Tonight, a Facebook friend posted a link to this article, in an approving way, and, in the way that I do, I became irritated. Thus, a new blog is born.
First, let's look at this fella's credentials because you should always lead with the ad hominem. The first thing that catches my gimlet eye is that he's lived outside of the US for three years. Three years. Hey, that's how long I lived outside the US, too! So, we have something in common. But, this joker has lived in "multiple countries" during that time, but not as a tourist. That's important to him, that we don't see him as a tourist, but as someone who deeply knows other countries. The thing is, three years is not a hell of a lot of time to really get to know "multiple" other countries. I lived in Japan for three years and married a fine example of Japanese masculinity, and I would have to honestly admit that there is much I don't know about Japan. Perhaps I'm slower on the uptake than the author of this piece, or perhaps if you travel to multiple countries over the span of a paltry three years, then, really, you are a tourist.
The body of the essay is very typical of the genre. What genre, you ask? The genre of essays written by Americans who have lived outside the US for some period of time, from one year to five or so (after five years or so, most authors realize that whatever country they have been calling home during their expat days is just as banal and messed up as the US and so then they stop writing this type of essay).
I like to make sure I cover the flow chart, so let's go point by point:
1. "Few People are Impressed by Us." It is entirely possible that most Americans do not know this. I'm not frankly sure how many Americans care whether people are impressed by us. From my experiences abroad, both in Japan and in other countries, some people are and some aren't, and this depends as much on the individual as anything else. Either way, I don't see this as a particularly scathing indictment of American culture. Most Americans may not know this (I don't know, really, if they do or not), but since I don't think it matters much whether foreign people are or are not impressed with us, I just can't work up too much shame on my fellow citizens' behalf.
2. "Few People Hate Us." Ehhhh. I suspect most of the Americans who say things about people hating us are aware that most of the people around the world who express marked distaste for America are really talking about our government, our foreign policy, and the like, rather than individual Americans. Be that as it may, I think this depends a lot. Most people around the world are, as he says, just going about their daily lives and not thinking that much about America. Except. Except some minority of them, a loud minority, does truly hate our foreign policy and our status as superpower and the way that we are infesting their nation with Big Macs. Many of these people express themselves on the internet, so it isn't exactly a secret. It has always struck me as notable that, for the most part, they hate us when we aren't doing precisely what they want us to do. They want us to intervene in this nation, but not in that one, and we've done the opposite for our opaque reasons, and so now they are pissed off at us. Not pissed off enough to stop buying iPods and Big Macs, but pissed off enough to get on the internet and talk about how awful the US is or perhaps to stop some American tourist in the street and yell at them about the bombing of Hiroshima. That has actually happened to me, but, of course, I lived in Japan, and a few of them are still touchy about that. Somehow they sense that I am Harry Truman reincarnated and feel the need to berate me.
3. "We Know Nothing about the Rest of the World." Ah, yes, this old chestnut. I am always especially amused by the "X% of Americans can't find country Y, that is incidentally the size of Delaware, on a map" because, as we all know, finding tiny countries on a map is the skill that matters in life. It may be true that we know nothing about the rest of the world. But in my experience, this is true of almost every other country's people. Europeans probably know a lot about other European nations, but that isn't that hard. It's like people from New Hampshire knowing a lot about other New England states. And all over the world, almost everybody seems to believe that they know a lot about America, but this is, in my experience, almost universally false. It is very true that almost any non-American is more likely to be able to identify the POTUS than any American could identify the head of that foreigner's country, but what exactly does identifying the head of the nation tell you about that nation? Being able to identify that leader's political ideas and so forth would mean more, but just his or her name? Eh. Most people around the world do know our president's name and they think that they know us, but most of their knowledge comes from their own national news, which is obviously delivered and received from the perspective of that culture, and from the culture that we export, especially our music and movies. But this is like saying that you understand Japan because you have a Sony TV and watch a lot of Studio Ghibli movies.
One of the most interesting experiments I've ever done was with my ESL composition classes. These were all foreign students, from a wide variety of countries, who came to America to study at college. After they had been in the US for a year or so, I asked them to write essays about stereotypes they had held of the US before they came here and how those matched up with the reality. After reading many of these essays, what stood out to me is how many of them had believed, before they came, that they knew a lot about America and how many of them had realized that America is not as easy to understand as they had thought. It seems easy, with its pervasive facade of informality and exuberance, but there's more under the surface. This tricks Americans, even, all the time, especially Americans who are inclined to believe that America is an inferior culture.
4. "We are Poor at Expressing Gratitude and Affection." Feh. Tell that to my Japanese husband, who expresses his affection for me by never telling me 'thank you.' This whole section is basically saying, "Hey I really like the way these other cultures do this, so I disparage the American style." That's fine, but it's hardly a factual bit of information that Americans can and should know about themselves. I find some of the more direct styles of expressing these things to be very boring and lacking in verve and wit. But calling Americans "passionless" because we express passion in different ways--and my Japanese husband would assure you that we overexpress our passion by quite a lot--is simply saying that you don't like the way we do things. I just can't quite see this as a criticism.
