I remember growing up in the suburbs of Philadelphia believing that everyone was jealous of America. With the notable exception of my parents (European immigrants) this was the view of the whole neighbourhood. Kids my age would repeat what they heard at the dinner table, namely that the only explanation for European post-war ingratitude towards the United States was jealousy. Our 2-story houses, our front gardens, our large cars, our baseball stadiums, Disneyland, etc., you name it, they wanted it. Europeans were so envious they couldn’t sleep at night.
Fast forward twenty years and I am back in Philadelphia listening to a supposedly educated American woman (now the ex-wife of a good friend of mine) telling me exactly the same thing. Her husband disagrees but then he has traveled overseas.
Fast forward another 10 years to 11 September 2001. Americans everywhere are asking: “Why do they hate us?” George Bush has a reassuring answer: “They are jealous of our freedoms and our way of life”. No one had to prompt him. This is Bush’s core belief and it is shared by millions of Americans because they all grew up with it. “The War on Terror” is merely a subset of “The War on Jealousy”.
In Stanley Kubrick’s film Full Metal Jacket, a senior American army officer in Vietnam explains to a skeptical journalist that “inside every Vietnamese is an American screaming to get out”. Today we are fighting (and losing) wars in the Middle East to liberate that inner American inside every Iraqi and every Afghan. Anyone who resists is, by definition, sub-human or would benefit from psychiatric help. The irony is, of course, that for all the money Americans pour annually into self-analysis and therapy, they are the most useless psychologists in the world. Years of sub-standard education, druggy pop culture, cretinous television, and a hopelessly corrupt political class have destroyed the average American’s ability to place his or herself in anyone else’s shoes. There is only one valid perspective: the American one.
The jealousy myth is, of course, a corollary of that other unassailable certainty: America is the greatest country in the world. Didn't Madeleine Albright describe it as the "indispensable nation"? Americans are always telling each other this – on television, in schools, in bars, in supermarkets, on the golf course. Though anecdotal, it is perhaps the most convincing evidence of mass ignorance that we have today. Besides, how on earth does one measure greatness? Greatness is an entirely subjective concept and has a multitude of facets, eg. economic, military, political, education, culture, food, health care, social services etc. against plenty of which America scores extremely badly.
The globalisation of telecommunications has had little impact. With all the overseas channels now available to us through satellite, we should have a much better understanding of external attitudes towards America. Instead the technology serves to identify those channels that need to be bombed (eg. Al-Jazeera). The reality is that all most Americans want in the way of overseas news and analysis is 24-hour feel-good patriotic mumbo-jumbo about our brave boys in Baghdad and Kabul. The situation promises to worsen as the dollar sinks below the waves and even fewer people can afford to travel outside the United States. Of course, the sick dollar means more foreigners are now able to visit the United States but surely that will be taken as further proof that foreigners want to be American.
