Myths about America
Posted by Maria
The Hurricane Katrina disaster and looming political crisis aren’t easy for an outsider to decipher. But we do have one advantage; not having believed in many American myths in the first place. For starters, the myth that the US is a generous and free country where anyone can achieve almost anything.
The abundance – of food, cars, roads, tv stations, just about everything a European could imagine, and then some – is probably unprecedented historically, and limited geographically to America. Growing up comfortably middle class in Ireland in the early 1980s, I found it almost unbelievable that T.V. Americans seemed to drink orange joice every day when we had it just for Christmas, went shopping just for fun and could afford to keep their enormous fridges constantly full. (T.V. Americans were forever hanging up the phone without saying goodbye, slamming car doors, and divorcing each other at the drop of a hat, but that’s another day’s incredulity.)
In my own fuzzy-logic way, I’d presumed that the cheapness of every day goods in the US was mostly because of the flexibility of the economy, i.e. the ability of employers to pay low wages, fire at will, offer few benefits, and generally pass on costs like environmental protection or maternity benefits. A few weeks in California cured me. Sure, labour ‘flexibility’ helps. But the cheap price of petrol is more important than I’d ever imagined. As newspapers and coffee breaks filled with doomsday scenarios of paying $6 dollars a gallon for gas, I sat down one day and did the sums.
That’s what we pay in Ireland. Today. Most of the extra cost goes in taxes, and the cost of that affects every imagineable part of life. Paying more for oil makes everything more expensive – getting food to the shops, from there home, cooking it, and cleaning up afterwards. It means more people rely on public transport, creating a policy feedback loop of greater government spending and making more citizens using shared resources every day of their lives. It means we don’t run central heating or (if we had ever needed it) air conditioning all or most the time, and probably just put on another jumper when it’s cold. It means we advertise cars based on their fuel consumption and we don’t have ‘all you can eat’ restaurant buffets. Teenagers don’t have their own jobs and cars, and rely on their parents, the bus or shanks mare to get around. They get it off in parks instead of cars. Not that many people drive to the gym. Until recently, not many people needed to go to the gym either.
Others on CT understand far better than I do the economic significance of America’s globally unique strategy of running a vast economy on cheap, cheap oil. And yet others can discuss how this dependence makes America less and less secure. (And how Amerca’s efforts to secure its own oil supply has made the world less and less secure for the rest of us.) It’s been a simple but revealing insight for me; the myth that America’s economic engine purrs along fuelled by of the virtues of its rather brutal labour market is only partly true. US work places may be dominated by the masochistic ideology of living to work, but the secret of success is simple. America lives or dies on cheap oil.
That’s one myth. Then there’s the myth that this is the land of opportunity. That anyone born a citizen can aspire to being president. Even if she didn’t go to Yale. And that anyone can use their own hard work and ingenuity to make it rich. This is one myth that many Europeans envy and also, sometimes, despise – mostly because we’d like to believe it too. It’s just that while in theory anyone can be a doctor or president, the reality is that you really only have a chance if your father was one too. Even the Economist grudgingly admits that social mobility is higher in Germany (Germany!) than it is in the US. So when Europeans point to the inescapable but seemingly uncontroversial race and class-based poverty and injustice that also exist in America, we find incredulous the prevailing ideology that poverty is personal, not structural. Or the belief that poor people have just made bad choices. But usually in these discussions we’re talking at cross purposes. Hell, we might as well be speaking French.
You don’t have to be Joseph Campbell to figure out that the lottery myth – the idea that every American has a chance of buying, no, earning that winning ticket in the lottery of life – is a sustaining myth that does more to placate than motivate. It’s also part of that myth to think a structural or political approach to poverty is cut off at the knees by pointing to the one in a million who’s managed to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. And so the argument goes round, the old worlders as blinkered by our own myths as the new, in a dialogue of the deaf that has no shared understanding of the world as it is, let alone of how it should be.
And then you see what’s happening in New Orleans. Where a natural disaster has shone the light on what’s ugly and usually hidden in American life; the inherent and unconsidered racism, the casual brutality, the values that prize property above people. You see people being blamed for being poor. You see black people penned in like animals and made to live in their own filth. You see in America people dying of thirst. Of thirst. You see people pushed beyond civility, beyond reason, beyond any imaginable breaking point, to be met with gun fire and the self-serving response ‘there, do you see how these people really are? It’s the war of all against all down there.’ You wonder what the Christian right might have to say, and fear it’s not ‘whatever you do to the least of my brothers, you do to me’, but rather; ‘devil take the hindmost’. Which he clearly did.
There is a war of all against all in America. But it’s not limited to Mississippi and Louisianna. The myths that have held the poor in check are now exposed. The callous disregard of this administration for the poorest and weakest Americans is now on display for the world to see.
In some ways, we’re not surprised to see this selfishness and wickedness exposed. After all, what did you think has been going on in Iraq for the past couple of years? Or what do any of us think is going on in Niger, in Sudan, or in any of the nameless places of boundless human suffering that we just aren’t interested in hearing about? The main difference in NOLA is that it’s harder to control the reporters, and the people suffering speak English and they expect to be heard.
But in another way, as a non-American I feel more shocked, disappointed and let down than maybe even some Americans do. We, too, can barely believe this is really happening in America. We can hardly believe that we are (gladly) opening our wallets to the poorest people of the richest country in the world. For so many people who live outside the US, America truly is a beacon of hope, a real if flawed exemplar of how new ideas can set people free. We’ve had our own myths too.
posted on Sunday, September 4th, 2005 at 2:39 pm
http://crookedtimber.org/2005/09/04/myt ... #more-3756