The old country song that goes “I’ve been everywhere, man” almost applies to 77-year-old writer Ann Jones, who says she’s set foot in “all but a handful” of nations. Jones, who was born and raised in Wisconsin and now lives in Oslo, has encountered a lot of negativity from non-Americans about U.S. foreign and domestic policies and delved into it in an article that ran last Tuesday at Salon.
“Americans who live abroad,” wrote Jones, “often face hard questions about our country from people we live among...[They] complain that America’s trigger-happiness, cutthroat free-marketeering, and ‘exceptionality’ have gone on for too long to be considered just an adolescent phase.”
Last fall, Jones journeyed “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…[M]ost of them had a single underlying theme: Have Americans gone over the edge? Are you crazy?”
Jones thinks “crazy” might be a bit harsh, but added, “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.”
From Jones’s article, which originally ran at the lefty site TomDispatch (emphasis added):
Americans who live abroad…often face hard questions about our country from people we live among...[They] complain that America’s trigger-happiness, cutthroat free-marketeering, and “exceptionality” have gone on for too long to be considered just an adolescent phase…
…I’ve had the good fortune to live, work, or travel in all but a handful of countries on this planet…I’ve talked with people all along the way...
...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…
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…[M]ost of them had a single underlying theme: Have Americans gone over the edge? Are you crazy?...
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…
Take the questions stumping Europeans in the Obama years…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…
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…
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?...
Other things I’ve had to answer for include:
* Why can’t you Americans stop interfering with women’s health care?...
* How can you still be so blind to the reality of climate change?...
* 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?...
Europeans…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…
…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.
