Ein ganz großartiges Buch: Richard Grant: Ghost Riders, Reisen mit amerikanischen Nomaden, Edition Tiamat, 335 Seiten, 20 Euro.

Grant ist ein Engländer, der amerikanische Geschichte studiert hat, nach Beendigung seines Studiums Mitter der 80er seinen Hass gegen und seine Depressionen über englische Regenwinterdüsterkeiten, Maggie-Thatcher-Geiferpredigten, Sozialamt-Demütigungen und das Existieren in Fickzellen mit Zentralheizung nicht mehr ertrug, so lange jobbte, bis er sich ein Flugticket in die Staaten leisten konnte und seitdem manisch unterwegs ist im amerikanischen Westen, ohne länger als drei Wochen an einem Fleck zu bleiben. Von diesem Unterwegssein handelt sein Buch, von einer nomadischen Lebensweise in einer Welt der Sesshaften, von langen Fahrten durch völlig flaches, kaum besiedeltes Land, über dem sich der Himmel ausdehnt, von Begegnungen mit Leuten, die es wie er nicht ertragen können, festzusitzen, zu wohnen, "eingesperrt" zu sein. Lastwagenfahrer, die ein paar hundert Meilen für einen Kaffee fahren. Rentner, die ihr Alter im Wohnwagen verbringen. Hobos, die durch die Wüste gehen, Leute, die sich nicht vergesellschaften lassen. Zwischendrin erzählt er, noch einmal, die Geschichte des amerikanischen Westens aus der Sicht des Nomaden; die Cowboys, denen es eher nicht darum ging, den Westen zu erobern, als darum, vor dem Osten davonzulaufen; die Ankunft des Pferdes in der Neuen Welt; ein großartiges Kapitel über die Lebensgeschichte Cabeza de Vacas, der als Conquistador nach Amerika kam, Schiffbruch erlitt, zum Sklaven von Indianern wurde, entkam, sich als Händler zwischen miteinander verfeindeten Indianerstämmen durchschlug und nach seiner Rückkehr nach Spanien es nicht mehr ertrug, in geschlossenen Zimmern zu sein; historische Rastlosigkeiten; all so was eben.

Einige Rezensionen:

• Guardian: Home on the range.
• Sunday Herald: A land of nomads.
• Scotsman: Movable feast to savour.

Außerdem:

• Guardian: Richard Grant's top 10 books about wandering.

nunquam eret habilis qui est non instabilis

Weil Sie "Maggie-Thatcher-Geiferpredigten" erwähnen: Ich war überrascht, im Rahmen meiner Streifzüge durchs Archiv der "New York Review of Books" zu lesen, daß Ronald Dworkin und Ian Buruma, die beide als links-liberal gelten, im Prinzip Thatchers Vorgehen gegen die Gewerkschaften befürworten. Ich zitiere mal schnell einige Passagen. (Das Ganze ist thematisch von Ihrem Eintrag weiter entfernt, aber, denke ich, doch interessant).

But even philistines can sometimes be right. The postwar consensus was no longer working under Heath, or indeed under socialist prime ministers, such as Callaghan. The planned economy was a disaster. The pound sterling had to be bailed out by the IMF. Strikes were making life impossible. Trade unions, some of which were ruled by Stalinist pashas, had accumulated enough power to make or break governments. They broke Heath's government in 1974, and they made and broke Callaghan's Labour government four years later. The time was ripe for someone who had no doubts, who knew her mind, who had radical ideas and was tough enough to challenge the vested interests of union barons, as well as the patrician, not to say patriarchal, hierarchy of her own party.
[...]
She effectively curbed trade union power, which most agree was a good thing.
[...]
The combination of Kulturkampf, World War II prejudices, and her sentimental nostalgia for the "spirit and unity of the English-speaking world" made her sound shrill and irrational about issues on which she was often right. Intransigent unions were destroying the British economy.
[Ian Buruma: Mrs. Thatcher's Revenge, NYRB 5/1996 eAbo nötig]

Anthony Lewis, then the London bureau chief of The New York Times, wrote that Britain had made a choice America might envy. The telephone system was poor, the shops did not stock a great variety of goods, and industry was often disorganized by assertive unions. But there was little crime, social relations were civilized, and people seemed to accept that the community as a whole had a stake in the fate of each of its members. London was still "swinging." Britain led in fashion and theater and in the distinction of its universities, and a respectable degree of economic equality seemed still within reach.
[...] During the Seventies, however, the egalitarian dream turned into nightmare. The British economy was in disarray: inflation, fed by excessive wage demands enforced through strikes, rose grotesquely, and the slide of the pound sterling seemed unstoppable.
[...]
In the middle of the miserable decade, a miners' strike forced a Conservative prime minister, Edward Heath, to ration electricity; the nation worked only three days a week, and families had enough power for only a few hours at a time. Labour won the next election, gave the miners all they wanted, and the country declined even further.
[...]
Thatcher attacked organized labor's political power with enormously popular legislation that decreased the internal authority of union leaders and outlawed strikes in circumstances formerly legal.

Hier Dworkins Begründung, warum es gut war, die Macht der Gewerkschaften zu beschneiden:

But for British intellectuals it seems natural to link equality with socialism. The Labour party and the trades union movement have been the main institutional bases for British egalitarians throughout the century, and that party has been committed, in structure and formal declaration, to two socialist propositions: that the economy's major industrial and service enterprises should be owned collectively and that workers should unite to control political decisions. In retrospect, it seems plain that the connection between socialism and equality in Britain has worked against the latter ideal for some time. Collective ownership and the triumph of the workers seemed sensible egalitarian goals in the nineteenth century, and in 1945, when industrial workers and miners and other members of large trades unions were plainly have-nots whose interests seemed identical with those of everyone at the bottom. Justice and class interest then seemed joined, and socialism showed how equality could ride on the back of an aroused majority acting for itself.
That strategy disintegrated, as Jenkins shows [Dworkin rezensiert Peter Jenkins' "Mrs. Thatcher's Revolution: The Ending of the Socialist Erashows"], in part through its own success. Trades union leaders used their institutionalized political power not in the interests of creating a national prosperity that could be used to benefit those really at the bottom—who became suddenly a small minority with no political representation—but to make inflationary wage demands and to protect economically disastrous featherbedding. Politicians claiming socialist credentials seemed unable to understand that workers were no longer, as a class, in the vanguard of the pursuit of justice, and worried more about their own ideological purity and power than about the tedious business of defining a form of relief for the homeless and jobless that the nation could actually afford.
[Ronald Dworkin: The New England, NYRB 16/1988 eAbo nötig]