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Americans' World Outlook
by Sun Yafei / New Century Weekly
I once heard an interesting story: a young American girl fell in love with her Egyptian classmate, but the young man did not share her feelings. To find the best way to refuse her, he said, "Can you find Egypt on a map?" The girl was speechless.
I've also run into an older person who has worked for the government for many years. He proudly said to me that when he worked in the Air Force and on trains, he "went to many places in the world." To humor him, I asked where he'd been, and if he'd ever been to China.
"I've never been to Asian countries. The train doesn't go there." He thought for a moment and said haughtily, "But I've been to Canada and Hawaii!"
Indeed, Americans' poor sense of geography and limited knowledge almost make you stop and stare. A famous person once mocked, "Women, like hens, forget where they're going once they step out the door"; with Americans' sense of geography, they are most likely no better than the hens.
Essentially, people born and raised in New York will never remember a scenic town several miles outside the city. Perhaps they've been to there for a trip to the suburbs, or gone their to ski a few times, or found romance at a bar on countless occasions, but ask them about that place, and they will ask, "That's in the US? I thought it was a new name for Mars." Truly, this is a case of "not knowing Han, how can one discuss Wei and Jin?"
If they go out, practically everyone has an electronic guidance system installed in their car; where to drive straight, where to turn, and even where to park your car to use the restroom - the system takes care of it all. New technology in combination with a peerlessly complete map of the entire US allows Americans to divorce themselves from geography with a clear conscience.
A Chinese acquaintance who has spent seven or eight years in the US has a penetrating analysis: Americans are not concerned with anything outside their immediate vicinity, while behind this is a willful arrogance. Even if the average American has a good family and education and is warmly friendly, the superior feeling in his bones from being a warmly-clothed, well-fed super citizen is ingrained. In the eyes of some Americans, the United States is the entire world, and the center of the world lies at the feet of New York or Washington, D.C.
"Although the United States is the most powerful country in the world, and America is in the thick of everything that happens, what does it matter if they are ignorant of other places and other nationalities?" that friend said.
One clear piece of evidence: the extremely small amount of international news on the major television networks. Even if there is news, most of it is of Iraq or Afghanistan, which concerns the US. The hot news, apart from big domestic events, is practically all local fluff stories, like someone's cat getting stuck in a tree, or spicy news about some starlet. I remember a few weeks ago in the "news personalities" rankings, the top one was a magician who spent several days in a water-filled bubble, the second was taken by a goat, whose "great story" was that it escaped from a farm and disrupted a middle school for a while, until several hundred frightened students and a few reporters surrounded and intercepted it.
John is a reporter for a major American newspaper. He was once in Bosnia-Herzegovina for ten years as a war reporter. He lamented that when he returned to the US, he discovered that his news ideals had been shattered, since the news for which he braved bloody turmoil and risked his life to obtain had not made any significant impression on the American people. "They don't care about things that happen in other parts of the world! In truth, they don't even read newspapers. They only watch TV, and that's only football - something the people in the rest of the world won't touch!"
One of my politics professors once complained in class that at the time of the genocide of more than one million people in Rwanda, the major TV stations and the tens of millions of viewers were following the scandal of Simpson murdering his wife.
In actuality, the problem of lack of geographic knowledge, in the end, is a problem of world outlook. However, it must be noted that what Americans hate most is other people telling them that they have no world outlook - how can they have no world outlook?! Look at the world - is there anywhere that Americans are not? Who started the Korean War? Who fanned the flames of the Israel-Palestine conflict? Who toppled Saddam? What major world event has been unrelated to the Americans?
So if you ask an American, "If there were no Iraq War, would you know about the Middle East?" he will most certainly wipe the friendly smile off his face and roll his eyes at you. If you come across someone with a shorter temper, who knows - he may angrily invite you to "get lost!" Yes, this is another pride of American culture: Americans permit self-mockery - self-criticism - anti-war, anti-Bush, and anti-government statements are no problem; they also permit mockery of others - they take the moral high ground, sparing no effort to criticize all other nations of the world, and force you to "humbly accept it." But remember, you must never mock them, especially their fatal weaknesses, like the problem of a world outlook.
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