“Innocence Abroad”
“to explain everything through the lens of American power is to explain less. One ends up reflecting back the mirage of American omnipotence instead of the reality of U.S. blundering, blindness and internal dissent, of our inability to address the most basic needs of our own society (gun control, health care, an end to police brutality, economic inequality), let alone to confront global challenges such as climate change. One also risks turning all non-Americans into pawns, vassals and victims. Conspiracy theories that ascribe everything to American power diminish the responsibility of local regimes and elites, and the autonomy of people who have staked their own claim to the United States’ proclaimed principles, challenging it to live up to its rhetoric…
For all his hard-bitten clarity, Baldwin expressed hope that America could see itself and could change “in order to deal with the untapped and dormant force of the previously subjugated, in order to survive as a human, moving, moral weight in the world.” He argued for what I think of as a sort of useful idealism, one that acknowledges reality as it is but does not accept that it has to remain so. He wagered that people could be better than they are: “We are capable of bearing a great burden, once we discover that the burden is reality and arrive where reality is.””
Related: “Unlearning the myth of American innocence”, An essay from the author they discuss — I haven’t read her book, but I found the essay really informative about how most white children are indoctrinated into the myth of America and how insidiously persistent the ideology can be even for people who think they are trying to escape it.
I catch myself thinking about the US like this all the time — or, rather, living in the assumption that other countries don’t have things that we have. Small things, like farmer’s markets or cartoons for adults. And I only realize these assumptions when I hear someone casually mention, like, finding a free toaster oven through a neighborhood listserv in Italy and I am totally surprised. And then quiet and weird for a few seconds while I process my reaction.
