All My Life...Trouble in America

THis morning while getting up, I checked my email and there was a notification from Quora. The question was something like: what assumptions to foreigners abroad make about Americans that are laughably untrue.

I had to think about it. First of all, I think what most foreigners fail to grasp about America is its size. Not only geographically but especially in terms of population. No, it's not the most populous country on Earth--it doesn't even approach China or India. But it might be the third most. I'm not sure. Brazil is big, too.

 On top of that there is the fact that it's made up of lots of immigrants or the sons of immigrants...willing and unwilling. It is by no means homogenous. In fact, I would say that is probably the most common assumption that foreigners make that is the most untrue is that American society is as homogenous as theirs.

When I point this out, it's almost unbelievable at how much resistance there is to this idea. I think it's not due to malice or stupidity; it's just that the concept is really hard for people in a relatively small, relatively homogenous country like the Czech Republic to get their heads around.

(Relatively homogenous: I want to stress the relatively part of that. It's easy to oversimplify things. No country is truly homogenous. Maybe the Vatican is.)

The fact is, (and this is something that people can grasp is that no matter what you say about Americans,) no matter how ridiculously good or bad the extreme stereotype you hold is...IT'S ABSOLUTELY true. You can say anything about Americans and then find literally millions of Americans about whom it's true.

So what I've heard:

all Americans are rich! Not all Americans...but(bearing in mind that 'rich' is a relative term: a Czech's sense  of wealth is different than a West German's or a Thai's) millions and millions of them are.

All Americans are poor! Millions upon millions of them are.

American schools are the best! Some of them are.

American schools are the worst! Some of them are.

Americans are fat and lazy! You can find tons of examples of this.

 Americans are unhealthily obsessed with their health. Tons of those, too. Though presumably less tonnage.

Americans are really friendly! That's true.

 Americans pretend to be friendly but hate you underneath! That's true too.

 Americans are racist! Yeah.

 Americans are open to other kinds of people. True.

 Americans are nationalistic. Well, I've known a lot who are and they scare me, too but not everybody is; in fact, I think being American often means bitching about your government 24/7.

The list goes on and on. The fact that so many examples can be found coupled with the fact that American media permeates most countries in the world means that all our best sides and worst sides are constantly being shown to people. *

When I watch the news about America in the Czech Republic, it's very rare that I watch footage shot by a Czech crew . Nearly always it's footage that's been taken from an American news source, edited and translated and then broadcast here. Nearly always when I read the news in Czech,it's come from an American source. It's quite telling what details they edit out of the story.  They usually serve to make America seem much worse than the story I read in American or British sources. I assume this phenomenon is worldwide or at least EU-wide. I also assume that prior to EU acession(is that the right word? Opoosite of secession) the exact opposite happened: Czech news sources turned a blind eye to the darker side of the USA.)

I try to avoid conversations about America too much. Because the truth is always way more complicated than what the listener wants to hear. the thing is, I don't think that people want America to be complicated. But it is. I get frustrated by it because it's really tiring to try to explain this simple fact all the time.

 A case in point is recently a British teacher, Catherine, that works for me was asking questions about why Americans are so anti-immigrant.(As if the British aren't?) Another teacher who works for me, Peter, who is from Oakland CA, was arguing that you can't believe the media: that Americans don't hate immigrants. I was listening.

 I saw his Peter's point. I feel the same way he does: I honestly have never had a class...or lived in an apartment building...or had a job...which did not have foreigners in it. And not only Mexicans. Chinese, Indians, Koreans, Phillipinos, Irish, English, German, Pacific Islanders from god knows where, Thais, Japanese, Czechs, Slovaks, Poles, Italians, new Zealanders,Russians, French...I've run into all of them several times in the US. Some of them were there to stay; others were only there for a time.

 I never had a problem with them. Nor did anybody I personally knew. In fact, oddly, I remember saying the same thing to the Catheirne in September. I told her the exact same words: Don't believe everything the media says. I tried to explain to her that the real prejudice in America lies amoung perceived lines of race. Because I think in Europe it's more about ethno-linguistic nationalism(which sometimes overlaps with race but not always). In America it's not. Ethnnic nationalism is kind of a bizarre concept to Americans because the idea of 'nation' is actually very very different to the European idea of nationalism which is more tied to ethnicity and language. I tried to explain that: In America the intolerance is largely about race; in Europe it's about ethno-linguistic nationalism.**

But on the other hand, I read the media too. Obviously there is anti-immigrant sentiment in America. Some of it, a lot of it, in fact, is probably racial prejudice since so many immigrants are Mexican. And those people seem to have no valid arguments about how to solve the problem of illegal immigration. In fact, sometimes it seems to me that they'd be most happy with just rounding up the 12 million or so and putting them in concentration camp and letting them rot. (this alarms me to no end, but it's the subject of another post.) But whatever the base root of it is, it's there.

So when I overheard the conversation I butted in and pointed out that, while maybe most people Oakland Peter knew felt that, in fact, not everybody did. "I'm sure Melinda"(another teacher
 from Arizona who was in on this conversation) "knows people who feel differently." And of course, being that Arizona is a border state, she did. Apparently some border-crossers commit crimes(especially theft) in parts of Arizona and indeed many people regard immigrants(especially 'illegal immigrants') as being a problem. And maybe they are there. who knows. As a leftist I feel it's my duty to say that she's wrong, but that's just the politicization speaking, not my rational mind.

And then I realized the problem. It's not only foreigners who tend to oversimplify America. It's actually Americans themselves.

Media that comes from America is framed in terms of American debate. Which is nearly always over-dramatic and extreme.(Americans are overdramatic: there's a stereotype about Americans that is actually true but which I never hear from foreigners .) I mean, take the health care debate. For Christ's sake to hear the left talk about it, 20 million Americans are dying on the streets. And if you listen to the right you hear horrible horror stories about long waits in hospitals in 'socialist' countries and dying from the wait. Yeah. Well, anybody can google examples of these things happening. But neither of them is the norm.

But sadly, these debates, which are loud and overdramatic(and this fact, by the way, keeps anything from ever changing in any meaningful way) and politicized to the max reach the ears of the rest of the world who take what essentially is high sense of drama as gospel truth. Because it is, after all, easy to grasp.

It's Americans' own oversimplification of America, perhaps that leads(or at least contributes) to the oversimplification of America by non-Americans.

In the end, America is like the fable of the elephant and the five blind men. One blind man feels the elephant's tail and says its a snake, another blind man a leg of the elephant and says it's a tree, another feels the the flank and thinks it's a wall, another the trunk and thinks it's...a really big snake(or something.) None of them are right. It's an elephant. You can't see the forest for the trees; and you can't see America for the Americans.

In fact, most things in the world are like that.

What got me thinking about this is hearing this song on the radio. It's about ten years old but such is the extent of my disconnection with popular culture that I don't remember ever hearing it. It was a huge hit in most of Europe, apparently.
 It's pretty cool and I think says a lot:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V9NhncU5_CE

(I have no idea how to embed a link. I guess you'll just have to cut and paste it. If you listen to it at all. If you read this at all.)

*There are two stereotypes that I hold about Americans that I honestly think do apply to a great majority of Americans: a) they are ignorant about the rest of the world. and b) they are nearly all incredibly wasteful.

**The idea of last year's secession referendum in Scotland is something I think is alien to most Americans. Some Americans might support it because of Scottish nationalist myths as exemplified in Braveheart, but in reality it's hard to imagine an American state taking something like that serious. Oh, yes, I know that Texas had several thousand people sign a secession petition when Obama won the second time, but in my honest opinion it wasn't serious and was just an example of how overdramatic Americans can be.