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What The World Knows About America
Here is an interesting article I picked up from a Melbourne AU paper about an outside view of The United States. I thought it was interesting. What is your opinion.
American pie losing its favour
American pie losing its favour
We all know America, don't we? While we may confess to ignorance about Japan or Russia, or even France, we are confident that we know America. It is, as they say, everyone's second country.
We have seen perhaps a thousand American movies, from Clark Gable to Gwyneth Paltrow. We have seen hundreds of American sit-coms. We know the words of dozens of American popular songs.
We have read Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Steinbeck, Bellow and Updike. We have a common language, more or less, and by now we are even familiar with American idiom and regional accents.
We know the American landscape about as well as we know our own: the prairies, the Manhattan skyline, the white spires and autumn colours of New England, those dangerous small towns of the Deep South - to some degree they are all part of our inner landscape.
So are episodes from America's recent history: the assassination of John Kennedy, the protest marches and Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" speech, Bill Clinton solemnly lying to the camera, and now the terrible images of those aircraft flying into the World Trade Centre on September 11.
Yes, we all know America. The trouble is that many of the things we know are not true, or are only partly true.
One of the things we know is that, by Australian standards, Americans are brashly and complacently self-confident, over-addicted to self promotion and boasting; "full of themselves" as we would say. Yes, up to a point.
Yet it is also true that Americans are the most self-critical people on earth. Everything bad we know about America - its crime and excessive punishment, its corruption, its graft, its racial tensions, its inane political correctness, its vulgar excesses - we know because Americans have told us about them.
Relentlessly washing its dirty linen in public is an American speciality. Americans are seriously and pragmatically dedicated to self-correction. And their optimistic self-confidence is often seriously qualified. In 1988, for example, when the US was on the verge of winning the Cold War, two books that were at the top of the best seller list were Paul Kennedy's The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, that predicted American overextension and decline, and Alan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind, a withering critique of the American cultural scene.
Four years later, when the US had actually won the Cold War, and when it was already being widely accused of arrogance and "triumphalism", New York magazine Commentary was running a lengthy two-part symposium under the title, "Is America On The Way Down?" Many of the contributors, in the main conservative intellectuals and not the alienated left, thought it was. Not much complacency or arrogance there.
Take another thing that we "know" about America: that it is a "young country", usually with the connotation that it is immature and naive in its ways, especially in comparison with an old, more mature and more sophisticated Europe.
The fact is though, that the US is an older country than Germany, Italy, and a dozen other European states, not to speak of Latin America, Africa, and most of Asia. It is the oldest extant democracy on earth, the oldest republic, and has the oldest federal system.
Intellectually, too, the rest of the world is in no position to patronise the US - although, of course, much of it does. The best American universities - Harvard, Stanford, MIT, Chicago, Princeton - are easily the best in the world. And there is a social club on Massachusetts Avenue in Washington - the Cosmos Club - whose members, over the years, have won many more Nobel prizes than the whole of Asia (28 the last time I counted the names on its wall).
A third thing that we - or some of us - "know" about America is that while it is great at handling success and triumph, it is an uncertain quantity - at best untried, at worse very suspect - when it comes to adversity and setbacks. The American temperament as a nation is considered suspect: they have had it easy, have been blessed with so many advantages that they are not really conditioned, not tempered, to handle bad times well. Their stamina and resilience are questionable. True or false?
Well, it might be worth beginning by observing that American prosperity is comparatively recent.
Whatever its merits and demerits, the frontier experience was not a soft one. At the beginning of the last century, Australia's per capita income was higher than America's. As late as 1930, 50 million Americans lived rural lives. Almost none of them had electricity and 45 million had no indoor plumbing.
Things were so hard for the migrants that a large proportion of them - nearly a third of the Poles, about half the Italians, more than half the Greeks - returned home. America's affluence, as a general condition, was quite a recent, post-World War II, phenomenon.
As for coping with adversity, one could say of America what was said of the 19th-century English statesman, William Ewart Gladstone: that, after a setback, he was tremendously formidable on the rebound.
The US has faced three great crises in the past 150 years: the Civil War, the Great Depression, and the upheaval and turmoil of the 1960s and 1970s. In each case it came back from adversity rapidly and with tremendous force. Not a bad record for a country whose toughness and ability to handle adversity are regularly questioned.
A last item in this list of things we confidently know about America is the belief that it is the most materialistic of countries. The US virtually invented modern consumerism, and the American people are notorious for their insatiable appetite for the acquisition of material goods and for conspicuous consumption.
Again all true as far as it goes. And don't we and other Western people enjoy ridiculing and scolding these American excesses - though it has to be said that, once given the chance, we have not exactly proved backwards as consumers.
But as well as being the most materialistic, of modern Western countries, the US is certainly the most idealistic. In the first place, it is the most religious, not only in the sense of believing in God but of actually going to church regularly.
So, how do the events since September 11 fit into this framework?
The great sympathy felt for America immediately after September 11 has quickly evaporated and been replaced by suspicion and hostility. Rosemary Righter, chief leader writer for the British Times newspaper, has observed that "America-bashing is in fashion as it has not been since Vietnam" - and she is talking, not of Asia and the Middle East, but of London and Paris and Berlin. Moreover she asserts that it is not just a case of the usual suspects on the left, but that a "resurgent anti-Americanism" exists across the political spectrum. As she says, "America is never less loved in Europe than when . . . it is angry, determined, and certain that it is in the right".
Let me be clear: After the outrage of September 11, I do not believe that the US could have reacted in any way other than as it did. But doing so will carry a cost.
The long-term significance of what happened some months ago may be that it forced America decisively along a course of action that - by emphasising its military dominance, by requiring it to use its vast power conspicuously, by making restraint and moderation virtually impossible, and by making unilateralism an increasing feature of American behaviour - is bound to generate widespread and increased criticism and hostility towards the country.
