Jan5200912:10 pm

“Rich, cocaine-snorting, decadent sybarites”

Jerrold Keilson, NCIV board member and VP for business development at the International Youth Foundation, is quoted in this Newsweek article on the impact of American cultural and entertainment exports around the world:

People who watch U.S. television shows, attend Hollywood movies and listen to pop music can’t help but believe that we are a nation in which we have sex with strangers regularly, where we wander the streets well armed and prepared to shoot our neighbors at any provocation, and where the lifestyle to which we aspire is one of rich, cocaine-snorting, decadent sybarites.

Kudos to Jerrold for this money quote. And while author Martha Bayles’ overall point in the article is a good one—that it’d be nice if our cultural and entertainment exports helped the U.S. image abroad rather than hurt it—it seems like she’s missing two key points. The first is in her misuse of Keilson’s quote and the Pew Global Attitudes Survey she cites directly after. While Hollywood movies undoubtedly give some in other countries the impression that Americans are violent, decadent sybarites*, the way to effectively counter that impression is not, as Bayles seems to suggest, to also export plenty of Cole Porter, to make sure foreigners know that us Americans like our violence but we like our Tin Pan Alley too. Rather, what both Jerrold and the Pew study are getting at is that exchange—actually traveling to each other’s countries and seeing what life is really like with our own eyes—is the best antidote to misperceptions brought on by media. That way, even if someone does see The Dark Knight**, he knows from experience that Americans don’t generally wear Kevlar body suits and talk like “the offspring of Clint Eastwood and a grizzly bear.”

The second point Bayles fails to hit on is one that is typically overlooked in most discussions of America’s cultural exports and diplomacy, and in fact in discussions of American exchange programs in general: the question should not be ‘How can we get them to like us?’ but rather ‘How can we come to understand one another?’ Americans worry so much about whether the world likes us, whether our media is creating a bad image for us, that we don’t ever stop to consider that what might really help our image is if we learn a little something about those people we’re so desperately trying to persuade to be our friends. If people in Pakistan, Turkey, France, or Germany no longer like (or never liked in the first place) American pop culture, then the next move is not to determine, ‘Okay, so how can we get them to like it?’ Rather, it’s to engage them in a discussion, in a dialogue (an integral component of which would be coming to know their own pop culture), and maybe ask why they don’t like it. The same goes for exchange programs. I’ve always believed that the point of international exchange programs, especially ones that bring foreigners to the United States to meet Americans and experience life here, is not to ‘get them to like us.’ It’s to give them a true and accurate experience. That way, their opinion of the United States—whether positive or negative—is at least based upon a truthful, personal experience.

This second Newsweek article, in some ways, gets at this same point:

If it’s going to thrive in today’s interconnected world, [the United States] needs new habits of cooperation based on a healthy respect for the interests of everyone else. Much of the world remains well disposed to the United States. But America needs to reciprocate this good will by listening carefully to voices from around the globe and trying to work with them.

*Sybarite = “one fond of pleasure and luxury.” I had to look it up.

**And why shouldn’t he? The Dark Knight was a pretty sweet movie.

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