What do People around the World See
When They See U.S.?

“Do not merely listen to the word, and so deceive yourselves. Do what it says. Anyone who listens to the word but does not do what it says is like a man who looks at his face in the mirror and, after looking at himself, goes away and immediately forgets what he looks like.” —James 1:22-24 (NIV)

Why would people hate America? We are a free country. We are the land of opportunity. We enjoy stories of the little guy who made it big. We give everyone an opportunity and cheer for the underdog. What is not to love?

Our president said that others hate us because we are a democracy, because we are free. That may be true in some cases, but I have experienced a different reason people around the world have trouble falling in love with all things American.

In 1986, my wife, Victoria, and I sat in a hole-in-the-wall restaurant in Kathmandu, Nepal. We were in a cheap part of town favored by international tourists, budget travelers like ourselves with backpacks and low standards for lodgings. A song came on the radio and soon everyone in the place was singing in unison, from the rowdy Israeli group by the front door to the waiters who knew little English. The song was Dire Straits hit, “I Want My MTV.” The song was new in America and yet halfway around the world, people from very different parts of the world sang it together. The song is a song of excess. Some of the people singing along were singing phonetically and did not know the meaning of the words. The words we sang together were “money for nothing and your chicks for free.” While we sang of custom kitchens, refrigerators, and color TVs, we could look out the window to see porters carrying goods on their backs and people going place to place on bicycle rickshaws.

In the summer of 1999, I served as an intern in the Anglican Church of Tanzania at a church on the backside of nowhere. The town of 6,000 had no electricity. Yet, I gathered with dozens of Africans on rough benches under a tarp to watch the World Cup soccer matches live. Enterprising businessmen bought a generator, TV dish, and televisions. They charged townsfolk to crowd together on the dark African night to keep up with soccer matches in France. Piped in with the soccer came commercials for European and American products. The commercials showed luxurious houses, fine meals, and sometimes-outrageous clothes—excesses far out of reach for the people who left the evenings entertainment to go home to mud-walled, thatch-roofed homes.

These two incidents are a sample of the way one encounters America in the Third World. Thanks to TV shows, movies, and CNN, the world also sees us as a largely violent nation, where heroes win by gunning down their enemies. Corporate America’s aggressive pursuit of foreign markets also influences how the world sees us. Coca-Cola signs and the Marlboro Man are ubiquitous. The sure sign that the America won the Cold War was not that churches reopened, but that there is now a McDonalds on Red Square in Moscow.

In Third World countries, American consumer culture threatens the ancient ways of life that have held those subsistence-farming cultures together. Not everyone in other nations is pleased to have their children watching American movies and listening to American music.

If Bin Laden and other marketers of hatred find it easy to convince masses of Islamic Fundamentalist that we are an immoral nation infecting the world with our godless ideals, can we hold ourselves completely blameless?

When we look in the mirror that the world holds up to our country, we see reflected back a nation that sold its soul to corporate profits, now lost in immorality, destroying itself with violence. While that image might not be completely fair, we should not look back from the mirror unchanged. We might not be able to change the perception, but we can work at reality behind the perception that allows that image of America to flourish overseas. To see America the way the world sees us will mean admitting that it might be us, and not just other nations, that need to change.

(The Rev. Frank Logue is pastor of King of Peace Episcopal Church in Kingsland.)