes, creating the variety, creating the civil resistance, coming up with the strategies, making an America Tom Paine would perhaps be able to revive a little hope for.

I don't look to escape when I move (unless it's to nicer scenery) and can't help but become involved in the politics of the area I live in. After all, as a British residence I pay taxes but can't vote. The cry of the London mob for two hundred years before it became the cry of the American revolutionaries was "no taxation without representation." I see the American Revolution as a re-run of the British "Glorious Revolution" in which defeated Methodists (as it were) continued hoped to continue their reforms. The British Bill of Rights of 1689 is very similar indeed to the American and I find it very odd that American history seems, in modern versions, to have begun spontaneously in 1776.

This tendency to romanticize and sentimentalize history is common, of course, but has become somewhat institutionalized in America, even in some academic circles. It means that the political continuity, of which America is a part, is misunderstood. This is also the only country which commercialized all its radio waves and didn't leave anything for the public. PBS in this country is a lie. It is controlled by government, through grants, and by big business, through patronage. It is not controlled by the public by any form of licensing fee to fund public airwaves (as in pretty much every other advanced democracy in the world).

America has always been in the hands of violent and ruthless entrepreneurs. There would have been no "War of 1812" without the land-hungry Madison and Jackson to fake it and the general treatment of Indians, while continuing the tricks and hypocrisies and cruelties of the original Dutch, English and French colonists, is a terrible indictment for a country which alleges it founded itself on ideals of liberty. The rhetoric, of course, is what makes the American who uses it evidently provincial and poorly educated. You can hear Bush attempting public speaking without the otiose cliches and its almost impossible for him to speak at all.

The words of American politicians in the world in general are empty of content and understanding. Americans are incredibly badly served by their representatives and too many Americans seem to think of their representatives as patrons. The authoritarianism in the political language is astonishing to a modern ear. So I might sometimes despair of this huge country's inadequate and unsophisticated bureaucracies and follies, but every so often the clouds part and I see the same vision Tom Paine saw—the same possibilities remain. All is not lost!

I have no representative. Therefore I make it my business wherever possible to represent myself. They ain't getting those fucking taxes without me having a say in how they spend them. This means I remain political. I'm involved in local politics around water rights and social reform, I'm involved in State politics with reference to Alcoa and some of Dirty George's other get-rich-quick-and-fuck-the-people schemes. I'm involved in national politics to the extent that I write articles and letters concerning U.S. politics and join organizations designed to ameliorate or reform U.S. social institutions. I'm still involved with British politics. I was involved with the Women's Shelter movement from the very beginning and still send money to the original Chiswick Shelter, which was the first modern women's shelter. I have been a keen supporter of Womankind Worldwide since it began (an outfit that puts the power—like the water purifiers and donkey engines—into the hands of the women, who will conserve, preserve and prosper whereas the men and boys would swap it for an AK-47 tomorrow).

My wife is hugely effective both as a fund-raiser and as a planner in our local Family Crisis Center, which is regarded by Federal agencies as one of the very best and as a result it now receives good funding and is a model to others. I'm very proud of what she's achieved. I've been involved in racial politics since I was a teenager and helped get the U.K. Race Relations Act through. Now that the E.U. has incorporated the Universal Declaration of Human Rights into its legal system, there is now far better machinery in place for solid social reform. If I had time I'd work for that to be incorporated into U.S. law as well, but the U.S. argues it already has a system.

That's the wonderful excuse of American big business. We already have a good system. It was a good system for its day. it is now a pretty awful system,. Canada and Australia, among other countries, have learned from the US experience and got themselves superior constitutions. The only problem is that the American version seems to work a lot better for the rich than the poor. That isn't a Christian system, whatever else it is. America sometimes seems to me to be more Old Testament than New and a lot of the Jews seem more New Testament than Old.

Liberal humanism—what young Americans believe is "socialism." I grew up in a British version of socialism and it was very good to experience. We have to understand that certain public services actually are better provided by and for the community rather than by and for private enterprise. Americans used to understand this. I know because I've seen the movies and my friends used to talk like that.

I've seen the quality of life and thought in America decline badly since the full-fledged adoption of consumerism Ralph Nader warned the world about so long ago (not capitalism—consumerism in my view is totalitarian capitalism and it's the totalitarian bit I hate—it's also dumb and doesn't work, as the Soviet Union proved). We are almost as badly mired in orthodoxy as the Soviets were, but we probably have a slightly better chance of getting out of it. Mire, I would say, is George Bush's middle name. (Well, mire's the polite word). Theirs is probably the last attempt of the old guard to produce the counter-revolution Reagan and Thatcher thought they had started. They cleared the decks for the real thing, but the clearing was unnecessarily brutal and still is. There are subtler engines for running a large economy.

I do have a huge faith in American citizens to put their house in order. But when everyone has been told they live in the best of all possible worlds (they don't—the French do at the moment) and that it's thanks to the rapacity of big business, it takes them a while to find out otherwise. Americans have been badly educated. It suits crude consumerism to have an under-educated, self-esteeming public. But it's short-term. That under-educated, self-esteeming public makes blunder after blunder, and the economy of the country declines as a result. Americans are just waking up to that fact and I've seen improvements already. My sense of commonality extends, as it were, to my fellow Americans. I know from my own experience that there are lots and lots of smart Americans. It's time they got themselves some real power.

Americans have to understand how their public language buzzes with authoritarianism and aggression and actually contradicts the idealism in the rhetoric. Email correspondents in Europe are often astonished at the aggressive language used by Americans and I still reel a bit from it when I encounter it unexpectedly. A weird sense of "success," of competition, or value. They are also astonished at the ignorance and bad education of so many young Americans.

