“One-Story America” book comparison

I recent­ly read Ilf and Petro­v’s book One-Sto­ried Amer­i­ca. Once I began read­ing it, but at that time it did­n’t car­ried me away and I haven’t fin­ished it. Now I read it in one breath and con­stant­ly com­pared my per­cep­tion of Amer­i­ca with their book and not­ed the changes that have tak­en place dur­ing this peri­od. After all, almost a hun­dred years have passed. But it remained unchanged my admi­ra­tion for nature, roads, liv­ing stan­dards and the lev­el of tech­nol­o­gy devel­op­ment. Of course, I did not vis­it 22 states like Ilf and Petrov, I was only in Cal­i­for­nia, Neva­da, Ari­zona and quite a bit in Utah.

Extra­or­di­nary nature is what Ilf and Petrov admired and what still admire peo­ple vis­it­ing Amer­i­ca, which is a land­mark of the USA. Numer­ous unique canyons, rivers, caves are fas­ci­nat­ing. 58 Nation­al Parks have been cre­at­ed here, the first of which was found­ed 145 years ago in 1872. The largest num­ber of nation­al parks is locat­ed in the states of Ari­zona, Cal­i­for­nia, Alas­ka and Utah.

Not only nation­al parks, but even pieces of the wild desert are care­ful­ly pro­tect­ed here. For exam­ple, a piece of desert called “wash” with­in a group of neigh­bor­hood hous­es is always left unde­vel­oped in Ari­zona. Basi­cal­ly, they per­form the func­tion of rain­wa­ter runoff (except for pre­serv­ing an untouched piece of desert), but in some places con­crete path­ways have been laid and Amer­i­cans are walk­ing there in the morn­ing and evening. Speak­ing of con­crete path­ways, the city has devel­oped entire “trail” routes. If the route cross­es the road, then must be built a pedes­tri­an tun­nel or bridge for not to inter­rupt the hike and inter­fere with the traf­fic. These path­ways are peri­od­i­cal­ly swept by a mini sweep­er. In gen­er­al, Amer­i­cans are obsessed with a “haik”. In the morn­ing when I take my grand­son to ten­nis camp, I see a lot of peo­ple walk­ing, run­ning, cycling, run­ning and walk­ing with dogs.

Dogs are a sep­a­rate top­ic. On many, even small plazas, among the shops there is a sign­board — “Pet club”. On the cars they stick on “I love mine” and a dog draw­ing. Some lovers car­ry dogs (and not small ones) on their hands behind the wheel. I once saw a dog look­ing out of a car win­dow in sun­glass­es. Along with “Pet clubs”, the sign­board “Nail” (man­i­cure) are every­where, as if every­one is into their nails. In my opin­ion, there are more peo­ple in gen­er­al con­cerned about a healthy lifestyle. Of course, there are very fat peo­ple, most­ly caused by poor nutri­tion, cheap processed food. But late­ly there have been more of those who are try­ing to buy prod­ucts labeled “organ­ic”. These prod­ucts are almost two to three times more expen­sive. If, for exam­ple, a pound of reg­u­lar pota­toes costs 45 – 99 cents, then organ­ic costs $1.45.

Amer­i­cans in gen­er­al don’t dress very well, or rather, they don’t pay much atten­tion to cloth­ing. Most­ly shorts, jeans and t‑shirts. A lot of peo­ple don’t even iron their clothes. They don’t have this kitsch in their clothes like we have in Rus­sia. You can’t tell a per­son­’s wealth by their clothes here. True, very rarely, but grand­par­ents are found in stores dressed to the nines in ironed shorts and shirts, but for some rea­son it seems that they are Europeans.

58 Nation­al Parks have been cre­at­ed here, the first of which was found­ed 145 years ago in 1872

The nation­al com­po­si­tion of Amer­i­ca is very diverse. Since Ari­zona is a south­ern state, there are very few African Amer­i­cans here. There are a lot of Mex­i­cans in Ari­zona. There are even many offi­cial doc­u­ments in Eng­lish and Span­ish. It hap­pens that Span­ish is heard in swim­ming pools, parks and oth­ers are used to it here, but when we talk with our grand­son, we are often asked what lan­guage do we speak. Valenti­na says that our lan­guage seems rough to Amer­i­can ears. Prob­a­bly like Ger­man to us. When they find out that we are from Rus­sia, they do not show any hos­til­i­ty. It often turns out that one of the ances­tors of the ques­tion­er was from Rus­sia, but they do not know the lan­guage. Harass­ment based on skin col­or, gen­der or nation­al­i­ty is pun­ish­able here by law.

