One of the great puzzles of the later 20th and early 21st centuries is that Americans face the same reputation difficulty as doctors. The medical profession as a whole is seen as avaricious and incompetent yet everyone says their own GP is polite, decent, and knows what he or she is doing.
How is it that the US is so detested around the world and has created such a litany of foreign-affairs bungles – the Bay of Pigs, Vietnam, Lebanon, Angola, Iraq, Gunatanamo and so on – yet so many individual Americans you meet are unfailingly courteous (especially in the South), helpful and generous?
I am on my 10th visit to the US – to various holiday and work destinations — and the puzzle remains.
One symptom (or perhaps cause) is that the American media is so overarchingly parochial and that the American mindset is so often local.
A bumper sticker in North Carolina read: “Think local. Act local.” North Carolina contains the mighty Fort Bragg military base that provides so many soldiers to fight in the far away, complex Middle East.
Thinking locally and acting locally has its advantages. It builds a sense of community and generous community-service organisations. It engenders a sense of responsibility and a desire to hop in and help. Perhaps that comes from a pioneering society, where at least initially conditions were harsh.
But hopping in to help in an environment you know – a quick playground in Smalltown or a wheelchair donation in Smallertown – is fine. It is quick and easy, resulting in a sense of achievement and warmly meant gratitude. Occasionally a swing might break or a wheelchair wheel fall off. But usually unremitting localism means that someone knows the weight of the wheelchair recipient or the reliability of the swing maker.
American television news (especially outside cities of more than a couple of million) is full of tennis court upgrades, honours graduates dying in crashes, charity fund raisers and dog and cat rescues – anything that moves locally.
Presumably the bulk of the well-polled audience does not want to know about the wider, complex world where the course of events is more drawn out, less predicatable and less familiar, where going in is easier than getting out. But events are demanding attention.
In the land of the bumper sticker and unremitting roadside billboards, the jumbling competition for attention results in virtually nothing standing out. But you do see an occasional “Support Our Troops and President Bush” roadsign. Now they are well-worn. The paint is coming off.
But you also see amid the myriad of the crass, witty, vulgar, cute and homely and amusing bumper stickers and signs outside homes, poignant yellow ribbon wreaths – a simple half-infinity sign, half the size of a book – with words simply saying: “In loving memory of Jodie” or whomever – one of the several thousand US soldiers killed in Iraq.
The bumper and roadside slogans are invariably simple. They advertise not just merchandise, but professional services, politics and god. A lawyer seeks personal-injury clients with simple words and a large sincere photo of himself: “Injured. Jack Evans. Attorney. Phone 1800-347-PAIN”. Thousands of billboards each with a simple message to buy this or that, or to be redeemed, or to be cautioned that buying booze underage can result in a life ban liquor purchase.
But all the simple messages add up to a confusing and vastly complex picture.
And all the presentation of choice adds up to no choice at all. A hundred food outlets sell the same food. Ten salad dressings are still salad dressing. In the Bible Belt, towns have a vast array of stark white churches: First National Baptist; Prime Tabernacle; Redemption Church and on and on. They all deliver choice about the same thing.
Through this the yellow-ribbon wreaths, though, pose a choice that Americans must make: to leave Iraq sooner, or later.
In Richmond, Virginia, the capital of the Confederacy in the Civil War is the Hollywood cemetery (nothing to do with films). A guide points out with immense local pride and knowledge details on gravestones and details of the families who own the plots. The graves are elaborate showing wealth and the close-knit nature of the local community spanning generations.
The cemetery has a Civil War section in which are graves of ordinary soldiers, many with puzzlingly new white headstones. The soldiers’ bodies were brought back from northern battlegrounds after the (1861-1865) war and marked. With the rise of interest in genealogy, many families have discovered that distant relatives are in the graveyard and have replaced the old markers with new headstones.
It is a classic expression of American commitment to family and community. But a wider view is needed here. The world wants and needs America and the Americans to succeed. It admires American democracy, the rule of law and individual rights and many are dismayed at the way events in Iraq have undermined them.
They hope more Americans can look beyond the local and parochial because they are the people who determine the Government and can express their dissatisfaction at its actions. Contrary to Abraham Lincoln’s parochial view that “the world will little note, nor long remember” what he said in 1863, the world has remembered and desires that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.