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SOCIOLOGISTS studying the cultural and behavioural reflexes of the US are still to come to a definitive conclusion about the factors leading to its excessive display of emotions and braggadocio in situations which ancient nations such as India, China or the UK are apt to handle with a great degree of reticence.

Its tendency to go overboard or behave like a spoilt child is not confined to the uneducated and unsophisticated. The built-in streak runs across all walks of life. Just watch the reactions of the characters in comparable scenes in American and British films or TV shows: There will be louder shouting and shrieking and flailing of arms and general romping about in the former than in the latter. A crisis only accentuates the hoohas many times over.

Is it because the US is a young nation? Exuberance is the natural corollary of youthfulness. Also, a readiness to take risks and sense of adventure as evident in episodes such as the overflight of U2 over the Soviet Union, and the attempted gift of a poisoned overcoat to Fidel Castro during the Cold War, or the trespassing of the US surveillance plane into Chinese territory last year and the eavesdropping electronic bugs fitted into the Boeing jet sold to the Chinese President, Mr Ziang Zemin, last month. A heightened self-righteousness blended with a possessive dash of overlordship is all that needs to be added to blow the fuse.

Or is it that the US got too rich and powerful too quickly, unlike other nations in history? It is possible that because of this, at the merest hint of opposition, it gets needlessly het up, and begins to throw its weight about to bludgeon others into submission to its ways of thinking and acting.

Yet another hypothesis concerns the conditions of insecurity and danger through which the first shipload of immigrants and their descendants had to pass. Here was a huge continental mass where they felt themselves in a state of siege, in the midst of flora and fauna which were wholly unfamiliar, in climatic conditions which often proved fatal, and surrounded by hostile natives with whom they were constantly at war. They had to go through excruciating uncertainties and ordeals before they could establish themselves as masters of all they surveyed from coast to coast. During this period, they had to be quick on the draw and outshout and outsmart others in order to demonstrate their undisputed supremacy.

The consciousness of their country's size and their obsession with the here and now have given birth to two other compulsive traits: Everything has to be jumbo from ice creams to jets, and every problem, be it personal, national or global, must lend itself to a quick fix. And, of course, what works for the US must work for the entire universe!

Altogether, an interesting, and in its own way, a lovable country!

B. S. Raghavan

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