Yesterday, I meant to start talking about America's image problem, and meant merely to introduce it with the origins of this saying by briefly mentioning Agassi's use of it in the early nineties, and then essentially giving a very short history of why it seemed that he was dismissed as being only image, and nothing deeper. Instead, I wound up talking at length about Agassi, going on for pages and pages, and decided instead to dedicate the entirety of my writing to him, since I had, surprisingly, quite a lot to say about him.
However, it was meant to focus more on this country and what has been going on just lately, because America's image has been taking a hit, left and right, and if Americans simply stopped and took a more serious, less superficial look at how they are truly perceived around the world, I think it might shock them.
I had an old classmate, a kid who was picked on really badly back then, and we are now Facebook friends. It does not extend beyond Facebook at this point, but I remember him being quite political way back then. Not much has changed. He considers himself a conservative Democrat, and was mulling over the idea of leaving the Democrats not all that long ago. That is fine by me, personally, since I am neither a Democrat or a Republican. In fact, I think that Americans tend to focus too exclusively on the two parties as the only real choices, and not enough on the limitations of narrowing their choices to two parties. Ultimately, almost every election cycle comes down to “the lesser of two evils”, or, more appropriately, “the evil of two lessers”.
Indeed, that is the truth. But this guy, he has made many claims, and some of them raise my eyebrows from time to time. One thing that he mentioned was just prior to the Oscars. He mentioned that this was the reason the entire world hated us. I am guessing that he meant the Hollywood glitz and glam, the superficiality, the money, the plastic surgeries and the actresses that starve themselves to look beautiful, and the false facades all around. Indeed, that would be one aspect of American culture that can be rightly criticized.
Yet, it occurred to me that this is such a small part of the overall American culture, and fixation on this, demonization on this, seems to tend to detract from criticism of other, more substantive, issues. When you focus almost exclusively on this, you are missing the larger picture of what is going wrong with America today, and why the image of the United States, once stellar and impeccable just decades ago, is now tarnished, probably permanently.
It is about far more than Hollywood, Hollywood glitz and glamor culture is more of a symptom of it, than the source. No, American culture has spread like wildfire around the world, and yes, this includes Hollywood. But it would be far too oversimplistic to just single out Hollywood as the reason, or the source, of the world's hatred to us. In fact, what he seemed to illustrate better was the fixation of many Americans towards certain aspects of American culture that they do not like, and then claiming that anyone with a shred of common sense would automatically agree with them. That, typically, dumbs down the argument.
If there is one thing about American culture that I really dislike, it is this very tendency to dumb down arguments, to take complicated issues and simply them enough that knee jerk, often xenophobic, close-minded, even redneck attitudes tend to define them. That we are, at least for now, the most powerful and influential nation in the world, and that we hold such viewpoints and indeed carry them in our hearts as if they are indisputable facts, is also an indication of a larger malaise, one that is not so easily defined by simply pointing to Hollywood.
I think America's biggest problem is that it is simply too big, too powerful, and that people here have been closed off for entirely too long from any other viewpoints, really, but their own. Most Americans cannot see beyond their borders, almost literally. It is like anything that happens outside of America is irrelevant to them.
That is a recipe for disaster, and it is not only closing one's mind off to things, but also blindfolding oneself to other examples, both the successful ones, and the failures. It is refusing to learn from anybody else, and there is a good way of describing that: being pigheaded.
America has it's fair share of problems, and it will take a while to diagnose them. But I think it is overdue, and it needs to be done in a serious manner, not in some lighthearted, or frivolous manner, as many Americans tend to do.
I am running out of time, so I will have to make this part one, and to be continued over the course of future blog entries.
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