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What Is It About Americans?

The U.S. midterm elections are over, and all that remains is stray confetti and the aftertaste of champagne. The American right are spinning out apocalyptic predictions faster than Nostradamus, consoling their base with assurances that whichever disastrous path the nation embarks upon will be the fault of those who were befogged and bewitched by Democratic lies. It is always when the rhetoric flies thick that my international friends ask, “Can you explain to me what is it about Americans?”


This is a question put to many Americans who have traveled and what is most curious about it is that, by its very construction, it dismisses the possibility that there is actually nothing to explain. It's phrased as if speaking to a person suffering from some awful and obvious abnormality—like a club foot, or a withered arm. It’s like being asked, “Can you explain to me what is it about that blowhole in the middle of your forehead?”

For a couple of years I gave versions of the same answers most Yanks give. You know the ones I mean: the U.S. has an insular for-profit news media that shows people what they want to see, rather than what they need to know; a two-party system creates a lesser-of-two-evils dynamic which prevents good candidacies; the American system is actually a semi-democracy controlled by powerful military and oil interests.

But my friends already knew all these things. They’d repeat the question slowly, so I understood: “Can you explain. To me. What is it. About Americans?”

Emphasis is everything.

The emphasis here told me they were interested in the American psyche. It's a question that is momentarily baffling the first time it is asked. You start with, "Well . . ." and then stall like a vapor-locked car. While socio-political discourse (such as that pictured above, from Scandinavia, and below, from Latin America) is always worthwhile, ferreting out answers to this particular question seems to lead directly down Alice’s rabbit hole.

But over the years I did come up with some sound bite answers, and here is one:

In the United States there is a cultural war against intelligence and expertise. Political candidates are defeated for being too smart and too experienced. Scientific fact, such as evolution, is derided as false or theoretical, even though the religious implications of accepting Darwin are no more dire than those of accepting the roundness of the world. Because of the pervasiveness of this anti-intellect sentiment, which equates personal lack of knowledge with hidden weakness, the average American cannot tolerate being instructed about matters of culture and politics, and rejects the knowledge of the learned in favor of propaganda from those who say what he wishes to hear.


That’s of course an extremely condensed version of my answer and, depending on the listener, often indecipherable. Here’s a more general answer, which works even when language barriers come into play:

The key element in American life is time—or rather lack of it. Americans are part of the most overworked Western culture in the world. They are also the most exhausted. Exhaustion means no reading and no self-improvement. In such circumstances convenience becomes a religion, comfort an inalienable right, and entertainment a constant demand. A mere two weeks of paid vacation a year means most people do not travel. The majority of those who do gravitate toward the comfort of resorts, package tours and cruises, and thus are not truly exposed to foreign lifestyles or points of view.

Here’s one more:

Dissent is alien to the American culture because citizens have been convinced that they must support rather than distrust their leaders, even though they have witnessed countless examples of unmonitored public officials breaking laws and selling out constituencies. Under the trust doctrine, they have been convinced that political protest can lose a war, and diplomacy can invite a terrorist attack. The trust doctrine has resulted in Americans completely ceding any interest in influencing the nation’s foreign policy, such that the White House has a free hand to do whatever it likes in any part of the globe. Only when disaster strikes do people realize perhaps vigilance is all that keeps officials (reasonably) honest. But by then their government has trained and armed a man who later became its chief enemy in Osama Bin Laden, and has permitted poison gas components to be sold to a man who they later tried on war crimes charges in Saddam Hussein.

This last explanation, more than the others, usually led to a buzzkill discussion.

So in the end, because of the seeming impossibility of reaching the root of the issue, I developed a stock response that served me quite well: “Trust me, I am very interested in this subject, but there's no point in discussing it because I guarantee we're in complete agreement.” True to the American political spirit, it isn’t an actual answer. And the statement itself is of course untrue. But when delivered with the correct sprinkling of sincerity it as often as not earns me a free drink.

And that, in microcosm, is all that anyone needs to know about Americans, and American politics.

posted by Egan Ehlers @ 11:42 AM