5. "The Quality of Life for the Average American is Not That Great." Well, I mean, aren't we the ones who get to decide that? We can actually decide if our quality of life is good enough or not without any information from other countries. Furthermore, I think Americans make a lot of choices about our quality of life that people in other cultures wouldn't. We work a lot, for example, or many of us do. People in Europe might think that makes for poor quality of life, so they make other choices. But the fact is, plenty of Americans also believe that, and choose more time off over working long hours. Most of them realize that by doing so, they will never be in the 1% (although by global standards, almost all Americans are in the 1%), and they are OK with that. Many Americans will also prioritize paying for satellite TV and cell phone plans over paying for a visit to the doctor. I personally think those are bad choices, and I recognize that Europeans and Japanese have made different choices. In Japan, you can get basic medical care very cheaply, but you won't have central heating, not even in the public schools. That's a tradeoff they've made, and Americans have made a different one. So?
6. "The Rest of the World is not a Slum-Ridden Shithole Compared to Us." This particular part is just a big old strawman waiting to burn. Who even thinks this? Find me an American who believes Sweden and Japan are slum-ridden shitholes, and I will find you someone who was probably chained up in a basement somewhere until just now. Singapore is lovely, but much of Southeast Asia is slum-ridden. It's hard for me to go so far as "shithole" but that's probably just my affection for Asian street food talking. Hong Kong is great, and I imagine the Chinese cities are also, but a great deal of China is, yeah, a slum-ridden shithole. And I have heard that "slum-ridden shithole" is the national motto of at least 7 African nations, with a few more favoring "war-torn shithole controlled by a megalomaniac jackass." But, no, seriously, I don't think there are any Americans, not even on Fox (though I don't watch Fox) who believe that Scandinavia is a shithole. What they do believe is that Scandinavia has made certain tradeoffs that we don't want to make--more equality but less innovation, for example. And I love how he brings up Japan's awesome trains. They are awesome! But a few paragraphs ago, he was chiding Americans for carrying a lot of personal debt. I guess Japan's national debt doesn't bother him because the trains are so awesome.
7. "We're Paranoid." Yeah, this I think is fairly true, as long as we recognize that for every tendency in a culture, there is usually an undercurrent going the opposite way. So, yes, we constantly fret over our personal safety, and yet many children where I live start doing dangerous sports like rodeo when they are very young, and I know a lot of Americans who are into one or another so-called "extreme" sport. We are very bad, though, at assessing relative risks. We don't tend to worry about driving (even though car accidents are one of the biggest reasons we have a slightly shorter average life span than other people, along with violent crimes--whee!). But we absolutely panic about strangers taking our kids, even though that is an incredibly rare event. Anyway, in the main, I think this is a good point, and I have often wondered where this tendency comes from. I don't think it originates from the media; I think the media is feeding an already-existing paranoia. So, where then? I noticed especially after returning from Japan that Americans being from a position of distrust, whereas Japanese do the opposite. Since Japanese assume you're being truthful, you don't have to prove yourself all the time. Americans want documents for everything and third-party evaluations. It's a bloody nuisance.
8. "We're Status Obsessed and Seek Attention." Eh? There is probably some truth here, but really? So what? And I have known far more Americans who do not seek attention and are not status obsessed than I have the opposite, but maybe it's just the parts of America where I've lived. We are often overly dramatic about things, particularly when compared to some of the cultures he seems to be drawing from, but, again, so what?
9. "We're Very Unhealthy." A lot of this is focused on costs of getting routine medical care, but this is pointless. It may cost $200 to get an STD test at a clinic here, except that our public health clinics, of which there are very many, will do it for free, and so will Planned Parenthood, among others, and there are also many of those on top of the public health clinics. As for those nations where these things happen for "free," let's not delude ourselves. Health care is never "free." You can pay for it via taxes, via health insurance, or via cash at the time of service, but it's never "free." As for the costs of our drugs: Yes, it is true both that we pay more for drugs than people in other nations, because their governments have instituted price controls and ours has not (yet), and that pharmaceutical companies expect to turn a profit. Let's say for the sake of argument that the US did institute Canadian-style price controls, what would happen? Since the American drug market is the most profitable, profits would plummet. And if profits plummet? Well, there are going to be fewer new drugs. And just at a time when we're running out of effective antibiotics! How comforting! As for our life expectancy, again, most of our decreased life expectancy is actually from car accidents and violent crimes, both of which we have a lot of, but these are not indicators of our general health. Also, we've kind of conquered most of the low-hanging fruit here. As someone once said, it's hard to get cancer at 69 when you're dead of typhoid fever at 10.
10. "We Mistake Comfort for Happiness" Part of me agrees with parts of this. But he also goes deep into "you're not as cool as I am" territory with his criticisms of how (some) Americans travel. His experience, see, is authentic and awesome. Other Americans are inauthentic. He knows what true happiness is. These pathetic suburbans in their easy chairs with their big TVs do not. This is not really arguable or falsifiable in any way, so, again, it's not something Americans really could know. I define happiness in a very Aristotelian way, which makes happiness difficult. Most Americans, much to my chagrin, define it in a more Benthamite way, and I think I could make a solid argument that most of the time it's because they haven't thought about it too much. But it's very difficult for me to say that I'm right and they're wrong because I think it's a very personal question, and I don't quite have the hubris required to tell people that they ought to live more like I do. Pretense of knowledge and all that.
Anyway. tl;dr. Whatever, man. I should have gone to bed a long time ago.