I also noticed that in Amer­i­ca it is not cus­tom­ary to have close con­tact with strangers, to touch a stranger with your hands. No one props you up to your stom­ach in the check­out line hop­ing the line will move faster. It is not cus­tom­ary to touch oth­er peo­ple’s chil­dren, treat them with some­thing. In short, they try to keep their dis­tance. This is called per­son­al space here, and each one has a dif­fer­ent size :)) But if Amer­i­cans come to the house to repair some­thing, for exam­ple, as a plumber, gas tech­ni­cian, air con­di­tion­er tech­ni­cian, then they always say hel­lo and good­bye, shake hands to whom they are doing busi­ness with. And when meet­ing or hav­ing a par­ty with famil­iar peo­ple, they hug. Anoth­er good cus­tom here is to send an e‑mail to the par­ty host after vis­it­ing about how he/​she liked our par­ty and how well every­thing was organized.

I won’t tell about huge cars and excel­lent roads, since I have already told about it. I will only add that in small towns there is no pub­lic trans­port, all trans­porta­tion is car­ried out by cars, and I have not even seen inter­ci­ty bus­es on high­ways here (they do exist, but not enough). Air­lines are inter­ci­ty trans­port. If a hun­dred years ago rail­road trans­port devel­oped, now, here in the South, it seems to me that rail­road is final­ly dying and there is very lit­tle of it. All the rail­ways I have seen are not elec­tri­fied. The trains and wag­ons are rem­i­nis­cent of retro trans­port, per­form­ing either tourist or aux­il­iary func­tions, such as trans­port­ing small loads from a farm or trans­port­ing coal from a coal mine on an Indi­an reser­va­tion. The only mod­ern rail­road with dou­ble-deck­er freight cars we met in Flagstaff when we were going to the Grand Canyon and there are some in California.

It was inter­est­ing to com­pare the prices that are giv­en in the book with mod­ern prices. At the time, wages were $18 a week, or 20 cents an hour for a man and 17 cents for a woman, and now only the nation­al min­i­mum wage is $9 an hour. Gaso­line then cost from 14 to 30 cents per gal­lon, now in Ari­zona $2.20 — $3.00 per gal­lon. Dou­ble room in a hotel — $4, now $120 — 200 and more (depend­ing on the hotel and the room). And a $10,000 house seems ridicu­lous now.

Many Amer­i­cans live on cred­it, noth­ing real­ly changed since the time in a book. Home loan, car loan, stu­dent loan, cred­it cards are paid in stores. Almost every adult has a cred­it his­to­ry, and if it is bad and you need a large amount of mon­ey to bor­row, for exam­ple, to buy a house, the bank may not approve it. If the cred­it his­to­ry is good, banks end­less­ly send and send offers to issue a cred­it card from them. Many Amer­i­cans are reluc­tant to pay off their home or stu­dent loans ear­ly, even if they grad­u­at­ed long ago and have the income to do so. In my opin­ion, they are very accus­tomed to over­con­sump­tion and econ­o­my con­tributes to this.

Sales­peo­ple no longer go door-to-door with offers to buy some prod­uct. Inter­net is the top sales­man. The Inter­net will tell you every­thing about the prod­uct, you can buy this prod­uct there, then obses­sive­ly receive adver­tis­ing for a new prod­uct. There are not so many ads on the streets any­more. I don’t know how it is in oth­er states, but in Ari­zona, in most cities, adver­tis­ing on the roads is pro­hib­it­ed, so as not to dis­tract the dri­ver from road signs and traf­fic sig­nals. But let­ters and print­ed pro­mo­tion­al prod­ucts flood the mail­box. Items pur­chased online can be eas­i­ly returned to the store where the item was pur­chased or mailed back. Rea­son enough to return is this: “Did­n’t live up to my expec­ta­tions”. Deliv­ery of goods by mail is very fast and a mes­sage is sent to the e‑mail that the pack­age has been deliv­ered. Parcels are brought to the door of the house (at least in our area), some­times they ring the door­bell and imme­di­ate­ly leave, and when I’m not there, they lie by the door until the chil­dren come home from work.

Ilf and Petrov wrote that “exces­sive wealth and exces­sive pover­ty stand side by side.” I would­n’t say that, we’ve only seen this in Mex­i­co. Of course, the liv­ing stan­dards are dif­fer­ent, there are poor­er areas, there are rich­er ones. In some areas, the crime rate is high­er, in some is low­er, but the liv­ing stan­dards of the aver­age Amer­i­can is much high­er than the aver­age Rus­sian’s pop­u­la­tion.