Outside Looking In

...they said that a man leaves much when he leaves his own country. They said
that it was no accident of circumstance that a man be born in a certain country
and not some other...
-Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses

I wonder sometimes how we look to everyone else. Maybe it's my sense of national self-consciousness. Maybe it's my experience travelling and being treated in different ways: well, poorly, and strangely. Not really sure why but I wonder. America in the last century has held an unbridled attraction to "non-Americans." Do you ever wonder why that is?

Of course, a few years ago when our last president was in office, too many of us knew all too well how we were "seen." But even a negative political image has done little to mar the wonder surrounding our country.

The curious phenomenon about our nation is that because of our massive international media exposure, we are a grand and open image to the rest of the world. I picked up a little tidbit blog browsing. It's a letter from Brian, of the UK. He has a lot of nice things to say about his cousins across the pond:

"Dear America, I'm traveling to New York and Washington for the first time in a
few weeks. The prospect of going to New York is thrilling. My whole life I have
watched American films and here will be my first chance to see the many
landmarks featured in these movies..."

He's ecstatic. Not because of our political reputation, or because of our amazing natural beauty, but for our television. Should we be flattered or offended?

The british lad goes on to explain his fascination with America and brings us a little deeper. He discusses his living situation-Byswater, London. I've never heard of the neighborhood but Brian paints it to be a bleak place of racial diversity and rough and tumble survival stories. His love of American television stems from our treatment of postmodern diversity and culture clash:

"London is America these days. The idea of a nation state, an England that is
for the English is defunct. As a culture we are not very good at expressing or
depicting this new world we live in. The Americans do it beautifully."

We do do it well don't we? Don't let Brian in on our crime rates, or the threats of gentrification, or our centuries-long struggle for equality and civil rights. Disillusionment is just the pits.

But to be fair-he has a point. Even if we depict our postmodern world well only because we have the money and Hollywood talent to do so, we can take credit for that right? Cynicism aside, we have created for ourselves a beautiful portrayal of life. A West where opportunities are endless, beauty is abundant, and money might just grow on trees.

As an American overseas I was astounded by the magnitude of people that wished they could come to my country, even to visit. Romance doesn't even fully describe it. Obsession, maybe. Our depictions of life have framed a world that is not real, a place that exists only in a TV set or written into the memory on a DVD.

I used to frequent a restuarant nearby that sponsored immigrants to come and work as servers. The stories I heard were different but ran in the same vein-the starry eyed twenty-something year old makes it to America on a work visa only to find that she has little free time or money to enjoy the lives she watched on television. She is also disillusioned with the life she thought America held out to her. She lives in a cheap apartment and finds community only with other people from her country. In fact, she begins to shop at an international grocery store and frequent international restaurants. She takes public transportation and is saving up for a car (because no one told her that using solely public transportation, while a money-saving and environmentally conscious effort in her country in Europe, is a handicap in most American cities). She finds that the things that she pursues in America are really small isolations of what is familiar to her back home. This is sad but inevitable, and she slowly realizes the dream she was chasing never really existed.

Perhaps I am being too harsh here. We all of us are proud of what we have. I too, while I was living overseas, looked for enclaves of what was familiar: the TGI Friday's that served Steak and Burgers, the bar that televised American baseball. Yet I had nothing to chase after when I lived abroad. There was no film or TV show that presented an offering of a certain type of life for me. The only thing that stood being disappointed was my own curiosity.

I hope that the rest of the world will go on viewing our country with wide-eyed wonder. It's good for tourism, right? But more than that, what I tried to help people understand when I lived overseas was the pride they must take in their own nation. Don't listen to our music-speak your own language! Sustain your own voice. Do not let it die in an ever-growing din of globalism. For our blood lies in the place we were born. The place we were raised. I hope non-Americans will find there a flame of pride that Hollywood, with all its millions, cannot extinguish.