Is
This Country [the
U.S.]
Crazy?
Inquiring
Minds Elsewhere Want to Know
By Ann
Jones
Americans who live abroad
-- more than six
million of us worldwide (not counting those who work for the U.S.
government) -- often face hard questions about our country from
people we live among. Europeans, Asians, and Africans ask us to
explain everything that baffles them about the increasingly odd and
troubling conduct of the United States. Polite people, normally
reluctant to risk offending a guest, complain that America’s
trigger-happiness, cutthroat free-marketeering, and “exceptionality”
have gone on for too long to be considered just an adolescent phase.
Which means that we Americans abroad are regularly asked to account
for the behavior of our rebranded “homeland,” now
conspicuously in decline
and increasingly out
of step with the rest of the world.
In my long nomadic life, I’ve had the good fortune
to live, work, or travel in all but a handful of countries on this
planet. I’ve been to both poles and a great many places
in between, and nosy as I am, I’ve talked with people all along
the way. I still remember a time when to be an American was to be
envied. The country where I grew up after World War II seemed to be
respected and admired around the world for way too many reasons to go
into here.
That’s changed, of course. Even
after the invasion of Iraq in 2003, I still met people -- in the
Middle East, no less -- willing to withhold judgment on the U.S.
Many thought that the Supreme Court’s installation
of George W. Bush as president was a blunder American voters would
correct in the election of 2004. His return
to office truly spelled the end of America as the world had known
it. Bush had started a war, opposed by the entire world,
because he wanted to and he could. A majority of Americans supported
him. And that was when all the uncomfortable questions really
began.
In
the early fall of 2014, I traveled from my home in Oslo, Norway,
through much of Eastern and Central Europe. Everywhere I went in
those two months, moments after locals realized I was an American the
questions started and, polite as they usually were, most of them had
a single underlying theme: Have Americans gone over the edge? Are you
crazy? Please explain.
Then recently, I traveled back to the “homeland.”
It struck me there that most Americans have no idea just how strange
we now seem to much of the world. In my experience, foreign observers
are far better informed about us than the average American is about
them. This is partly because the “news” in the American
media is so parochial and so limited in its views both of how we act
and how other countries think -- even countries with which we were
recently, are currently, or threaten soon to be at war. America’s
belligerence alone, not to mention its financial acrobatics, compels
the rest of the world to keep close track of us. Who knows,
after all, what conflict the Americans may drag you into next, as
target or reluctant ally?
So wherever we expatriates settle on
the planet, we find someone who wants to talk about the latest
American events, large and small: another country bombed
in the name of our
“national security,” another peaceful protest march
attacked
by our increasingly militarized
police, another diatribe
against “big government” by yet another wannabe candidate
who hopes to head that very government in Washington. Such news
leaves foreign audiences puzzled and full of trepidation.
Question Time
Take the questions stumping Europeans
in the Obama years (which 1.6
million Americans residing in Europe regularly find thrown our
way). At the absolute top of the list: “Why would anyone
oppose national health
care?” European and other industrialized countries have had
some form of national
health care since the 1930s or 1940s, Germany since 1880. Some
versions, as in France and Great Britain, have devolved into two-tier
public and private systems. Yet even the privileged who pay for
a faster track would not begrudge their fellow citizens
government-funded comprehensive health care. That so many Americans
do strikes Europeans as baffling,
if not frankly brutal.
In the Scandinavian countries, long
considered to be the most socially advanced in the world, a national
(physical and mental) health program, funded by the state, is a big
part -- but only a part -- of a more general social welfare system.
In Norway, where I live, all citizens also have an equal right to
education
(state subsidized preschool
from age one, and free schools from age six through specialty
training or university
education and beyond), unemployment
benefits, job-placement and paid retraining services, paid
parental leave, old
age pensions, and more. These benefits are not merely an
emergency “safety net”; that is, charitable payments
grudgingly bestowed upon the needy. They are universal: equally
available to all citizens as human rights encouraging social harmony
-- or as our own U.S. constitution would put it, “domestic
tranquility.” It’s no wonder that, for many years,
international evaluators have ranked Norway as the best place to grow
old, to be
a woman, and to raise
a child. The title of “best” or “happiest”
place to live on Earth comes down to a neighborly contest among
Norway and the other Nordic social democracies, Sweden, Denmark,
Finland, and Iceland.
In Norway, all benefits are paid for
mainly by high
taxation. Compared to the mind-numbing enigma of the U.S. tax
code, Norway’s is remarkably straightforward, taxing income
from labor and pensions progressively, so that those with higher
incomes pay more. The tax department does the calculations, sends an
annual bill, and taxpayers, though free to dispute the sum, willingly
pay up, knowing what they and their children get in return. And
because government policies effectively redistribute wealth and tend
to narrow the country’s slim income gap, most Norwegians sail
pretty comfortably in the same boat. (Think about that!)
Life and Liberty
This system didn’t just happen.
It was planned. Sweden led the way in the 1930s, and all five Nordic
countries pitched in during the postwar period to develop their own
variations of what came to be called the Nordic Model: a balance of
regulated capitalism, universal social welfare, political democracy,
and the highest levels of gender
and economic equality on the planet. It’s their system. They
invented it. They like it. Despite the efforts of an occasional
conservative government to muck it up, they maintain it. Why?
In all the Nordic countries, there is broad general
agreement across the political spectrum that only when people’s
basic needs are met -- when they can cease to worry about their jobs,
their incomes, their housing, their transportation, their health
care, their kids’ education, and their aging parents -- only
then can they be free to do as they like. While the U.S. settles for
the fantasy that, from birth, every kid has an equal shot at the
American dream, Nordic social welfare systems lay the foundations for
a more authentic equality and individualism.
