Ugly American

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What made the initial shock last was the fact that no one at the top of the command chain took personal responsibility and resigned. Ministers and generals stayed in office, while in other democracies, surely someone quite high up would have been forced to resign. To overcome the blow the scandal served to the international reputation of the U.S., all the world could rely on was the passage of time – the passage of time and the American Constitution.

I’m mentioning the Constitution, because after all, Americans do replace their government at least once every eight years. By 2008, the top people responsible will be gone. Then the world can start over, with a fresh team of Republicans or Democrats at the helm of the U.S. government. That’s one thing that is still beautiful about America.

Another thing the State Department in Washington has little control over is American popular culture, which as we all know pervades the world. American movies, American music, American food and other American consumer products have long given occasion to much anti-Americanism, from Europe to traditionalist societies in the Middle East.

From the point of view of many conservative, mainstream Muslims today, Hollywood is living proof that the U.S. is a decadent secular society; they don’t want to be molded in that image. These conservative Muslims don’t want to live the way they think Americans do. Come to think of it, many Americans wouldn’t want to live that way, either. Extremists easily exploit this observation.

Europeans, on the other hand, although they sneer at Hollywood movies and McDonald’s, dislike just the opposite thing about the U.S. They fear that in America, secularism is disintegrating, that the barrier between church and state is crumbling. This concern somewhat coincides with stereotypes and prejudices that have been underlying rationale for anti-Americanism for a long time.

For example, Europeans have long been wary about what they have come to call “Puritanism.” This version of “Puritanism” has really little to do with the beliefs and ideals of the people who originally founded the American republic. Rather, Europeans have come to use it as a synonym for “prudish.” So when they say that Americans are “Puritans,” they essentially mean that people in the U.S. have an unnatural relationship with their bodies that is somehow rooted in religion. You can’t lie topless on an American beach or show naked breasts on U.S. television, but you can cut these same breasts up to make them look better or show as many people getting killed on television as you want. That’s about as logical as creation science.

For better or for worse, Europeans are in the habit of attributing this kind of attitude to Christian fundamentalists, who they suspect are gradually taking over the U.S. Religion has become one of the major story lines in foreign media coverage of America in recent times. Most of these stories are not all that sophisticated. Rather, Europeans tend to throw evangelicals, fundamentalists, Methodists, Presbyterians and Baptists all together in one bucket.

In the minds of the general public in Europe, most Protestant churches in the U.S. have somehow banded together to create a force behind George W. Bush whose goal, they presume,  it is to conquer the world for Christ by the sword – the new Crusades. This force is seen as a sinister element in American political life, something to watch out for. If you’re a foreign correspondent based in Washington, as I was in the second half of the 1990s, you get hit with demands for stories like that practically every day. Their home offices, like media everywhere, tend to propagate recurring story lines.

The ugly American is one of those story lines, and it has many incarnations: the fat American, the stupid American, the zealous American.  Poverty, obesity, brutality, and ignorance – countless stories in foreign newspapers and on television present illustrations of these clichés on any given day.

If you’re a foreign correspondent, it doesn’t help that the longer you stay in the U.S., the more you come to appreciate this country for its diversity and even for its contradictions.  Accounts of American society that paint a more complex picture are difficult to sell.  You do your best to sneak in some additional points of view, hoping that they will make it past an editor who needs to cut.

Prevailing story lines have been a staple of journalism all the way back to medieval times. That doesn’t mean that there isn’t some truth in what they convey. For example, there is no doubt that under the Bush administration, the religious right has started to play a larger role in international affairs. If anything, evangelicals have given new energy and support to U.S. humanitarian efforts.