An author who knows her stuff and applies it level-headedly is a rare delight nowadays. Martha Bayles, in exploring how America projects its image, both favorably and unfavorably, reaches not only into the detailed modern history of American foreign relations but also into broad cultural matters, and she has a knack for prodding honestly against the weak spots. I’ve never come across, for example, such a succinct and deadly critique of American optimism as this:
Through a Screen Darkly: Popular Culture, Public Diplomacy, and America's Image Abroad
Yale University Press
336 pages
$12.84
This “religion of progress,” as historian Christopher Lasch [in The True and Only Heaven (Norton, 1991)] calls it, saw scientific expertise as the key to the perfected future, not just in technology and medicine but also in human affairs, including politics. Yet this vision is an odd amalgam. Mainly, it is not scientific. Claiming the objectivity of science, it expects only positive outcomes.
In researching her book, Bayles also went to distant but important sources, including Islamists, foreign media professionals, and diplomats across eleven countries, and she delivers the hard news: We are presenting ourselves very badly abroad—especially now that commercial products are filling in for any concerted information policy on our government’s part; normal life here, including our cohesive and idealistic institutions, gets little coverage out there, and many foreigners call the trashy backwash of our popular media on their shores a threat to their traditions and social stability.
In addition, Bayles, a conservative expert on American pop culture (her previous book was entitled Hole in Our Soul: The Loss of Beauty and Meaning in American Popular Music), is large-minded about our potential for good influence. In her prologue to Part 1, she sets the scene in a McDonald’s in Shanghai, where, to her initial distaste and embarrassment, an articulate and cultivated Chinese video artist has arranged to meet her for an interview. But Bayles herself is good at what she lists as an essential part of public diplomacy—listening—and she quickly understands why her informant is genuinely attached to the place, having often studied there as a teenager (“Our families’ houses were cold and dark, so we loved the warmth and brightness, the light music, everything so clean and friendly”).
An entertaining tour of exotic McDonald’s operations follows: the kosher and halal ones, the ones with alcohol and curious local dishes—but never, by this account, with the most competitive qualities rendered negotiable. Our lowest common denominator in eating out can raise standards elsewhere. McDonald’s has even taught hygienic food preparation as an outreach, and effectively campaigns for American-style retail courtesy in many places where it’s needed. A friend of mine who spent eight years in China tells of a shop sign that testified to the very low consumer expectations that preceded a fuller opening to the West: “We do not beat or curse our customers.” Is it imperialist swashbuckling to demand improvement on that? With her usual meticulous documentation, Bayles traces the origins (an American novel, as it happens) and vagaries of the “ugly American” stereotype, but natural and thoughtful questions that her book helps raise are “Ugly how?” and “Ugly compared to what?” and “Ugly sometimes, for sure—but when is there some use in that, and when is it just destructive?”
Accordingly, I recommend the book heartily as an orientation for debate about U.S. foreign policy, because our image in the world and the role media exports and other cultural contacts play in shaping that image are hardly to be discounted.
In 1989, while taking part in an international study program in Yugoslavia, I roomed with a translator from Erfurt, in what was still East Germany, and she was a loopy fan of Dirty Dancing. To this day, I don’t know what in this Hollywood fare appealed to her so much. Maybe, having been raised under totalitarianism, she was thrilled at the story of a girl finding love and glamor in defiance of social restrictions. In any case, the movie gave her real joy and helped make her friendly toward me, probably at some risk to herself. (Her government must have kept good track of her, as a career traveler.) We continued to correspond, and she came to see me three years later, at my apartment in (the former) West Germany.
Similarly—and this is not really a digression, because Bayles treats American missionary outreach too—I’ve marveled over connections made through religious arts and culture, as recorded in Yale Divinity School’s magnificent missionary library. Out of an array of Bible stories translated in booklets and offered to the public at a church-sponsored event in colonial-era China, why on earth was the Parable of the Prodigal Son mobbed, why did so many exclaim over its touching beauty, even though (at the literal level) it rejects the indispensability of filial piety in favor of parental love and forgiveness? Or was that what the Chinese crowd wanted, an alternative?
But living for almost a decade in Africa taught me to be extremely careful about offering foreigners alternatives. My mental title, in retrospect, for that time isn’t the elegiac Out of Africa but what Abbott and Costello named one of their movies: Africa Screams.
What was desired from me wasn’t, alas, my own opinions or my own writing. A letter to the editor condemned my first book (of poetry) because a “white American poet” had written it, accused a prize jury of racism, and instructed me to enjoy the prize “in silence.” In microcosm this wasn’t fair, but as a response to nearly five centuries of brutally exploitative regimes imposed and supported by the West and seconded by a loudmouthed and self-satisfied American cultural invasion of which I was part, it was understandable.
