What If They’re All Basically OK?

What if we’ve been lied to about them all along?

Coming of age in Cold War America, the message drilled into our little heads was that “they” were not free and “we” were. Poor Soviet schlubs, victims of The State, not free in the pursuit of life, liberty, and property…I mean, happiness. Unlike we lucky ones born in The Land of the Free and The Home of the Brave where we could be and do anything we wanted to.

What a load.

While I will concede that things were probably much rougher for the average Pytor in Leningrad than for the average Joe in Pittsburgh in 1965, I’m still thinking that Pytor just got on with his life and did the best he could and probably had some good times along the way as well.

Pytor and Joe very likely had more in common than they would have been lead to believe.

I’ve been watching a couple of webcams set up in St. Petersburg, Russia recently.

And, I dunno, but these people seem to be doing all right. Of course, there’s only so much you can deduce from watching a public webcam, but still. They’re well-dressed and I see plenty of them laughing together. Interestingly, I don’t see very many walking with their faces glued to their smartphones even though they do have them (I also see people riding horses at night which tells me that I might like it there better than here).

It makes me wonder about the lies we’re being told about how wretched and awful life is in other parts of the world.

There is no doubt that many people around the world live under horrendous conditions (often, it must be said, due directly to the actions of one country in this world called The United States of America), but even under the weight of poverty and bombings and oppression, people do get on with their lives.

If webcams offer a glimpse through the keyhole of other cultures, another keyhole is movies. Several years ago I saw a movie by the Oscar-nominated Iranian filmmaker, Asghar Farhadi, called “A Separation”. It followed the efforts of an Iranian woman to obtain a divorce so that she could take their daughter and leave Iran after she and her husband had gotten visas to leave but he’d changed his mind.

That movie and several others by Farhadi and other Iranian filmmakers — I’m looking at you, Jafar Panahi — showed a world where women drive, have important and challenging careers, take zero shit from their husbands, and make decisions about their lives. I saw Iranian people living their lives. Their imperfect lives in an imperfect society.

Like ours.

No doubt people in other countries have some fairly strange ideas about what it’s like in this country for us poor schlubs with crappy healthcare we can’t afford, gun violence keeping us on edge every time we go out to shop, and crowds of unmasked buttheads arguing about the merits of horse de-worming medicine….for people. With Covid.

Granted, the keyhole that provides a glimpse of our culture to other countries is a gaping superhighway — yayyyyyy, Hollywood — but the image beamed out to people in other countries is, shall we say, a bit twisted.

Although the stuff about health care, gun violence, and uneducated mouth-breathing pinheads, that bit is pretty much on target.

So here we all are, penned up in our national echo chambers, fearing everyone in the other echo chambers because the men running our chamber have fed us a line of crap about them.

I dated a guy for a while who revealed himself to be charming, smart, fun to be around, and a total xenophobe. Name a nationality and he had two or three sharp nasty words to describe it. Let’s not belabor the obvious and start flinging nasty stereotypes around. But when I asked him what he thought of Americans, here was his succinct two-word summing up: fat and stupid.

No one can argue that those two words don’t describe a whole helluva lot of Americans. But they also accurately describe a significant portion of the population of nearly every national echo chamber with the exception of France where there are no fat people.

See? I do it, too.

Divide and control. Keeping us suspicious of others who live far away is a good strategy. Keeping us suspicious of those living across town? Even better. We’ve proven ourselves adept at doing the Us vs Them cha-cha for millennia. It can’t be surprising that those in power would see how to use that to their advantage.

I like to imagine that we could buck that strategy and begin to see past the lies of our respective echo chambers (helpful reminder, John Lennon’s birthday is October 9 and he said it before I did and much more melodically).

Give it some thought and get back to me.

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