America has this bizarre ability to twist normal things around. Sometimes this happens in a good way and sometimes, all too often, this happens in a way that makes people who aren’t in tune with the current ‘American way’ think that the country and its denizens are from some completely different planet.

Looking at a cocktail menu from a trendy bar and restaurant called The Alembic in San Francisco, I find the following: The Poop Deck Cocktail — It’s hard to resist a cocktail with a nautical theme (or scatological reference for that matter). This classic cocktail blends cognac, port wine and blackberry brandy, making for smooth sailing on stormy seas. Overindulgence, however, could send a wave up over your stern. First of all, you get the slightly outré name; next you notice the gracious yet economical use of English; third, in a piece of writing that’s trying to get you to buy an alcoholic drink, you actually get a gentle warning against overindulgence! It’s only afterwards that you see the confidence of the strange melange of liquors, including blackberry brandy, which this wannabe connoisseur of drinks, at least, had never heard of before. Having then purchased the P-D Cocktail I can assure people that it worked just fine (and, no, I didn’t go for a second one).

You can also see American pizzazz in the movies, in, say, the timeless dialogues of a film like Wall Street: “Money is the stuff you need in case you don’t die tomorrow,” says Martin Sheen’s airline maintenance mechanic. “They can suck on my kneecaps!” says Michael Douglas’s immortal greed-ghoul, Gordon Gekko. But then, the same movie shows you that the degradation of words like ‘awesome’ and the spread of words like ‘dude’ was already well in progress by the early 1980s.

Visiting America, what got me this time was the simple human exchange we call a ‘hug’. On the one hand, over the last 50 years the United States of America has been a primary mover in sexualizing all sorts of areas of life that were previously free of erotic charge or sexual danger; other countries such as France, Spain and, to take a non-European example, Japan, have brought stuff to that table as well, but primarily as part of a game of ‘keep up’ (no pun intended). It was the States that brought us the sexual freedom of rock ’n’ roll, of women’s lib and of gay rights, but it was also America that engineered human sexual desire into a take-no-prisoners weapon of modern marketing, it was, again, America that turned a tiny, sleazy underground industry of pornography into a large, sleazy, worldwide phenomenon. All this sexualizing would have, you’d imagine, made people at ease with their bodies and those of others. To set yourself straight, just try hugging an American or someone who has of late spent a lot of time there.

Here is what happens when two Americans publicly embrace each other: first, both parties stick their posteriors as far out behind them as they possibly can; second, they bend forward from the waist as if beginning a yogasana that involves the touching of the forehead to the ankles; third, when their heads pass each other and are almost touching the other person’s shoulder, they gingerly encircle the other party with their arms but in such a way that it looks as though they are trying to avoid the limbs touching any bodily part but the tips of the other person’s shoulder blades; having achieved this mudra straight out of some modern dance manual, the hugging pair then graze cheeks and make mewing and muted shrieking noises while patting each other very, very lightly on the back. The idea seems to be to prophylactize this most common human act from any trace of sexuality, real, potential or imaginary. So much has this American Hug spread that I’ve seen it executed with precision by schoolgirls in London and conceptual artists in Delhi.

What happens, of course, is that it immediately sexualizes what should be an innocent gesture of warmth and welcome. Old-school huggers such as myself now find themselves unable to hug any but the oldest and closest of friends; when caught between going forward into Am-Hug Procedure and doing a normal full-body hug, I now stick my hand out in greeting and farewell and a both full two hands if I’m feeling especially warm towards the other person.

A friend who has analysed this explained that along with the maquillage-protecting air-kiss, this ‘hug’ was actually invented in New York in the mid-80s by rich socialites who didn’t want to muss up each other’s expensive dresses and heavy jewellery but who, nevertheless, needed to display warmth and affection towards other class-equals. I’m not sure if this is true or, later, how instrumental the ghastly Sex and the City and (the far less ghastly) Desperate Housewives TV shows have been in spreading the malaise, but I do know that back in the days when I studied in Vermont and then lived in NYC we hugged often and properly. I guess in those carefree days we weren’t too bothered about the tectonic attrition of our overalls or, later, our leather jackets and jeans, nor were we in danger of imploding with worry if the bodily parts we sometimes deployed for quasi-procreative pleasure were in some proximity to those of other friendly people of either sex.

Returning to London, where I don’t need to double-check the direction of traffic every time I cross a road, I play a game of trying to find speech and bodily tics that originated in America. After a while, overindulgence sends a wave over my stern: after all, I’m in Britain, the first colonial power to have been counter- colonized by one of its former colonies; even though there is the noise-cancelling curtain of what is nominally the same language, there’s more America flowing in the societal veins here than there is in most other places outside the US.

A few days later there is some sort of a Beatles anniversary and I witness the unfurling of the BBC’s TV archive of the one moment, between 1962 and 1967, when Britain struck back and briefly re-colonized the United States, using no more than four mop-headed young men in dapper suits, all four armed with quintessentially American armour: a set of drums, a bass guitar, a rhythm guitar and a lead axe. That is followed by a fictionalization of John Lennon’s life and the actor playing Lennon looks scarily like the man himself. What is interesting though, is the actor/Lennon’s walk, which is a wide-legged swagger straight out of some cowboy movie. I have no idea if that is indeed how John Lennon walked but, by the end of this biopic, the great rock star leaves the United Kingdom with his Japanese wife, Yoko. After all the protesting about the Vietnam war and the songs about giving peace a chance, where do the couple head? India? Japan? Tahiti? No. On September 3, 1971, they board a plane for New York. In a film that feels like it’s factually quite accurate, the Lennon character berates the British press before leaving: “In America, we are respected as artists!” Lennon was never to return to his home country.

As I hear Lennon’s great post-Beatles song, Imagine, the nasty character in me starts to replace the words: “No hell below us, above us only the States…” Not entirely fair, perhaps, but if the spirit of J.L. is looking down from somewhere in the sky above us, he would see that the plates have shifted somewhat — despite the philistine new Con-Lib government there is now far more space and respect for mavericks and artists in this copy-cat Britain than there is in an America busy hugging itself in a very gingerly fashion.