I am, on the other hand, even now prized in South Africa as a purveyor of Michael Jackson CDs and DVDs; one is on my desk here in Connecticut, ready to ship to a close friend who has also worked as my assistant. She doesn’t like to hear or read me analyzing world affairs (or versifying about them), but merely loves to dance along with MJ—as, incidentally, the Methodist Society at Yale did for one year’s Div School Idol competition, in which they placed second.
The prevailing inability to control American culture’s isolated successes abroad, and the growing resistance to an American leadership role in anything, make the prescriptive parts of Bayle’s book far less useful than, say, her acute report on McDonald’s in China. Certainly, it would be good to revitalize agencies that are underfunded, demoralized, or lacking any direction, so that we communicate better in our foreign relations; and some services, like high-quality local-language news broadcasts into authoritarian countries, where internal reporting is stifled, seem to be no-brainers. But in most of her recommendations, Bayles has not only missed the train but is standing out in the countryside watching it roar past at 250 mph (let’s say it’s a French TVG), and she never had a ticket in the first place.
I wasn’t even sure I understood correctly her views of media’s power to make the rest of the world see us the way we want to be seen, until I came to her conclusion and read this:
Why, then, does US public diplomacy remain feeble? I have argued that it was a serious mistake to cut back on government-sponsored diplomacy and entrust America’s reputation to the entertainment industry (and to the various nonprofits analyzed in Chapters 8 and 9).
Excuse me! In the aggregate and over time, we create our reputation through what we do; and if we pile on top of offensive acts a floorshow of our unique virtue, we only worsen resentment, as if I were to give certain acquaintances in South Africa, who reasonably consider themselves insulted or betrayed by me, not a commitment to emended behavior, but my family photo album, to show what a great person I am.
Bayles assumes that we can purvey our culture selectively and not be frustrated, first of all, by what is wrong at home; she warns, for example, about exporting our culture wars. But essential in whatever we purvey must be an affirmation of foreigners’ right to know the truth. We do have culture wars, and hardly should—we hardly could—be working through them in secret. (Bayles does, to her great credit, eschew censorship as a U.S. foreign policy.)
What’s more, I question just how distorting of our national character our media exports are. More than half a century ago, in the essay “Boys’ Weeklies,” George Orwell showed the distinct sadistic strain in our popular culture, and toddlers’ beauty contests are just one example of our striking tendency toward exhibitionism and sexualization, at least when contrasted with British and European norms. These traits are not arbitrarily depicted; instead, they are at home in our society at large.
What would look—and be—quite arbitrary would be a campaign protesting, “We’re not like that! We’re like this!” An official attempt to depict any American subculture as exemplary—rather than just to tell the truth, that we are, in general, wildly pluralistic and tamely tolerant—would be a disaster. I can picture the congressional hearings into how this group (or groups, a few out of our myriad subcultures) came to be selected and advertised; and I’ve experienced how foreigners tend to absorb examples of American nonconformity, no matter how carefully presented. A set of images (of the Amish, say) from here but distorted over there may be aimed back at us, and the issue can readily become why Americans, if we know what we’re doing, put up with these people.
This suggests another major problem in the book: Bayles overlooks foreigners’ sheer tough-mindedness. To potent effect, the nonaligned and developing world inherited the survival struggle from us and Europe and Britain, and in Europe and Britain that struggle looms well within living memory. To give Americans interviews of the strictest accuracy and sincerity is at the bottom of the to-do list in all of these places.
“If only you didn’t send us so much sex and violence, materialism and idiocy!” is a ready plea to a like-minded American passing through (especially since Americans are almost always viewed as able to summon life-changing favors at whim). Tragically, in the developing world the plea is likely to hide realities Americans do not want to hear about, which I summarize as the following: “You mainly insist that we institute real democracy, human rights, and the rule of law, but we can’t. Our majority is illiterate and backward and so poor that they would sell fifty years of our collective future for the next meal. They cheer on the thugs who rule over us. We are just trying to fudge it and hold things together some way or other, and to throw you off track we complain about your media—knowing that you haven’t had a good look at ours and vetted it for outright pedophilia, near-psychotic misogyny or sadism, horrifying anti-Semitism, or just a trashiness that would make Ricki Lake burble with shock.”
There are, in short, two principal reasons for the worst of our media finding a ready market overseas. The first is that many people there like that kind of thing. There was nothing weird about Bin Laden’s porn stash. The second is that they don’t like us much; in public, they can readily pass off predilections shared with us as an imposition by the corrupt West. I’d bet anything Bin Laden rationalized his porn-grubbing that way. What most of them would not like, and wouldn’t do unless you strapped them down, is to listen to classic jazz and uplifting oral histories of the great nation from which it sprang.
