If you have been alarmed by parliament's recent assaults on our civil liberties, then you should consider a trip to the land of the free. There you can fulfil Karl Marx's prophecy, announced in The German Ideology, by hunting (yes, hunting!) in the morning, fishing in the afternoon and practising literary criticism after dinner, and all with no CCTV to keep a record of your misdemeanours. You can wander through the suburbs relishing the silence that emanates from the Disneyland castles in their three-acre plots. You can indulge your fantasies in burger bars and shopping malls, and watch the half-tonne cubes of human flesh as they propel themselves on invisible and unguessable undercarriages from nowhere to nowhere, blessing with Whitmanesque largesse whatever is placed before their eyes, mouths and nostrils, always smiling, always greeting and always at ease in their world.
But what do you drink? The locals, whose annual intake of 105lbs of sugar requires perpetual sipping from the cans that armour their midriffs, are guided in this, as in most things, by a stubborn sense of patriotic duty. Coke is American, so Coke must be drunk. Their brief flirtation with French wine ended abruptly in a patriotic huff, and although they still drink copious amounts of Budweiser, they do so under the impression that it is an all-American product, and in ignorance of the lawsuit whereby the Czechs are striving to reclaim the name, and the beer, of Budejovice.
So what do you drink? The answer is simple: American wine. The discovery of America brought phylloxera to Europe, but the grafting of our vines on to native American stocks saved them from extinction. This story illustrates a general truth - namely, that when diseases come from America so, as a rule, do their cures. The lesson is not to avoid the disease, but to press on to the cure. This goes as much for free trade, fast food and feminism as for phylloxera, and if I were not contracted to write about wine, I would provide many instructive instances.
The Zinfandel grape, brought from Hungary by the great oenologist Count Haraszthy in the mid-19th century, grows better in California than anywhere else in the world, and "white Zinfandel", which is actually pink, is a "blush wine" that has no real equivalent in Europe. The Pinot Noir, meanwhile, can rival the middling Burgundies when planted and properly tended in the Sonoma Valley. So here is the best of cheap American meals: Maine lobster with white Zinfandel, followed by Virginia black Angus T-bone steak with Echelon Pinot Noir. Echelon is a brand name, but don't be put off - the same goes for Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson and President Kennedy, who have all improved with bottle age.
