American stereotypes have ring of truth

When Tony Blair’s effort to rally the British against a hateful Arab dictator sputtered at home last winter, the prime minister played his ace in the hole. He turned attention instead to French President Jacques Chirac’s defiance of the United Kingdom over Iraq and soon galvanized enough support to win the crucial vote in the House of Commons on the war.

Blair’s complaints about Chirac no doubt summoned up subliminal memories, both ancient and recent, of the conflicts between Perfidious Albion (as bilingual French intellectuals still call England) and the Country of Snail-Eaters. But Blair’s ploy was actually one of the milder moments in a troubling, virulent outbreak of national and personal stereotyping that contributes to a breakdown in international cooperation and civility.

The post-Cold War era has granted the citizens of an economically interdependent world more freedom and more cause to push stereotypes of other nations and their elected leaders to ridiculous and brutal extremes. One of the fruits of globalization may be final proof that familiarity does breed contempt — especially when foreign jobs are lost or threatened because of recession in the giant American marketplace.

Few Americans and Britons talked about the French as surrender monkeys when the Russian bear was on the prowl in Europe. In Britain and the rest of Europe today, bitterly anti-American invective and cartoons that were once fringe stuff now saturate mainstream commentary and flow from both the right and the left.

The disregard President Bush and members of his administration have shown for the opinion and political problems of others has nourished this trend. It has helped make Bush the butt of savage derision abroad that is unrivaled since Lyndon Johnson’s treatment during the Vietnam War. Bush, the Toxic Texan, was caricatured recently here as a crazed, gun-toting baboon on the editorial page of The Guardian, while a columnist observed on that same page that “if George Bush can be forced from office, a certain sanity will return to the world.”

Bush has brought some of this on himself (and seems secure in the impression that it will not hurt a wartime president at the polls). But more than tit-for-tat slurs and Bush’s often abrasive approach to foreign policy is involved in this accumulating psychological sea change in international relationships. The forest of global backlash must be seen and understood as well as its individual trees.

Spending more on public diplomacy, as a Bush advisory panel recommended in Washington last week, is necessary but will not be sufficient to reverse the hostile propaganda and popular resentment that automatically focuses today on the richest, most powerful and most intrusive society the world has ever known.

Foreigners see and amplify the concerns that Americans themselves have about the vulgarization and coarsening of politics and culture in a 24/7 society. Americans still coping with the lingering trauma of 9-11 and the war on global terrorism also grant themselves more freedom to repaint pre-existing stereotypes in sharper hues of black and white. The Muslim religion and Arab culture are held responsible for murderous fanatics who brazenly claim to represent Muslim and Arab values.

I gained a small sense of what it must be like to be an Arab living in the United States or Europe these days by going to see the London hit musical “Jerry Springer The Opera,” which mercilessly satirizes Americans as grossly fat, oversexed, foul-mouthed exhibitionists and renders our overstimulated culture as a barbaric travesty to be avoided. An American film director who happened to be in the audience the same night depressed me enormously by predicting that the show would be a big success when it travels to Broadway.

Americans who want the rest of the world to admire and emulate their country — in that respect we resemble the French — naturally are sensitive to the spread of anti-Americanism and hurtful stereotyping. But we are not alone in, and are indeed not innocent of, blaming real problems on exaggerated images.

Americans can all always do a better job of explaining themselves to other cultures and filling in the gaps that stereotypes inevitably leave. But we are likely to be more effective in doing that if we recognize that much of the authentic misunderstanding as well as the deliberate falsification of America’s motives and values abroad stems from real political conflict and sharpening economic competition.

The distemper of the times will not be ended by changing a policy, an approach or a president — however desirable those changes may be on their own merits.