But again, I don't believe this will last. Nobody likes to be stupid. If you're told you're smart and then discover that you're not as smart as you were told, you tend to start getting yourself properly educated. As I said once—if Jay Leno tells his viewers that 75% of students at Harvard didn't know the earth went round the sun, by the next day every one of those viewers is likely to have made it their business to make bloody sure they know that and everything else associated with it!

As long as the problem is identified, Americans can solve it. People love solving problems. If they didn't there would be no market for crosswords and detective fiction. You could argue that as it becomes unnecessary for us to solve problems on a moment-to-moment basis, we seek out problems to solve anyway. We are problem-solving machines who make problem-solving machines. . .

The American Giant is capable of doing a lot of good for itself and the world. It needs to drop the self-esteem and the rhetoric, however, and start responding to reality. So far the world's perception is of a selfish, greedy giant that merely spouts Disney sentiments while stealing your cow.

CM: You moved here from the U.K., but you're hugely critical of the U.S. Why? Is it that you see this country as the place on the dyke where you have to stick your finger in, lest all the world be flooded?

For instance, you wrote: "When we decided to move to the States I wanted to move somewhere south of the Mason-Dixon because that was where I perceived the real, on the ground, politics to be happening." Of course, the Civil Rights movement was one big example of this. More in my own experience, I'm an editor for the nation's largest school book publisher. (To wit, I'm working on the sixth-grade world history book.) One of our biggest concerns is your adopted home state of Texas, which is a huge market—yes, we write the books "to the market," and no, it wasn't my idea, I'm a 26-year-old junior editor. However, we have to take into account all sorts of insanity, such as the Holy Rollers dictating that we can't talk about evolution. How do you see what's going on in Texas as paradigmaic of the rest of nation? Also, how can American education be saved? Any thoughts on what Neitzche called "The Use and Abuse of History?"

MM: I'm hugely critical of any country I'm paying taxes in. It's as simple as that. It's my privilege and I'm paying for it. I like Americans and I like the town I live in. I am disgusted by how badly served Americans are by their shoddy political system. That's all. If I was living in France, you'd find me making similar comments—and you might not have read much of my political writing about England (The Retreat from Liberty for instance).

I'm a populist democrat. If the democracy doesn't appear to be working, I want to know why. This is not anti-Americanism. I have a reputation in Europe for being far more pro-American than most of the people I know. In certain cases this makes people suspicious of my politics because you're not supposed to like America and be a socialist. I'm actually an anarcho-syndicalist by instinct and this is a far more common form of American radicalism than it is British. I felt that some Brit had to come over and carry on the work Tom Paine started. . . That could be why I'm starting in Texas!

Seriously, there is a radical tradition in Texas that produces some fine commentators (Molly Ivens being one, Jim Hightower being another) and in a sense the raw basics of the American experience can be found here. I know it is also 'another country' compared to the rest of the US, but I wasn't going to move to Mississippi because it's too hard to get out of fast. Texas has major airports. American education needs even more strong-minded educators who are already changing things (and things are changing in Texas—not all teachers go along with that Neanderthal stuff).

I came here because I hoped to experience social change and I think I am. Because Texas is a conservative state, it was more open to the idea of going back to a more substantial method of education (i.e. its not only bad policy, but it makes bad teachers—it's a lot easier to show consumerist-style "results" if you lower the boom and concentrate on self-esteem rather than gaining self-esteem through becoming knowledgeable, articulate and effective in the world).

America is a big slow country. It took it ages to get on to VCRs and mini-dishes, for instance. Once it got them, it embraced them. Ideas take even longer to catch on. But they do catch on. This country is a strange one in that it does offer a model for other similar democracies—but it doesn't have the foundations that some of those similar democracies have—and since Europe sent America all her religious loonies, we have generally very little religious bigotry in the mainstream and you have a lot! That's glib, of course, but it might have a truth in it.

Personally I believe that Americans are far too responsive to bigotry and there should be a lot more people out there telling the bigots that they are fools. I disapprove of modifying schoolbooks to suit bigots. Many years ago I wrote to the chairman of the Race Relations Board, who also happened to be the boss of Collins, who did a lot of educational books. They had a World History that was selling world-wide which essentially described the Japanese as little yellow devils with no respect for individual human life and soft-pedaled disgustingly on South Africa (a major market). I wrote to him and asked why as chairman of the RRB he was allowing such books to be sold. He wrote back and told me that they sold millions and hadn't had any complaints. . . Something I'm sure you're used to.

I don't intend to live in America permanently much longer (maybe six months to a year). I really am becoming tired of a culture which actively celebrates philistinism. That would be my serious criticism of this country. Intellectuals are marginalized, put into compounds virtually, and have no real function in their society. European life incorporates its intellectuals more cheerfully. But the BBC and any other large broadcasting company that is not controlled by State or private enterprise is the chief base of British civil society and the National Health service is the other. If you are not afraid of losing your health insurance, you can become a bolder citizen. Americans aren't very bold as citizens. They complain and express shock at the lack of humanity of corporations. They feel sorry for the children of politicians as if those children weren't used to the life. They defer to authority which has not been earned as readily as they defer to fame for its own sake. They start wars they can't finish. They make laws that can't, in any rational way, ever be implemented. This isn't an active democracy. I think it will be again soon, though.

I might complain, but I also have a lot of idealism wrapped up in the American experiment! It's a very big federation and has its own big problems. What I mostly hate is the way big business has set the rhetoric as well as the terms. It makes them harder to resist.

Next: "Men in suits have most to gain from maintaining the status quo."