Proud To Be An American

Barack Obama may be struggling to beat John McCain in our quadrennial presidential sweepstakes but the rest of the world is cheering for him to capture the White House. According to a BBC poll, people in all 22 of the countries surveyed prefer to see Senator Obama elected US president ahead of John McCain by a 4-1 margin.

In 17 of the 22 nations, people expect relations between the US and the rest of the world to improve if Senator Obama wins.

So what does this say about the overall image of the United States? I would argue that it shows that after 7 and a half years of George W. Bush the world sees America as more insular and indifferent towards the rest of humanity than ever before.

History suggests this antipathy for the "ugly American" has been well earned.

"[I] know of no human right that is one-tenth as valuable as the simple right to utter what seems to be the truth"
--H.L. Mencken

People across the world understand that the United States is the Unrivaled Empire with the military might to exert its will and pursue its interests wherever it pleases. And yet they seem convinced that this hegemonic power can be employed benevolently -- or at the very least, less dangerously at a time when human beings as a whole are facing existential challenges. Climate Change, resource depletion, pollution, HIV-Aids, just to name the most pressing, should be of utmost priority yet here we are, roughly 50 days from electing the most powerful leader on earth and these issues are mostly absent from our political discussions.

Rather than being pressed to articulate, exactly how, he as president will go about tackling these problems Barack Obama is being constantly forced to explain:
a)--who he never was and b)--things he never said.

A report by Dan Hoyle on voters in small-town America bears the first point out:

"Obama, he's not our kind of people," said Middleton in a gruff, bitten-off speaking style, taking a break from canning green beans at the couple's double-wide mobile home. As a retired coal miner and a die-hard union man he should be a Democratic candidates natural supporter. He won't vote for Obama: "He don't believe in the hereafter, and the Lord, the way I look at it ... he's Muslim."

Such views are common in what the corporate media tenderly refer to as America's heartland. Polls taken in Canada and Australia show that citizens in those countries know Senator Obama to be a devout Christian (he spent his early twenties working on behalf of Catholic Charities), so when similar polls in rural USA indicate that over 19% agree with Mr. Middleton is it ignorance or simple excuse-making cussedness?
I'd say probably a little of both.

"[Our]ecclesiastics are responsible for all the turmoils and black hatreds that now rage in the bleak regions... they are to blame for every witches' pot that now brews in the backwoods of the Union."

Mencken penned those words for the American Mercury in 1924. His fear was that the Ku Klan Klan's infiltration of the Baptists and Methodists had inspired their ministers to oppose "every attempt to meet ignorance and prejudice with enlightenment." He charged religious zealots with preaching "not only the most bitter, savage morality of the Old Testament," but its "contempt of obvious facts."

And there you have it. In Mr. Middleton's America facts are malleable not concrete. Knowledge must first be filtered through prejudice. As for taking on the great ills of the day: Belief not Action confers Redemption. It is a way of viewing life, as well as others, that is necessarily both self-referential and self-reverent.

The ugly truth for Obama may simply be this. He might impress those foreign non-believers who offend God with their atheistic modern notions, he will never be what good Christians folks in our faithful hinterland think of as devoutly and proudly American.

I think Gary Ball, a former coal miner and editor of the firebrand Mountain Citizen newspaper in Inez, Kentucky said it best: "We know Obama's plenty book-smart ... but I liked Harry Truman, the last president to have a simple high school education."

I don't believe John McCain needs to worry about not understanding much about the "internets". He may have a millionaire wife and more homes than he can count, but he likes us Americans just the way we are. Just the way we've always been.