That may turn out to be the real tragedy of September 11.
We have seen perhaps a thousand American movies, from Clark Gable to Gwyneth Paltrow. We have seen hundreds of American sit-coms. We know the words of dozens of American popular songs.
We have read Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Steinbeck, Bellow and Updike. We have a common language, more or less, and by now we are even familiar with American idiom and regional accents.
We know the American landscape about as well as we know our own: the prairies, the Manhattan skyline, the white spires and autumn colours of New England, those dangerous small towns of the Deep South - to some degree they are all part of our inner landscape.
So are episodes from America's recent history: the assassination of John Kennedy, the protest marches and Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" speech, Bill Clinton solemnly lying to the camera, and now the terrible images of those aircraft flying into the World Trade Centre on September 11.
Yes, we all know America. The trouble is that many of the things we know are not true, or are only partly true.
One of the things we know is that, by Australian standards, Americans are brashly and complacently self-confident, over-addicted to self promotion and boasting; "full of themselves" as we would say. Yes, up to a point.
Yet it is also true that Americans are the most self-critical people on earth. Everything bad we know about America - its crime and excessive punishment, its corruption, its graft, its racial tensions, its inane political correctness, its vulgar excesses - we know because Americans have told us about them.
Relentlessly washing its dirty linen in public is an American speciality. Americans are seriously and pragmatically dedicated to self-correction. And their optimistic self-confidence is often seriously qualified. In 1988, for example, when the US was on the verge of winning the Cold War, two books that were at the top of the best seller list were Paul Kennedy's The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, that predicted American overextension and decline, and Alan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind, a withering critique of the American cultural scene.
Four years later, when the US had actually won the Cold War, and when it was already being widely accused of arrogance and "triumphalism", New York magazine Commentary was running a lengthy two-part symposium under the title, "Is America On The Way Down?" Many of the contributors, in the main conservative intellectuals and not the alienated left, thought it was. Not much complacency or arrogance there.
Take another thing that we "know" about America: that it is a "young country", usually with the connotation that it is immature and naive in its ways, especially in comparison with an old, more mature and more sophisticated Europe.
The fact is though, that the US is an older country than Germany, Italy, and a dozen other European states, not to speak of Latin America, Africa, and most of Asia. It is the oldest extant democracy on earth, the oldest republic, and has the oldest federal system.
Intellectually, too, the rest of the world is in no position to patronise the US - although, of course, much of it does. The best American universities - Harvard, Stanford, MIT, Chicago, Princeton - are easily the best in the world. And there is a social club on Massachusetts Avenue in Washington - the Cosmos Club - whose members, over the years, have won many more Nobel prizes than the whole of Asia (28 the last time I counted the names on its wall).
A third thing that we - or some of us - "know" about America is that while it is great at handling success and triumph, it is an uncertain quantity - at best untried, at worse very suspect - when it comes to adversity and setbacks. The American temperament as a nation is considered suspect: they have had it easy, have been blessed with so many advantages that they are not really conditioned, not tempered, to handle bad times well. Their stamina and resilience are questionable. True or false?
Well, it might be worth beginning by observing that American prosperity is comparatively recent.
Whatever its merits and demerits, the frontier experience was not a soft one. At the beginning of the last century, Australia's per capita income was higher than America's. As late as 1930, 50 million Americans lived rural lives. Almost none of them had electricity and 45 million had no indoor plumbing.
Things were so hard for the migrants that a large proportion of them - nearly a third of the Poles, about half the Italians, more than half the Greeks - returned home. America's affluence, as a general condition, was quite a recent, post-World War II, phenomenon.
As for coping with adversity, one could say of America what was said of the 19th-century English statesman, William Ewart Gladstone: that, after a setback, he was tremendously formidable on the rebound.
The US has faced three great crises in the past 150 years: the Civil War, the Great Depression, and the upheaval and turmoil of the 1960s and 1970s. In each case it came back from adversity rapidly and with tremendous force. Not a bad record for a country whose toughness and ability to handle adversity are regularly questioned.
A last item in this list of things we confidently know about America is the belief that it is the most materialistic of countries. The US virtually invented modern consumerism, and the American people are notorious for their insatiable appetite for the acquisition of material goods and for conspicuous consumption.
Again all true as far as it goes. And don't we and other Western people enjoy ridiculing and scolding these American excesses - though it has to be said that, once given the chance, we have not exactly proved backwards as consumers.
But as well as being the most materialistic, of modern Western countries, the US is certainly the most idealistic. In the first place, it is the most religious, not only in the sense of believing in God but of actually going to church regularly.
So, how do the events since September 11 fit into this framework?
The great sympathy felt for America immediately after September 11 has quickly evaporated and been replaced by suspicion and hostility. Rosemary Righter, chief leader writer for the British Times newspaper, has observed that "America-bashing is in fashion as it has not been since Vietnam" - and she is talking, not of Asia and the Middle East, but of London and Paris and Berlin. Moreover she asserts that it is not just a case of the usual suspects on the left, but that a "resurgent anti-Americanism" exists across the political spectrum. As she says, "America is never less loved in Europe than when . . . it is angry, determined, and certain that it is in the right".
Let me be clear: After the outrage of September 11, I do not believe that the US could have reacted in any way other than as it did. But doing so will carry a cost.
The long-term significance of what happened some months ago may be that it forced America decisively along a course of action that - by emphasising its military dominance, by requiring it to use its vast power conspicuously, by making restraint and moderation virtually impossible, and by making unilateralism an increasing feature of American behaviour - is bound to generate widespread and increased criticism and hostility towards the country.
That may turn out to be the real tragedy of September 11.
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