We spent three days in Budapest recently, and, as we are wont to do, we got into a discussion with one of the crewman on our ship, a young man who previously lived in the United States for about three years. Crew members are strictly forbidden to talk politics with passengers by company rules, but, like any regulations imposed from on high, there are always ways around such prohibitions. To begin a conversation about political matters, it only takes a nod, a wink, a sympathetic ear, and an admission that you haven’t bought into the notion that all Americans are gods from Mt. Olympus who can do no wrong by self-definition.
It was clear from our discussion that this particular European, a Romanian by birth, believed Americans to be a homogenous, monolithic tribe of peoples akin to the Romans and their armies or Attila’s horde of Huns. To him, we clearly are an aggressive people, a tribe who likes to throw its weight around for the sheer joy of having done so, constantly sticking its collective nose into things that are none of its business in order to prove that it can and that no other tribe is strong enough to prevent it from doing so.
Little does the crewman know that while we do, in fact, stick our collective noses into matters we have no business interfering with in the first place, we usually do so because we are a fractured society unable to communicate across political divides; because sticking our collective noses into others’ business is far easier than having a meaningful dialogue about our own internal business and priorities. In other words, we delight in sticking our noses into other people’s business because it is far easier to do so than to take care of our own. While we are busy going about the business of imposing democracy upon the rest of the world’s tribes, we have forgotten how to practice democracy within our own, preferring instead to practice imperialism abroad.
Can the lions and the Coliseum be far behind?
The crew member’s viewpoint is a sobering one, for America has given him, without charge, the building materials from which he constructed it. His viewpoint is akin to many I see among our resident politicians – a viewpoint composed of equal parts predisposition to reach a certain, foregone conclusion, a ready willingness to disbelieve those facts that are inconvenient to reaching such a conclusion, and a self-comforting, certain knowledge that one’s personal beliefs are of the very essence of a holy, God-given Truth. After all, why think when you already know? In short, the crew member in question ought to seek U.S. citizenship and immediately thereafter run for Congress, for he is eminently qualified to serve in its halls.
Having said this, there is a caution in this tale that we, as Americans, should take to heart. Our major failure in taking up our place in the world is that we are too self-absorbed with our own fractious democracy to listen to or care about what those abroad think of our behavior. While we don’t see ourselves as a monolithic society, those living abroad often see us as a tribe known as “American” who have wandered into their territories bent on conquest. They see us as they are predisposed to see all foreigners, preconditioned as they are by waves of invasions by foreign armies that helped shape their own cultures over the long centuries of human history; they wish to see us as invaders seeking to conquer new lands, to bed the women resident there, to pillage the stores of goods and grains, to enjoy the fruits of our conquest, and so they do.
And why shouldn’t they, for this has been the stuff of human history for centuries. While Americans see themselves as spreading democracy to the unwashed, non-Americans see us as the most recent reincarnation of Genghis Kahn’s Mongol hordes. We, as a society, fail to understand their viewpoint simply because we have no such predilection, simply because we are safe behind the vastness of our ocean defenses, simply because our forebears escaped all of those ancient, constricting beliefs by emigrating to the Land of the Free and somehow our foreign relatives should have realized this, should have somehow intuited through a process of osmosis what the lessons learned from that escape might be. We forget that they are the ones who didn’t escape; we forget that we are descended from the ones who did.
In short, we have forgotten that non-Americans are just like us: narrow-minded; intolerant of any opinions unlike those we and they hold dear; beset by fears that predispose them and us to believe implicitly in our most cherished assumptions; willing and able to believe in the most improbable of conspiracies; ready to bend the facts to suit their and our convenient assumptions; lazy and bigoted and indifferent and deaf and blind to the assumptions of others not like us.
While we see the American myth as being that anyone may succeed if only he or she has the talent and the willingness to try, they see the American myth as being that of Roman armies silently on the move in the mornin’s mist, of invisible hordes waiting to strike at any moment from almost any direction when least expected to do so.
Or, at least, this specific crewman sees us this way, but I am willing to bet good American dollars that there are lots more like him abroad in the world.
For humans are herd animals: we live and thrive in congress; we communicate most formidably by broadcast; we share our fears through rumor; we define ourselves by community. And if each grouping of humanity does so and, in doing so, feels right and proper, why shouldn’t another grouping of humanity do the same?
And so it is that we Americans should understand that non-Americans see us as a territorially cohesive tribe bound by common cause and ancestry, rather than as the fractious, fragmented, diverse society we believe ourselves to be. After all, many of them see themselves in the same way.
Should they learn to see beyond their prejudices? Of course they should. And so should we.
