EXCUSE ME FOR ASKING, but do you feel Bloated? Callous and Vain, perhaps? How about Schizo and Talky, Robotic and Obvious and Cutthroat? No? Not even the teensiest bit Powerless and Shortsighted? Then the patriotic editors of the New York Times Magazine have a simple question for you: You call yourself an American?
They’d never come right out and demand an answer, of course; editors at the New York Times are decorous ladies and gentlemen. But the question rises implicitly from every page of the June 8 number of the Times Sunday magazine. This was a special issue, a plump and portentous project, titled ” How the World Sees Us.” From 18 countries the editors ingathered prestigious contributors. How prestigious? “Three Nobelists; leaders from the world of finance, advertising and media; chefs,” and so on. Very prestigious, in other words. The Times asked each to delineate some aspect of the American character, and the responses took the form of brief essays or transcribed interviews. Each contribution was given a one-word title — the adjectives (Robotic, Schizo, etc.) you see above. Also Trendy, Assertive, Relentless, Fleeting, and Hellbent. As an instance of How the World Sees Us, the special issue is unreliable; but as an instance of How the New York Times Sees Us, it is definitive.
Of course, not all the contributions were derisive. Some verged on the complimentary. The British historian John Keegan, in “Powerful,” points out that we have a beefy, well-armed military, some of whose officers are even black. The Greek journalist/rich person Taki says we’re Forgiving, and the German historian Josef Joffe, in a splendid opening essay, opines that the United States is rightly a model for the world. Two management consultants from Italy, whose names are too long to print here, think we’re Plucky.
Not surprisingly, many of these compliments are backhanded. A novelist from Moscow named Victor Pelevin searched and searched and discovered something to love about America: our bold, expressive, colorful . . . graffiti. (Russian graffiti are totally derivative, complains this self-hater.) A young German Internet expert thinks Americans are “cool”; yet his only evidence is the 1960s sitcom Hogan’s Heroes, which tends to undercut his argument. Vikram Chandra admires the technical proficiency and big budgets of Hollywood movies — especially (he’s a writer) the big budgets — but gosh, they’re so soulless. In the end he decides he prefers “cheesey Hindi movies with half- naked guys and babes dancing in the rain.” Who can blame him?
But mostly the tone of the Times’s special issue is unmitigated contempt. In the specific examples the contempt is scattershot, often contradictory, but this seems not to matter to the editors. Gina Lollabrigida, who’s been chunking up steadily since her starlet days, complains in “Vain” that Yank gals are obsessed with dieting. In “Bloated,” the Brit writer Marina Warner says we’re too fat. “Bigness still defines America,” she writes, “but a bigness grown pillowy and flaccid and fluffy and fat like baby flesh.” A fat Bigness? A Big fatness? Are we all really, as Gene Wilder said to Zero Mostel in The Producers, “big fat fat fat fatties”? Surely this is an odd charge to bring against the country that has offered Tyra Banks to the world. But Marina Warner’s view is too large to be restrained by evidence. “This nexus of ideas,” she continues, “[has] buried phallic hardness under an esthetic of polymorphous billowing flesh.” So there.
Speaking of phallic hardness, Arnon Grunberg’s got a problem. In the American vernacular: He ain’t gettin’ any. He’s from the Netherlands but lives in Manhattan, and you would not believe the look his English teacher gave him when he tried to sleep with her. “You’re my student,” she protested. These Americans! So uptight! “Americans are unembarrassable,” says Martin Amis. “They’ll invite a camera crew into their toilet out of a general openness.” These Americans! So uninhibited!
Are you confused? It would take a Nobel prizewinner to straighten this whole thing out, and the Times, as noted, has not one but three. Wole Soyinka, perhaps the greatest belletrist in all of Nigeria, clears it up like so: “Americans are so open, so uninhibited, but it’s really all a facade. You censor language, you censor conduct.” Not like in Nigeria. Then again, ” something must be done about this shameless glorification of self-exposure. It’s something my society would find soul-destroying.” Better to keep busy with something wholesome and soul-enriching, like starving all the Biafrans.
Soyinka’s views, though incoherent, at least have the virtue of originality. It’s not every day that Americans are told they could improve their country by making it more like Nigeria. Most of the other contributors reach for pre- packaged criticisms. To recap: Americans, say the Times experts, are too fat and diet too much; they’re straitlaced Puritans with no sense of privacy or shame. Does the special issue omit any anti-American cliches? No, they are all here. The Times overlooks nothing. It is the newspaper of record.
Thus: “Once they gave me a bottle of [Budweiser] in Texas,” says a Belgian master brewer. “I said: ‘This is reinvented water. You don’t need a brewery to bottle water.’ It’s an alcoholized soft drink.” My God — European brewers don’t like American beer? “You Americans may have everything but you don’t have this: Our fervent, expressive passion,” says Mayra Montero, a novelist who hails from that volcano of unfettered self-expression, Cuba. Another writer, Britain’s Ian Hamilton, complains that when he writes for American publications, they often ask him to check his facts. (Barbarians!) The result, he thinks, is a loss of joie d’ecrire, as the British say.
There is not, in truth, a great deal of joie in the special issue’s ecrire, either. Even what were once thought to be virtues prove deficient when measured by the Times’s contributors. Oral hygiene, for example. “Those with perfect teeth unwittingly suffer a loss,” writes yet another German. ” They cannot appreciate the idea that natural diversity or incompleteness is part of a person’s character.” I myself would have thought that people with little gray stumps on their gums were the ones suffering a loss, but what do I know? I’m an American — a Yankee — a jingo — a flosser.
But enough, enough. It would surely devastate the Times editors — who prize sophisticated hipness, being ahead of the curve, above all — to point out that there is something hopelessly retrograde about their orgy of anti- Americanism. It seems so . . . so 1983. The Soviet Union’s collapsed, Reagan’s retired, and the Times’s editors have yet to scrape the “U.S. Out of Nicaragua” bumperstickers from their Volvos. They should get hep to the times. How about a special issue devoted to “How We See Them”? On Britain: Can they learn to bathe? France: If we invade, will they fight back this time? India: What’s with those suits? And, yes, Germany: Nothing a little fluoride can’t fix. The great anti-American cliche once had to do with ” getting on the right side of history.” It is of course unreasonable to expect the editors of the New York Times to avoid cliches. But we still might get them to switch sides.
Senior editor Andrew Ferguson wrote last week’s cover story on John Kasich.
