Americans are delusional, prudish religious nuts when compared to the rest of world https://t.co/3HzC3RJqkr pic.twitter.com/hdO5VmNn3s
— Raw Story (@RawStory) May 10, 2016
Cultural differences exist across borders, and because monoliths are mostly fantasies, often within them, too. That said, America, in particular, is culturally perplexing, and even confounding, to a lot of the rest of the world. I am not, as Americans are wont to do, laboring under the delusion that people in other places spend all that much time thinking about us. We are all, as a species, just trying to get through this thing called life. The conservative American notion that people with far better healthcare, civil rights laws and gun control “hate our freedom” is a wishful imperialist delusion. Worse, it’s not fooling anybody at this point…. To the outside onlooker, American culture—I’m consolidating an infinitely layered thing to save time and space—is contradictory and bizarre, hypocritical and self-congratulatory. Its national character is a textbook study in narcissistic tendencies coupled with crushing insecurity issues.
Have lived and traveled overseas extensively, I’ve always found being outside the U.S. to be an interesting exercise in perspective. One of our greatest collective failings is a pronounced lack of self-awareness. Americans have little concern for or awareness of how the rest of the world perceives us. We tend to assume that being American means never having to say we’re sorry and that American Exceptionalism provides justification for all manner of untoward behavior. We expect the rest of the world to adapt to us…because Americans lead, we don’t follow. We tell other countries how things are going to be; we don’t tolerate being directed by others.
Having been fortunate enough to have had opportunities to travel outside our borders, I’ve frequently found myself in a position where I’m asked questions and/or to justify things our government does. I’ll certainly entertain questions, but I’ve never felt it necessary to defend what so often appears to be patently indefensible. How does one begin to even hope to be able to explain the inexplicable?
Now, more than ever, we appear to the outside world to be a hot mess, a rich, loud, hyper-religious, attention-seeking bully who places its own wants and needs above those of anyone else.
Yep…that’s pretty much spot on.
How to reconcile a country that fetishizes violence and is squeamish about sex; conflates Christianity and consumerism; says it loves liberty yet made human rights violations a founding principle? In conversations with non-Americans, should the topic of the U.S. come up, there are often expressions of incredulity and bewilderment about things that seem weird when you aren’t from here. Talk and think about those things enough, and they also start to seem objectively weird if you are from here, too.
We Americans may not be big on self-awareness, but American Exceptionalism if nothing else demonstrates our devotion to epic, mind-bending self-delusion. We in too many cases simply can’t countenance and/or refuse to recognize that another country might better at something than us. With rare exception, we believe that America is superior across the board and that there’s little to be learned by examining the best (or ANY) practices of any country not named “America.”
We discount the experiences of non-Americans and we tend to ignore the lessons we could learn by examining what others may have done in other places. We’re Americans, damn it!! We don’t ask for advice or directions; we lead the way!! We also generally don’t play well with others, as demonstrated by our invading (Iraq) and drone-bombing (Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen) sovereign nations because…well, because we’re Americans, and we don’t take shit from anyone.
We hate who we choose for reasons whose validity (and existence in the collective memory) fades with time. It’s OK, though; we’re Americans. You can’t stop us.
In many European countries, hate speech can earn you legal rebuke and a fine, as it did John Galliano for his disgusting, drunken anti-Asian and antisemitic tirades, and Brigitte Bardot for her Islamophobic remarks. It’s illegal to go around waving the Nazi flag in Germany, and if you’re an up-and-coming neo-Nazi in places like Canada, you’ll have to get your hate materials from groups in America. No need to shove, we’ve got plenty of them here.
In America, say all the hateful stuff you want and invoke the First Amendment while you’re at it; if you can’t be legally implicated for inciting violence, you’re in the clear. Just remember that the First Amendment makes no guarantees you’ll get to keep your lucrative cable TV show or movie career. But if you do decide to take it one step further, we’ve got almost no regulatory gun control to aid you in your mission. That’s the American way!
Our collective (and too often reflexive and unthinking) devotion to Christianity leads us down paths those outside our borders often struggle to comprehend. We revere Presidents whose ineptitude is exceeded only by their ideological inflexibility (Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush) and revile those who actually endeavor to live by the teachings of their faith (Jimmy Carter). Strength, as exhibited by the willingness to bomb villages, schools, and hospitals, is exalted, while working to create peace is eschewed as weak and squishy, the domain of bleeding-heart Liberals.
We reward with air time, column inches, and face time those Conservative culture warriors who decline to live by their own rules even as they preach the immutable, inviolate, and unshakeable nature of their convictions. The loud, the arrogant, the gross, and the stridently intolerant garner far more attention than those quietly working to create peace and social justice.
The view from outside our borders is that the Yew-Ess-of-God-Damned-A is a hot, hypocritical mess of a nation, a bully with a short attention span, and whose solution to every problem is to bomb it back into the Stone Age.
I can understand why some would say that they’ll leave America if Donald Trump is elected President. Though I won’t do it myself, part of me wishes that moving to Reykjavik and quietly living out my days could be an option. It would be infinitely preferable to having a ringside seat for four years of bad performance art centered around racism, sexism, misogyny, homophobia, and Islamophobia.
