Caricaturing America

Yesterday, on the verge of heat exhaustion in 100+ Austin heat, I sought relief in the cool shadows of the University of Texas main library. Sitting near me were two graduate students in their twenties, brushing up on their English at UT, before departing for doctoral programs in other parts of the United States. One was a male physical education major from the University of Tokyo, the other a female Japanese lit specialist from the University of Rome. When I told them I was moving to Austin in a month—to get a better handle on Texas for a book I was writing on the American Dream, they started volunteering how the country looked to them in person as opposed to reading about it in books or seeing it in the media.

The Japanese man offered that his countrymen were always looking at foreign countries for what they could learn and put to use. But now he was seeing all sides of the country, most of which he hadn’t even thought of before. And the Italian woman agreed that it was a lot more complicated up close than it was from far away. “A few more minuses, but many, many pluses,” is the way she put it.

This increasingly frequent encounter reminded me of the frustrations I felt over the past three months explaining America to Europeans who already thought they knew more about it than I who have lived it for 58 years, and taught it for thirty. I was reminded of a potluck supper of teachers in Turin, The Detroit of Italy, where I had been taken by a University of Genoa history professor (her specialty is American Indian women oral narratives!), with graduate degrees from the University of Oklahoma.

Now my politics are way left of center, and I can bait Reagan with the best of them, but the conversation at the dinner table began to get under my skin. “All those homeless,” they clucked. “Cutting off food stamps,” they whined. I found myself sneering out loud at their comic book stereotypes of John Wayne Reagan—even to the point of nastiness, teasing them in turn that they have so many presidents with such short tenures that no cartoonist ever had time to put his pencil to them. And I tried, to deaf ears, to explain what a “welfare cheat” was, but they pretended not to comprehend, even though later in the conversation, they regaled each other with tales of tax cheating that made me wonder why they couldn’t follow me. Here were the people teaching the children of Italy what the world was like, and their version of America was ludicrously childish.

To them, America was nuclear missiles in Europe, and neglected old people at home. People who could talk with great subtlety about art and philosophy suddenly turned infantile when the subject of America came up. Why, I have wondered since. Well, for a start, 99 and 44/100 hs of those at the table were what I call Picasso Communists—like the painter, basically apolitical, but so anti-bourgeois that they’re ready to think the worst of the West at the drop of a cliché. They really don’t think about America. They feel about it. And they fear it. And seize on it for a convenient catchall explanation of everything they can’t control in their own lives—inflation, salary raises, freedom to travel as widely as “you rich Americans” do.

It was the same, basically with minor variations, everywhere I went in Europe (except Turkey, where in that semi-police state, everyone I met pretended to be very, very pro-American, so much so that you suspected duplicity!)

Lolling in my bunk at the youth hostel in Helsinki’s Olympic Stadium, I overhear a New Zealander telling an Aussie how happy they all felt about tweaking the American Navy’s nose by not letting nuclear arms dock there. (The Aussie replied with tales of how elated they all were Down Under to take the America’s Cup from you know who.) And on a train platform in Jyvaskyla, Finland, I listened to two holidaying Swedish nurses tick off all the benefits their social insurance gave them—the clear implication being that we were neanderthalish to charge people for medical care. They seemed surprised to hear me describe Medicare and Medicaid—but they relaxed once more when I had to confess that my own HMO cost me $800 a year. Even when I told them how low my federal taxes were compared with theirs, they were loath to see in America anything other than a rich, uncaring oaf causing the world grief because it can’t solve its own problems.

Frankly, the USIA tactic of putting Thoreau in the hands of the Third World and alienated European intellectuals is not much of a response. Both sides need to walk in each other’s mocassins. Those graduate students in Austin were getting a better, more realistic image of America in all its complex contradictions from Greyhound than from American literature. Ted Turner’s recently announced Goodwill Games in Moscow 1986 are the way to counteract the piffle generated by global telecasting of Dallas and Dynasty. High school teacher and student exchanges ought to be expanded by ten or twenty factors. And Americans abroad ought to avoid the ghettos of first class hotels and get out and mingle with ordinary people on the trains and in the hostels. One civilized American is worth 10,000 four-color brochures in absolving corrigible ignorance about America.

When I spoke in French, for example, using my Visa cash advance at the Credit Lyonnais bank next to the Gare du Nord, the cashier replied after seeing my San Francisco Federal Savings card, “I didn’t know Americans could speak French.” I didn’t want to disillusion her by saying not many monolingual Americans can even speak English well, let alone a foreign language. I just gave her a GI Joe grin, and grumbled, “Oh, we’re getting there!” took my fresh francs, and ran. We can’t organize a Truth Squad to counter every bit of disinformation our enemies dish out in the global war for credibility among the unaligned. But we can use personal contracts and, when necessary, counterpunching humor to establish the generalization that America, warts and all, is dynamic precisely because it can take and respond to criticism, even when that criticism is absurdly one-sided, a mad man’s comic book version of America.