For most of my adult life I have browsed but refused to buy

For most of my adult life I have browsed, but refused to buy. A flirtation in the early Eighties with a tooth-buffer (after one buff it seized up – due, I think, to the unfortunate presence of saliva in my mouth), and another with a contraption for getting painted-over screws out of walls, left me too well aware of the gap between the happy photos of an attractive model buffing pearly teeth, and the nasty, rubbery, stuttering reality.And then my mother – my parsimonious, careful, why-do-people-pay-money- to drink-water-out-of-bottles mother – succumbed in a big way. Innovations straps me to the cutting edge of electronic gadgetry, Oxfam will save whole Peruvian mountain cultures for the price of an alpaca throw-rug, Past Times would permit me to place a replica 50s Bakelite radio (with ultra-modern CD capacity) alongside my Isle of Lewis chessmen. My name is David and I am a junk-mail junkie. These are my confessions; please try to understand and not to judge me too harshly.

Of course I know that I ought to tick the little boxes which would spare me the exciting “thlup” of cellophane on the hall mat. But I don’t, and the catalogues and offers from eager mail-order companies arrive regularly to fascinate and tempt me. What they really suggested to many for the first time was that maybe the United States talks a better game than it plays.. Viewing the world through the lenses of news media that have all but ceased to notice the existence of Europe and demonised Islam, the voters he is trying to woo cannot be blamed for thinking that the world saw the Atlanta Games as the apotheosis of American capitalism.

In any case we are going through cultural panic on a historic scale.American exceptionalism, though, is less likely to appeal to Frenchmen and Germans, Japanese and Russians; let alone Africans and Muslims, Chinese and Japanese. It is dangerous for Americans to persuade themselves that the world accepts their own view of themselves – particularly if that self-perception comes to diverge too far from the truth.Preoccupied with flattering the American people in the run-up to re-election, Bill Clinton can be expected to chant U!-S!-A! Indeed, only yesterday he did just that, when he insisted that the United States was “indispensable”. Let’s be more “aggressive”, they said, like cheerleaders at a high school football game – and put most of the world’s backs up.It may just be possible to persuade people in Britain of the innate moral superiority of American civilisation: since we speak English, we have been exposed to dangerously high levels of indoctrination. The Clinton administration’s spokesmen behaved as if the only reason the Japanese don’t buy left-hand drive Chevrolets is because their government is opposed to free competition. But the evidence is shaky, the consequences of punitive action against Iran dodgy to say the least, and the idea that all, or even most, terrorism comes from Iran absurd.Trade policy is another example. Now President Clinton seems intent on picking a quarrel with Iran on the grounds that it is the sponsor of terrorism.

The Cold War is over, but there are signs that Americans are casting round for new enemies to replace the communists, and that the American news media and American politicians are encouraging them to do so.When the federal building in Oklahoma City was bombed, the initial reaction was to blame the Arabs Well, it wasn’t the Arabs; it was American super- patriots. To convince yourself that you have won in an athletic contest which you actually lost is not a good idea.It is even less of a good idea in foreign policy. It really is the case that emigration to the United States was a liberating experience, the offer of new life In some cases, let us not forget, this was literally true American Jews are specially conscious of that. If their parents had not emigrated, said Irving Howe, the historian of the Lower East Side, “we might all have been bars of soap”.Having said that, it is not good for people or for nations if their picture of themselves diverges too acutely from reality, or from the perception of others. It was also a belief that appealed to those who had left feudal, ethnic or economic exploitation in Ireland, Poland and Sicily, in the Ukraine, Lancashire factories and the downstairs of London.It is not wholly unjustified.

It was carried to New England by its Puritan founders and carried across a continent by preachers and divines. It is the belief, deeply grounded in American history and in American religion, that the United States is morally superior to other nations.With loving complacency, the exceptionalists roll on their tongues the sacred texts of complacency, evoking America, “a city built upon a hill”; the American, “this new man”; the United States, “the last best hope of mankind”.American exceptionalism is not new. One of the movements that sprung up to challenge the assumptions of traditional American liberalism in the late 1960s and the 1970s was the neo-conservative movement, and one of the shibboleths of neo-conservatism was what is called “American exceptionalism”.This is not the view that the United States is bigger, stronger or richer than its rivals. Americans individually are still just about the richest people in the world – though the gap has shrunk dramatically over the past 30 years.But the impression of superiority conferred by the sheer size of the single unit can sometimes lead American opinion-formers to exaggerate the margin by which they lead the world. Nothing could be more natural than for ordinary Americans, accustomed from their childhood to be told their country is the richest, the strongest, the most successful, their teeth the whitest and their cars the fastest, not to notice that in many respects the margin of that superiority has dwindled and even in some respects disappeared.That is not the worst of it, though.