Eu li isso nos anos 80, eu acho. É uma história curta sobre uma pessoa, talvez uma jornalista, vinda da Europa para os EUA para entender o povo e a cultura americana depois que os EUA se isolaram de qualquer tipo de interação com outros países. O jornalista fica com a família de um oficial militar e comenta as diferenças entre sua visão de mundo e a visão de mundo de uma típica família americana. A filha do oficial pode ter vindo ao seu quarto uma noite e ele não sabe como responder. No final da história, ele começa sua jornada para casa, ainda sem um strong senso do que a América acredita.
SF psicológico à maneira de Clifford Simak, talvez. Lembro-me de lê-lo em uma das antologias de SF que surgiram nos anos 70 ou 80.
Acho que você pode estar se referindo a Coming Attraction de Fritz Leiber. Não é exatamente como você descreveu, mas o protagonista é britânico e visita uma guerra nuclear pós-limitada nos EUA.
Ele conhece uma garota, mas ela tem ... problemas.
Termina com o protagonista desejando poder ir
to wait for the rusty ship that would take me back over the seas to England.
Não é uma combinação perfeita, porque os EUA não são "isolacionistas": ainda em uma guerra fria com os comunistas, ainda lutando no Sudeste Asiático (Siam), ainda tem um Corpo da Paz. E o visitante britânico é um professor de poesia, semelhante, mas não exatamente a mesma coisa que um jornalista. Mas eu acho que você pode estar pensando em Fritz Leiber 's história de 1970 "America the Beautiful ". Alguma estas capas soa bem?
Aqui está uma crítica do Blog do PorPor Books :
Fritz Leiber’s ‘America the Beautiful’ sees a young British academic traveling to a United States that seems like something out of Tomorrowland; hypersonic shuttles from London to Dallas, automated cars and freeways, plenty of clean, cheap energy, social and racial harmony, etc., etc. But there’s an undercurrent of unease…something about The Commies (!?)…the story comes across as a limp effort at political commentary, and confirms my belief that [Leiber] was one of the more overrated authors of his day.
Aqui estão os parágrafos de abertura da história:
I am returning to England. I am shorthanding this, July 5, 2000, aboard the Dallas-London rocket as it arches silently out of the diffused violet daylight of the stratosphere into the eternally star-spangled purpling night of the ionosphere.
I have refused the semester instructorship in poetry at UTD, which would have munificently padded my honorarium for delivering the Lanier Lectures and made me for four months second only to the Poet in Residence.
And I am almost certain that I have lost Emily, although we plan to meet in London in a fortnight if she can wangle the stopover on her way to take up her Peace Corps command in Niger.
I am not leaving America because of the threat of a big war. I believe that this new threat, like all the rest, is only another move, even if a long and menacing queen's move, in the game of world politics, while the little wars go endlessly on in Chad, Czechoslovakia, Sumatra, Siam, Baluchistan, and Bolivia as America and the Communist League firm their power boundaries.
O jornalista fica com a família de um oficial das forças armadas
The purity of the atmosphere was strikingly brought to my notice when I debarked at Dallas rocketport and found the Grissims waiting for me outdoors, downwind of the landing area. They made a striking group, all of them tall, as they stood poised yet familiarly together: the professor with his grizzled hair still close-trimmed in military fashion, for he had served almost as long as a line officer and in space services as he had now as a university physicist; his slim, white-haired wife; Emily, like her mother in the classic high-waisted, long-skirted Directoire style currently fashionable; and her brother Jack, in his dress pale grays with sergeant's stripes, on furlough from Siam.
e comenta as diferenças entre sua visão de mundo e a visão de mundo de uma típica família americana.
In particular, I argued that many or most Americans were motivated by a subtle, even sophisticated puritanism, which made them feel that the world was not safe unless they were its moral arbiters, and that this puritanism was ultimately based on the same swollen concern about property and money—industry, in its moral sense—that one found in the Swiss and Scottish Presbyterians and most of the early Protestants.
A filha do oficial pode ter vindo ao seu quarto uma noite e ele não sabe como responder.
She did not come into my room, but after a pause during which I sat up jerkily and she became again a shadow, she beckoned to me.
I snatched up my dressing gown and followed her as she moved noiselessly down the hall. My throat was dry and constricted, my heart was pounding a little, with apprehension as well as excitement. I realized that despite my near week with the Grissims, a part of my mind was still thinking of the professor and his wife as a strait-laced colonel and his lady from a century ago, when so many retired army officers Lived in villas around San Antonio, as they do now around the Dallas-Ft. Worth metropolitan area.
[. . . .]
"You still think I'm a puritan, don't you?" she softly asked me afterward, smiling at me sideways with the smeared remains of her crimson mouth, her gray eyes enigmatic blurs of shadow.
"Yes, I do," I told her forthrightly. "The puritan playing the hetaera, but still the puritan."