Everyone makes fun of Sally Field for her joyous exclamation at the Academy Awards - "You like me! You really like me!" - but she was only demonstrating how American she is. Americans tend to have a high opinion of their country - American exceptionalism is the scholarly term - and are taken aback when confronted with beliefs to the contrary.
Case in point: An article in a recent edition of a national publication headlined "Global warmth for U.S. after 9/11 turns to frost." It turns out that the glow of sympathy for America that lit the world last fall has turned to darkness, and "anti-American sentiment has turned into a contagion that is spreading across the globe and infecting even the United States' most important allies."
It cited the experience of U.S. travelers abroad encountering genuine enmity: "In virulent prose newspapers criticize the United States. Politicians ferociously attack its foreign policies ... and regular citizens launch into tirades with American friends and visitors. . . . (In) Britain . . . snide remarks and downright animosity greet many Americans these days. It's not just religious radicals and terrorists who resent the United States anymore."
Of course, the article declined to quantify these facts. It is not clear if such assertions are based exclusively on opinion polling, widespread reporting, or anecdotes from an editor's summer vacation. But as with any generalization, there is a grain of truth embedded in the overwrought prose, and a fallacy or two.
One of the fallacies is the notion that anti-American sentiment is anything new. It is not, and hasn't been for a couple of centuries. After the Irish poet Tom Moore paid a call on the White House in 1804, he warned visitors to Washington that "nought but woods, and Jefferson they see,/Where streets should run, and sages ought to be."
The view of Americans as crude, unlettered, overbearing and money-mad has a long and distinguished pedigree - and, of course, is sometimes accurate. For that matter, if the reporter of the above-mentioned article had traveled to Europe in, say, the early 1980s, she would have encountered plenty of "virulent prose" in newspapers and "snide remarks and downright animosity." Except that, 20 years ago, the snide remarks would have been directed at the IQ of another president (Ronald Reagan) and the foreign policy that, in due course, prevailed over the Soviet Union in the Cold War.
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The other fallacy is no less misleading. That certain foreign journalists and academics are reflexively hostile to the United States should come as no surprise: A survey of American academics and journalists would yield many of the same attitudes. Consult a professor of political science at a university in Pakistan or Denmark or Argentina and you will get a reasoned, sometimes passionate, critique of what's wrong with the world's superpower. But talk to people in the streets of Bombay or Damascus or Edinburgh and you get a different impression - indeed, a generally favorable view of the land of free speech, SpongeBob SquarePants and Herman Melville.
Which is not to argue for complacency. It's a law of physics that the world's mightiest country is bound to inspire resentment, and some people will never be reconciled to American power. But hard as it may be to conceive, empires don't last forever, and arrogance is often the reason. The United States is unquestionably dominant, but it is not omnipotent, as we learned almost a year ago. And foreign hostility toward the United States is, to some degree, matched by domestic contempt for the outside world. It is appalling to read certain American journalists on the subject of our European allies, and embarrassing to learn the views of self-described Christians about the Islamic world.
And lest we forget, not every foreign critic is motivated by malice or envy. From our annual congressional drug certifications to our current crusade to "democratize" the Middle East, the United States has a tendency to mind other peoples' business - even if we haven't the clearest idea what we're doing. Suppose the Indians or Tunisians rated us yearly on our commitment to human rights or free enterprise. We'd be livid.
We are fighting a war against terrorism that relies on strategic alliances with some of the world's least democratic regimes, and we seem to regard the views of our democratic allies as naive meddling. We preach free trade and impose tariffs on steel. And while we spill blood to permit the Afghans to rebuild their country, we encourage Israel to suppress the national aspirations of Palestinian Arabs.
We are, in other words, a big, well-intentioned and complex nation, and while blessed by God, not always doing His bidding. That others don't recognize what we see in the mirror is no surprise.
by Philip Terzian
Knight Ridder-Tribune
Philip Terzian is the associate editor of the Providence Journal. Write to him at: Providence Journal, 1325 G Street NW, Suite 250, Washington, D.C. 20005.
