Journalist som besöker en isolationistisk Amerika

Jag tror att du kanske hänvisar till Kommande attraktion av Fritz Leiber. Det är inte precis som du beskriver, men huvudpersonen är brittisk och besöker ett post-begränsat kärnvapenskrig USA.

Han träffar en tjej men hon har ... problem.

Det slutar med huvudpersonen som önskar att han kunde gå

to wait for the rusty ship that would take me back over the seas to England.

Det är inte en perfekt match, eftersom USA inte är "isolationistisk": fortfarande i ett kallt krig med kommissionerna, som fortfarande kämpar i Sydostasien (Siam), har fortfarande ett fredskorps. Och den brittiska besökaren är en poesiprofessor, liknande men inte exakt samma sak som en journalist. Men jag tror att du kanske tänker på Fritz Leiber s kortfattad 1970 "America the Beautiful ". Har någon av dessa omslag ringa en klocka?

Här är en översyn från PorPor Books Blog :

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.

Här är de inledande punkterna i historien:

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.

Journalisten stannar hos en militärens officer

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.

och kommenterar skillnaderna mellan hans världsutsikt och världsutsikten av en typisk amerikansk familj.

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.

Dotter till officeraren kan ha kommit till sitt rum en natt, och han är inte säker på hur man svarar.

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."