The day today
Are we still on this topic (via Instapundit)? Of course, we are. It comes up every contentious election. Don Surber’s reaction to the latest BBC poll is this:
What? The sky did not open? The light did not come down? Celestial choirs did not sing? The world is not now perfect?
Reality is hitting liberals.
Envy, honey, envy.
We’re the bestest nation and they are soooooooooo jealous of us.
Well, yes, it often really is envy, especially on the part of Europeans whose grandparents needed rescuing during the war.
Never underestimate the power of good, old-fashioned ignorance, though. A lot of supposedly educated people abroad seriously think they can learn all they need to about the United States by watching CSI: Miami and listening to, well, the BBC/CNN International version of world news. I can’t count the number of discussions I had about the Iraq invasion, during my twelve years in Asia, in which my interlocutor clearly just was not processing the idea that finding weapons of mass destruction had not been the only (or even the primary) rationale offered by the Bush administration. My point is not that foreigners couldn’t build a case that America is prosecuting the WOT in a way that does harm, if they really believe so, based on an accurate understanding of how things work. My point is that they don’t. I think most news-junkie Americans would be pretty shocked at how few alternatives to pacifist social-democratic happy talk there are in many other places.
My point is not that foreigners couldn’t build a case that America is prosecuting the WOT in a way that does harm, if they really believe so, based on an accurate understanding of how things work. My point is that they don’t.
Exactly! It’s like when people criticize Bush. They criticize him with attacks that have nothing to do with him or his policies! They say things that are completely inaccurate, where they could simply bring up, say, excessive spending. It’s lazy and it makes it hard to take any of those people seriously.
I know–although it would be hard to take leftist Democrats seriously if they railed against excessive government spending anyway.
My brother, who is about as well educated as they come and supposedly genius IQ but born and raised in Europe forms his idea of the US from movies and novels. He takes it as a point of faith for instance that our crime is much higher and since I live near the center of a middling city we must get robbed “a lot” (Our next door neighbor doesn’t own a key to her house, but never mind.) Meanwhile they have to have bars in the windows of their safe suburb to keep break ins from happening.
This is coupled with a sort of infantile deification of the US and our secret services, best exemplified by the phrase “country like that.” As in “Country like that doesn’t make stupid mistakes. It had to be malice.”
Also he has a touching faith in his own experiences and translates them to the US. No matter how many times I tell him it just ain’t so, he is SURE that our press is state controlled. (Right now more statism enthralled I’ll grant you.) Therefore anything that’s printed that casts a bad light on the US must in REALITY be a hundred times worse.
And this in a Western democracy in Europe which is probably closer to us than just about any other system. Imagine what eastern Europe or non-European countries think. They see us through their own lens. There is no such thing as a culture-neutral view, unless you’ve lived a long time in the other culture… and sometimes not even then. I don’t trust my own views of things back in my native country, anymore. I’ve been away too long. Or, as my brother — for once aptly — calls me I’m “an ex-native.”
I think that’s the oddest thing about my American-born friends who’ve never lived out of the country — endearing but odd — they tend to assume the rest of the world can, of course, understand us fine because we’re obvious or something. It’s the cultural equivalent of not hearing your own accent.
P.
Well, even living abroad doesn’t always learn ’em, in my experience. But it does remove excuses. Eastern Europe (outside Russia, if you consider it Eastern Europe) seems to have a much clearer sense of what we represent and what’s at stake in our system than Western, actually, though it’s not hard to guess why.