KEY POINTS:
We can love America or loathe it. We can do both simultaneously or we can oscillate. What we cannot do, however, is ignore it.
New Zealand tried harder than most but the recent visit by US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice could be viewed as formal recognition that we've abandoned our wilful ways and been accepted back into the fold.
Rice, as much as anyone, personifies our ambivalence towards her country. On one hand the fact an Afro-American woman from a humble background can exercise such influence in an ultra-conservative Republican administration reinforces the idea of America as the land of opportunity where barriers of race and class can't hold back the tidal pressure exerted by energy, ambition and the dream of social mobility.
On the other, there's the worrying thought that managing America's infinitely complex relationship with the rest of the world requires more than Desperate Housewives grooming and a dainty presence. This is a woman who has risen without trace and whose greatest achievement would seem to be that she's spent eight years in and around the Bush White House without being indicted.
Those who deplore US hegemony over popular culture would endorse writer John O'Hara's judgment that America has leapt from barbarism to decadence without touching civilisation.
It might be truer to say that because of factors such as its youth, its fixation with the mythology of the frontier and particularly the redemptive power of violence, its meritocracy, its social Darwinism, its racial melting pot and its capacity to generate colossal wealth, America is a country in which civilisation coexists with barbarism and decadence.
America continues to fascinate because it continues to surprise. What has France, that tireless critic of all things American, done to surprise us in the past couple of decades apart from electing Nicolas Sarkozy?
This week Los Angeles' Chief of Police declared the city's paparazzi plague officially over now that Britney Spears has relocated her underwear drawer, Paris Hilton has left town and Lindsay Lohan's gone gay.
Hollywood has traditionally gone to vast lengths to conceal gayness. So determined was Rudolph Valentino to throw the media wolves off the scent that he managed to get himself arrested for bigamy.
When the Great Lover died of peritonitis in 1926, aged 31, young women on several continents attempted suicide and a crazed 100,000-strong crowd practically stormed the New York funeral home where he lay in state. Not until 1975 when underground film-maker Kenneth Anger published his legendary expose Hollywood Babylon did it emerge both of Valentino's "wives" were lesbians and neither marriage was consummated.
Almost overnight Hollywood homosexuality has gone from being a dark and potentially career-threatening secret, to be hidden behind the demeaning facade of a fake marriage or a rolling PR campaign portraying the closet gay in question as heterosexual to a fault, to a life choice so unadventurous it gets the paparazzi off one's back. Come back Rock Hudson, all is forgiven.
But America also seethes with contradictions. In the same week the Los Angeles Police Department, an organisation with a hair-raising reputation for practically every form of bigotry, endorsed gayness as an antidote to the compulsion to get publicly off your face at 3 o'clock in the morning, and the Wall Street Journal opened a new front in the culture wars by asking: Is Barack Obama too fit to be President?
It was assumed the burning question of the 2008 election was whether or not the US is ready to elect an Afro-American. However, the right's strategy is more subtle than simply playing the race card. They want the focus to be on Obama's otherness, his difference from the mainstream. The elegantly slender frame, partly the result of an aversion to junk food, is just another manifestation of that.
This is the context for the McCain campaign advertisement linking Obama to Paris Hilton, another skinny celebrity whose privileged background and glamour must make her seem like an alien to the lard-arsed battlers in the heartland.
The message is: Obama's not one of us. You can vote against him with a clear conscience because even if the guy was white, you wouldn't like him.