These ideas are not novel. They are
implied in the preamble to our own Constitution. You know, the part
about “we the People” forming “a more perfect
Union” to “promote the general Welfare, and secure the
Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.”
Even as he prepared the nation for war, President Franklin D.
Roosevelt memorably specified components of what that general welfare
should be in his State of the Union address in 1941. Among the
“simple basic things that must never be lost sight of,”
he listed
“equality of opportunity for youth and others, jobs for those
who can work, security for those who need it, the ending of special
privileges for the few, the preservation of civil liberties for all,”
and oh yes, higher taxes to pay for those things and for the cost of
defensive armaments.
Knowing that Americans used to support
such ideas, a Norwegian today is appalled to learn that a CEO of a
major American corporation makes
between 300 and 400 times as much as its average employee. Or that
governors Sam Brownback of Kansas and Chris Christie of New Jersey,
having run up their state’s debts by cutting taxes for the
rich, now plan to cover
the loss with money snatched from the pension funds of workers in
the public sector. To a Norwegian, the job of government is to
distribute the country’s good fortune reasonably equally, not
send it zooming upward, as in America today, to a sticky-fingered one
percent.
In their planning, Norwegians tend to
do things slowly, always thinking of the long term, envisioning what
a better life might be for their children, their posterity.
That’s why a Norwegian, or any northern European, is aghast to
learn that two-thirds of American college students finish their
education in the red, some owing
$100,000 or more. Or that in the U.S., still the world’s
richest country, one
in three children lives in poverty, along with one
in five young people between the ages of 18 and 34. Or that
America’s recent multi-trillion-dollar
wars were fought on a credit card to be paid off by our kids.
Which brings us back to that word: brutal.
Implications of brutality, or of a
kind of uncivilized inhumanity, seem to lurk in so many other
questions foreign observers ask about America like: How could you set
up that concentration camp in Cuba, and why can’t you shut it
down? Or: How can you pretend to be a Christian country and
still carry out the death penalty? The follow-up to which often is:
How could you pick as president a man proud of executing his fellow
citizens at the fastest
rate recorded in Texas history? (Europeans will not soon
forget George W. Bush.)
Other things I've had to answer for include:
* Why can’t you Americans stop interfering with
women’s health care?
* Why can’t you understand science?
* How can you still be so blind to the reality of climate
change?
* How can you speak of the rule of law when your
presidents break international laws to make war whenever they want?
* How can you hand over the power to blow up the planet
to one lone, ordinary man?
* How can you throw away the Geneva Conventions and your
principles to advocate torture?
* Why do you Americans like guns so much? Why do
you kill each other at such a rate?
To many, the most baffling and important question of all
is: Why do you send your military all over the world to stir up more
and more trouble for all of us?
That last question is particularly
pressing because countries historically friendly to the United
States, from Australia to Finland, are struggling to keep up with an
influx of refugees from America’s wars and interventions.
Throughout Western Europe and Scandinavia, right-wing parties that
have scarcely or never played a role in government are now rising
rapidly on a wave of opposition to long-established immigration
policies. Only last month, such a party almost toppled
the sitting social democratic government of Sweden, a generous
country that has absorbed more
than its fair share of asylum seekers fleeing the shock waves of “the
finest
fighting force that the world has ever known.”
The Way We Are
Europeans understand, as it seems
Americans do not, the intimate connection between a country’s
domestic and foreign policies. They often trace America’s
reckless conduct abroad to its refusal to put its own house in
order. They’ve watched the United States unravel its
flimsy safety net, fail to replace its decaying infrastructure,
disempower most of its organized
labor, diminish its schools, bring its national legislature to a
standstill, and create the greatest degree of economic and social
inequality in almost
a century. They understand why Americans, who have ever less
personal security and next to no social welfare system, are becoming
more anxious and fearful. They understand as well why so many
Americans have lost trust in a government that has done so little new
for them over the past three decades or more, except for Obama’s
endlessly embattled
health care effort, which seems to most Europeans a pathetically
modest proposal.
What baffles so many of them, though, is how ordinary
Americans in startling numbers have been persuaded to dislike “big
government” and yet support its new representatives, bought and
paid for by the rich. How to explain that? In Norway’s capital,
where a statue of a contemplative President Roosevelt overlooks the
harbor, many America-watchers think he may have been the last U.S.
president who understood and could explain to the citizenry what
government might do for all of them. Struggling Americans, having
forgotten all that, take aim at unknown enemies far away -- or on the
far side of their own towns.
It’s hard to know why we are the way we are, and --
believe me -- even harder to explain it to others. Crazy may be too
strong a word, too broad and vague to pin down the problem. Some
people who question me say that the U.S. is “paranoid,”
“backward,” “behind the times,” “vain,”
“greedy,” “self-absorbed,” or simply “dumb.”
Others, more charitably, imply that Americans are merely
“ill-informed,” “misguided,” “misled,”
or “asleep,” and could still recover sanity. But
wherever I travel, the questions follow, suggesting that the United
States, if not exactly crazy, is decidedly a danger to itself and
others. It’s past time to wake up, America, and look around.
There’s another world out here, an old and friendly one across
the ocean, and it’s full of good ideas, tried and true.
Ann Jones, a TomDispatch
regular, is the author of
Kabul in Winter: Life Without Peace in
Afghanistan, among other books, and
most recently They
Were Soldiers: How the Wounded Return From America’s Wars --
The Untold Story, a Dispatch Books
project.
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Copyright 2015 Ann Jones
This article, without the image, originally appeared in TomDispatch.com
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March 2015