America, from the outside

Since Sept. 11, befuddled Americans have asked a single question of the world: Why do they hate us so? However reasonable such a question might seem in the wake of the attacks, it signals something far less reasonable: We’ve become a thoroughly solipsistic nation. In the last year, America has refashioned itself as the world’s primary victim, survivor and dominator. We’ve taken possession of all available roles except, of course, that of villain, and the rest of the planet has been relegated to the sidelines. It’s like that old joke in which a man talks endlessly about himself and then says, “Enough about me, how about you? What do you think of me?”

For years, Mark Hertsgaard has been asking what others think of us but with a less self-centered purpose. He’s had an urge to help us, even force us, to break through that self-involvement and look at ourselves as others see us. He wants us to understand that there are other lives out there in the wider world. He is among the small number of Americans who are aware that ours was not even the first Sept. 11 tragedy. As he points out, that date was the anniversary of Gen. Augusto Pinochet’s coup, a “U.S.-sponsored assault on democratic government in Chile,” whose long-term death toll more than equaled ours of last year. “It’s no secret to Chileans,” he adds, “that the United States helped bring to power the dictatorship that ruled them for seventeen years.” But as with so many aspects of the world -- and our role in it -- this has not been on most American radar screens. We are, he assures us, an “oblivious empire.”

“The Eagle’s Shadow” is Hertsgaard’s attempt to explain what might be called a global disparity in comprehension. As a young, white South African restaurant manager told him, “Any stupid thing that happens in the States is news all over the world: O.J. Simpson, the Florida election recount ....Actually, I think we have an advantage over you, because we know everything about you and you know nothing about us.”

Hertsgaard, a fine reporter who produced a classic account of the subservience of the press during the Reagan era, was on the road -- and not the American road either -- when the World Trade Center towers crumbled. He was in the middle of the second of two global meanderings that, since 1991, have taken him to more than 30 countries on an American-saturated planet.

From polluted Chinese cityscapes to South African slums, he has pursued the complex ways that the rest of the world comes to grips with an ever more in-your-face American presence. In fact, nothing is more striking in his account than the fact that you can land anywhere, ask anyone what he or she thinks of us and get a generally intelligent, even nuanced response. Yes, some out there do hate us with a passion, and others are riveted to simple-minded images of American wealth and glamour from our TV shows and movies that circle the world at nearly the speed of money. But most of Hertsgaard’s interviewees, to the extent that we glimpse them, seem to have come to more complex conclusions about who we are. Their views of us, he claims, are light-years more sophisticated than ours of them. Perhaps the disparity between what they know about us and what most of us don’t know about them isn’t that surprising. After all, they live in our growing imperial “shadow,” while, until recently, most Americans haven’t cared to notice the shadow we cast, nor have our media (a point Hertsgaard dwells on) made it their business to offer us much help with the task.

Unfortunately, Hertsgaard’s book is something of a rant -- invigorating at moments, but more often one-dimensional and unexpectedly expectable -- and in the end it is not so much about what foreigners think of us as what Hertsgaard thinks of us.

Everyone senses that we’ve reached a defining moment in our history, but how to define that moment? In the best of the critical pieces now being written about America in the world -- and they’re articles, not books -- you can sense writers reaching almost desperately for historical analogies that might orient us: the Roman Empire, the British Empire, prewar Hitlerian Germany, the Spanish-American War, World War I. Hertsgaard senses this too. You can feel his palpable disappointment that the terrorist attacks last year did not open his country up to the world in a new way or to a more honest assessment of our acts in it. Our assurance that we know what’s best for a planet of which we’re largely ignorant, and the media coverage that nurtures such ignorance, clearly drive him to distraction.

But facing a new age, he’s fallen back on a tired set of plaints about American faults, a familiar critical litany in an exceedingly unfamiliar moment. Hertsgaard has organized his book into “a sort of dialogue ... between how foreigners and Americans perceive the United States.” He lists 10 conflicting perceptions that foreigners have about us (“America is parochial and self-centered, America is rich and exciting ... Americans are philistines ... “) around which he structures his book. And he’s capable of using striking details from his travels to illustrate his categories -- like the two South African gangs named the Young Americans and the Ugly Americans. (When he asks the difference, the answer is: “The Young Americans dress like Americans. The Ugly Americans shoot like Americans.”) But for all his traveling, the foreigners he introduces us to seem unidimensional and oddly lifeless.

There is an honored place in life for a rant. It can clear the head and provoke the brain to think again. Sometimes Hertsgaard’s riffs do just that. For instance, his take on that “stenographer to power,” the media -- “The biggest political joke in America is that we have a liberal press” -- is fierce, bracing and to the point. But too often he does what he praises most of his interviewees for not doing: taking all America in with a single gulp of generalization. (Are we really “friendly but boorish, clever but shallow, prosperous but lonely”? Are we truly “suckers for a happy ending”?)

The attacks of Sept. 11 seem to have flattened his book and thrown it into some disarray. It may, in fact, be less a book than a collection of angry memos to us, to foreigners about us, and to himself. It could be worse. The limits of mainstream criticism have recently proved so confining that there’s relief simply in encountering Hertsgaard’s anger and in picking up one major point. Until the next set of terrorists appear, we live in an ever more gated and self-involved nation on an all-American planet. You only have to try to imagine a Chinese or Afghan Hertsgaard traveling the vast provincial empire of America, asking, “Why do you hate us? What do you think of us?” The result would undoubtedly be a short book indeed.

What a shame that “The Eagle’s Shadow” feels stale and airless. We needed a jolt from a book like this. Soon enough, those years when Hertsgaard was traveling the planet may look like an era of benign neglect now that the emboldened leaders of our “oblivious empire” are readying us for a trip between Iraq and ruin. They seem intent on ensuring that no one out there will forget us for a long time to come.