The following is, as I see it, the there-and-here gist of our incapacity to give a new impression of ourselves. We would be hard put to work against certain things that have already happened, and against certain situations on the ground overseas—and Bayles does note many. But our government didn’t just lay down important public-diplomacy functions, some of which it could pick up again (not, alas, the large, well-stocked, quite open reading rooms attached to U.S. diplomatic complexes in countries like Turkey and Egypt); we also, in quite solid ways—legal, political, cultural—devolved so many resources and so much latitude onto multinational corporations, that foreigners look to these (when they don’t look to our military) to say who Americans “are.” Public policy has little or no control over what is projected as our “soft power,” and government efforts to project something else can look puny and ridiculous, when people notice them at all.
On a trip to Poland, where I stayed in Protestant churches and visited a minister’s family in their home, I found America’s popularity channeled mainly into delight with new Mac products. The minister and his children wanted to know which ones I had, and to share the ones they had, and they exclaimed over the hope and opportunity that these devices stood for in their world; America was a unique, wonderful country to have evolved them. Had I suggested, however, anything about the inspirational character of American family life or arts or music, or about the historical sacrifices we have made in the name of self-determination, my hosts would have struggled not to laugh in my face. A group of ministers, in fact, was almost speechless with alarm when I told them of small children subjected to the “people pass” in American stadiums. I could see in Reverend Semko’s eyes a nightmare of his son tossed from one stranger’s hands to another’s, away from his devoted care, up the steep seating towards the sky, and in a few polite words he said how awful that would be.
What foreigners seem most enthusiastic about in our cultural exports is our attacks on our own cultural pretensions. I attended the weekly cut-rate movie event in Goettingen, Germany, for many months, but I never heard a louder roar of approval at the announcement of the night’s feature than for Addams Family Values. The biggest laughs I ever heard in that cinema went to the film’s joke that the Girl Scouts peddle cannibalism; and to Wednesday and company’s being forcibly brainwashed by syrupy American shows such as The Brady Bunch—but soon rebelling and turning a Thanksgiving pageant into a denouncement of American racist imperialism, and then into mayhem.
In South Africa, I have seen the unpopularity of the U.S. expressed in quite an unexpected way in the treatment of McDonald’s. As part of economic sanctions against the apartheid government—a series of moves that hurt blacks worst, and, it appears, irreparably—McDonald’s withdrew from South Africa. Into the fast-food vacuum, with an attitude of “Watch this, Americans!”, came imaginative and charming options, such as Nando’s roast chicken, with its rich spices and hilarious commercials, and Spurs, with its luscious burgers, lightly breaded fried onions, and salad bars with breads and soups to be taken seriously. These restaurants grabbed convenient locations, trained their staffs with the usual South African zeal for hospitality, and kept prices down through almost comprehensive local sourcing. When MacDonald’s came back after the first multiracial elections, it was to hopeless competition, and a customer in a nearly empty restaurant might wait many minutes for an order, sit at a dirty table, complain only to be snapped at, and judge the fries to be not as good as elsewhere. Despite vigorous promotion, franchises winked out like fireflies in a cloud of poison gas. The chain became a local byword for America’s failure in endeavors on which our country normally prides itself: the application of political and social ideals to business; imaginatively flexible mass production and mass marketing; and strict and detailed organizational accountability. If McDonald’s (Gazillions Served!) is a hostage to history to that degree, what chance does the United States Information Agency have?
My irritation with Bayles became personal—since I create intellectual property for my (increasingly precarious) livelihood—when I reached the following:
One could also anticipate further dissemination through illegal downloading and knockoff DVDs. While not officially approved by the US government, such pirated distribution would likely reach a broad audience—and perhaps the lawyers would be mollified knowing that versions dubbed in foreign languages would have little resale in English-speaking markets.
You know something? I mean, beyond the suggestion that the U.S. no longer model the rule of law in the treatment of its own media industries? This would cause civil unrest at the grassroots, that’s what. Most of us creators can’t afford the lawyers who might be “mollified” when the government turned from defending our property to collaborating in its theft by the terabyte and saying, Don’t worry—in the forms into which it’s been altered without your consent, it’s not worth anything to you anyway.
But though my reservations about Through a Screen Darkly range from the slums of Cape Town to my checking balance at the credit union down the road, I still commend the book for its useful overview and many astute points.
Sarah Ruden is a visiting scholar in classics at Brown University. She recently finished translating the Oresteia of Aeschylus for the Modern Library series with funding from the Guggenheim Foundation. The Music Inside the Whale, and Other Marvels: A Translator on the Beauty of the Bible is forthcoming from Knopf early in 2015.
Copyright © 2014 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.
