As a college student, one summer I visited the Czecho-Slovak Socialist Republic. When my stay had ended, I was, early one morning, after drinking a bit too much home-made wine, waiting in a train station in the east of that country with two friends, when we were accosted by a drunk who evidently knew we were from the USA. He told us, “We have everything we need here…” The next day, in Vienna, a city whose billboards alone stood in bright contrast to the gray of communism, we laughed as we remembered his words.
Today, I find that the North Americans I meet suffer from a peculiar narrowness of perspective reminiscent of that Czecho-Slovak man. A specific incident can illustrate this:
After several years spent working outside the USA, teaching English (EFL) and Philosophy, I was back in the States, standing in a long line at a major airport hub. As we moved through endless turns through turnstile after turnstile, I was greeted by a small, dark-skinned uniformed woman with a friendly smile and an incomprehensible accent. I don’t know what she said, but I guessed that she was helping me continue in the right direction. “Guess” may be something of an exaggeration since her body language was clear.
.When I commented upon her incomprehensibility, a nearby woman, young and (to my eyes) over-confident, laughed, and said smugly--speaking to me as if I were not a citizen of the USA, "Yes, we are a mix...." -- Or words to that effect.
Her words expressed a kind of pride. Apparently, she regarded me as an ignorant foreigner who needed a lesson in the greatness of the USA. In reality, there was nothing here to be proud of. First of all, if you speak a language with such a strong accent, that's because you've not had the opportunity to correct or improve your pronunciation.
If you have a strong accent, you have not benefited from the sort of schooling I used to provide at an “International” School in Slovakia to the spoiled children of ambassadors and mafia dons, as well as to the extremely hard working children of hard working Korean employees of an automotive firm.
(I hasten to add that the Mafia parents treated me with the utmost respect, and were far less pushy than North American teachers whose children attended the school.)
Secondly, that small dark-skinned woman probably was badly paid, and probably doesn't even get health insurance.
So, what's to be proud of? Her home country has in all probability been the victim of interference form the USA or some other industrially advanced nation, and that's why she's come to the USA.
Nothing to be proud of in that.
The real problem is that the young woman who I briefly encountered in the airport is in no way unique. And that’s something not merely to gripe about; it is a serious problem.
Recommended Reading:
Vijay Prashad, The Darker Nations; A People’s History of the Third World: New Press, London and New York 2007: The focus of this elegant work is the recent history of countries once called “third world”. This work justifies my speculation that the uniformed woman I met came from a place which suffered from USA interference.
John Quiggin, Zombie Economics; How Dead Ideas Still Walk Among Us, Princeton University Press 2010, Princeton—on the absence of upward mobility in the USA, despite myths to the contrary…. And more generally, on the insanity of the ruling economic consensus in the world’s most dangerous country.
Richard Wilikinson and Kate Picket, The Spirit Level, Penguin 2010, London.
A quick look at the graphs will tell you that the USA is not doing very well as compared to other industrialized nations.
Eirk Olin Wright and Joel Rogers, American Society: How it Really Works, WW Norton, New York and London, 2011
A portrait of the actual state of the USA, and more evidence that the young woman’s pride was not justified.
