800lb Gorilla Explained

With political fragmentation at home and distrust abroad, how can Americans successfully advocate for themselves? Several contributors for Understanding America: The Anatomy of an Exceptional Nation explained at an American Enterprise Institute (AEI) conference what they feel are the factors underlying foreigners’ skewed perceptions.

“The stakes for understanding America could hardly be higher. For better or worse, America is the 800-lb gorilla in every room in the world. When it has an itch, the world scratches,” write the editors of Understanding America. “Today, American politics often seem to be polarized between those who see this country through the eyes of a hard-core liberal or a rock-ribbed conservative,” they argue.

Martha Bayles, a Boston College faculty member and cultural critic, argues that Hollywood and the entertainment industry have abandoned their original “tacit understanding” with the government that, in exchange for open foreign markets, they would represent America positively abroad. Many of the misperceptions of American culture are perpetuated by this industry, she argues. She said of television shows that Americans “are often portrayed as single people, people on their own, mavericks, renegades, people with no particular ties to any kind of community.” She added, “Now that is—we adjust for that in America…But I think it is a severe distortion to people overseas.”

Reading from a study of 60 Mexicans’ views on the U.S., Bayles quoted the author as saying

“People who watch U.S. television shows, attend Hollywood movies, and listen to pop music cannot help but believe that we are a nation in which we have sex with strangers regularly, where we wander the streets well-armed and prepare to shoot our neighbors at any provocation, and where the lifestyle to which we aspire is one of rich cocaine-snorting decadent sybarites.”...

I think a grand assumption can be made about the US, both historically, and in the future.

America doesn’t like the rest of the world. That is why the ancestors of most Americans left there to come here.

Periodically in our history, we tried ignoring the rest of the world, because we just didn’t want to play in the vicious, murderous and senseless wars of their kings and princes.

That was fine with us. We could just stay here and make our own fun. But every time we did that, the rest of the world just went to hell, and forced us back into their game.

Finally, we said to heck with it, and decided to become the big player in world affairs. But we always had an out.

If we could make the rest of the world into real democracies, then we could just go back to being left alone, without fear that some petty tyrant was going to try and burn half the world.

This is because we never did have to play with them. With a little warning, we could just tell the rest of the world to go bugger off and ignore them.

Sure, we’d come visit, if for no other reason than to keep them on the straight and narrow. But otherwise, they really have nothing that we want. Never did.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.