CULTURE

You Don’t Understand America As Well As You Think You Do

There is far too much joy expressed in predicting our eventual demise, and we’re sick of it

Photo comp by author. Photo by tom coe on Unsplash

I see it a lot, especially on social media platforms that are likely to include non-Americans, such as Medium. It is the full-scale breakdown and analysis of our culture, government, diet, criminal justice system, or media, as well as their confident solutions or predictions of our demise. They are not from here. They don’t live here. But they claim to have all the answers.

It doesn’t matter whether they are Canadian, British, South African, Australian, or French. They certainly understand us better than we understand them. Americans are notoriously self-involved and insular, largely because of our geographic isolation but also because of our egocentricity.

But here’s the deal. Just because you’re well-read, politically informed, educated and astute, doesn’t mean you understand us the way you think do, simply because you’re exposed to our media, movies, and horrendous television.

There is a scene in the 1995 comedy “Get Shorty” where Delroy Lindo tells John Travolta, “You don’t know me. You only think you do.”

Tourists are almost always shocked by the reality of America, and even people who have lived here for some time, find much of our culture perplexing. It’s never as straightforward or as simple as they imagined, and the country itself is larger than most can comprehend.

Mostly I just find the reductionist analysis insulting and condescending. There is far too much joy expressed, schadenfreude though it may be, in predicting our eventual demise. It’s understandable, of course, as our hubris precedes us in almost any arena, and it’s natural to want to knock that. We all expect some comeuppance when it comes to ignorant, arrogant bullies. Anyone thoughtful enough not to be defensive about it recognizes our complicity in this.

But what you have to remember is that this is a massive country, with not one culture, but many different cultures. We are not a monolith of anything. No single ideology, ethnicity, religion, or political persuasion represents Americans. We differ by state and region, rural and urban, north and south, east and west.

All societies are complex, and ours has the added elements of power, wealth, and scale. There are no simple answers in trying to run a democracy of this scale, with so much money and power at stake. There are no other comparative countries with the same scale of issues, so there is no precedent to what we are going through.

I’ve had this argument with American ex-pats who haven’t lived in this country for a decade or more. They assume they still have a solid grasp on the dynamics of life here and maybe even fresh insight that their absence allows them, but this is still an arrogance that defies logic. You can’t begin to understand the way America has changed since 2016 unless you’ve been living here every day. You won’t understand the subtleties and complexities by reading the newspaper or watching the news.

It’s not the Clinton era of the 90s, when moderate Democrats lurched to the right. Nor is it the post 9/11 America of the Bush years with its endless wars and the trading of civil liberties for the promise of security. It’s not even the relatively blissful period between 2008 and 2016 when we imagined a new post-racial America. When the former guy was elected in 2016, something broke. It wasn’t just the election, it was everything that led to it.

The Federalist Society’s dream of a partisan judiciary. The Tea Party’s thinly-veiled racism. The insidious effects of the NRA. The systematic racism of the electoral college and the Senate. The failure to expand the House to represent America fully. The dismantling of the Fairness doctrine in our media. The rise of cable news, radical talk radio, and the internet, which led to a self-feeding disinformation feedback loop. The destruction of organized labor and the growing economic disparity. The militarization of law enforcement. The unsustainable growth of a global military. The sheer effectiveness of the former president and his army of former lobbyists intent on dismantling all our institutions. And finally, the culmination of decades of efforts by the Republican Party to combat the disastrous effects of an ever-shrinking white, Christian population by abandoning democratic norms and tipping the scales in their favor with gerrymandered districts and voter suppression laws.

The effect has been to create a single political party that no longer believes in the tenants of liberal democracy and understands that in order to stay in power, they have to change the rules so that they can rule from a minority position. They have succeeded in transforming the party to one of identity rather than policy and ensured that their base will vote for them no matter what they do. Without a media ecosystem to hold them accountable, they are no longer responsible to voters but to the wealthy donor class that funds them.

Maybe you knew all of that. But you haven’t been to a school board meeting and heard your neighbor try to use civil liberties to justify his refusal to vaccinate his children or allow them to wear a mask. You haven’t witnessed a shooting in a grocery store because the previous president demonized immigrants and people of color as filthy animals. You haven’t watched a loved one die unnecessarily because they couldn’t afford medical treatment or lived in near poverty despite a decent job because of crushing student loan debt.

The other comment I see a lot is that we have no culture in America. This despite entertainment being our biggest export behind arms. The rest of the world sure does seem to spend a lot of money on our nonexistent culture. Music. Movies. Artists. Writers. Scientists. Economists. Architects.

It’s perfectly fine to say you don’t like our culture, and on my darker days, I might be tempted to agree with you, but it’s also patently absurd to say we lack culture just because it doesn’t follow your belief of what that might be. Is it our friendliness that offends you? Our volume? Our hubris? Our naïveté? Our brashness?

Why do other cultures believe that Americans should bend to local customs when traveling abroad, but they’re the first ones to criticize and refuse to engage when visiting the United States? Your cultural chauvinism is readily apparent.

It’s not the criticism of America that bothers me. Complaining about America is how I spend 95% of my time. It’s the arrogance of believing you understand what’s wrong and how to fix it and that we do not. It’s also the hubris of believing that you’re right and that we don’t understand what is happening in our own country.

Allow me to quote one more movie. There is a scene in the 2015 film “The Big Short”, where Brad Pitt and a few traders have discovered the upcoming housing collapse and have subsequently bet big against the American housing market. They stand to make hundreds of millions of dollars on the catastrophic failure of the financial markets. The two traders begin to celebrate by dancing poorly.

Brad Pitt’s character snaps at them to stop, and they look at him confused.

“If we’re right, people lose homes,” he says. “People lose jobs. People lose retirement savings. People lose pensions. You know what I hate about fucking banking? It reduces people to numbers. Here’s a number — every 1% unemployment goes up, 40,000 people die, did you know that?”

“No,” says one of the traders. “We didn’t know that.”

“We’re just happy about the deal,” says the other trader.

“Fine,” says Pitt. “Just — don’t fucking dance.”

It’s fine to criticize America, but if you’re not from here, don’t dance while you do it, at least not in front of us. It’s rude.