©2005 UrbisMedia
In 2002 I was giving some lectures on American Public Administration at four universities in Beijing. I wasn’t convinced that American style PA was transportable to China; there, and are, were too many significant differences between our countries. I was trying to explain to one of my interpreters that it wasn’t the same thing as importing to China something like the Jeep Cherokee plant that made the vehicle we were riding in at the time. The Jeep was identical to those built in the U.S.; but it was a consumer good, not a system for public decision-making and its administration. Such systems are derivative of the very culture of a society, I explained to her. A Jeep doesn’t care what culture makes it, or drives it.
I realized that I needed some way to communicate this idea to my audiences if I was going to make this point as a basis for other things I wanted to say about American PA. I hit upon an idea as we were having tea a few minutes before my first lecture. I asked the interpreter “what does it mean to be a Chinese?” She hesitated; maybe she had never been asked such a question before and it might have seemed a very strange question to someone who had always lived in China. She answered that to be a Chinese meant that you were born in China, spoke the language and lived the culture of the Chinese people—to be of the Chinese “race.” [1]
It was my turn to hesitate. Then I took out my U.S. Passport and slid it across the table and asked her to have a look at it. She checked the photo and said I looked more “kindly” in person. I said: “That passport is what it means to be an American; an American is a person with U.S. citizenship .” I went on to explain that I could never become a Chinese in the way that she defined it, tat I could never acquire the “ethnicity,” but that she could become an American citizen as people of many races and ethnicities have. The citizenship was really the only thing, and perhaps should be the only thing that makes all Americans “Americans.” We are an amalgam of many cultures, races, even languages, I added.
She appreciated the distinction and I used it to introduce each if the four lectures I was to give in Beijing. I went on to make the point that you can import plans to make a Jeep identical to the one’s we have in the U.S., but a lot of modifications would have to be made in importing American PA.
I recount this anecdote because I now realized that I was also expressing something that resided deeper in me—the notion of American exceptionalism. It is true that American culture comes from rather unique sources; it’s as much an idea as a place. But many people believe more than that. Most people I know, and people I’ve met all over the world, believe that America is special, different, and exception to the history of nations and civilizations. America is a beacon to the world, the land of opportunity, the dream destination of every person from dictatorial, corrupt governments, failed economies, and even stale, tradition-bound democracies. Even people from nations we regard as enemies want to come to America to learn, work and/or live. America is the exception, it established the first truly secular government in history.[2] America is sui generis.
There have been several factors that seemed to buttress this impression. Remember the days when America used to retain its amateurism in the Olympics when rivals like the USSR and East Germany were professionals on performance enhancing drugs? Then came the Dream Team in basketball, professional prima donnas, that represented that winning was more important than principle. There was the America that helped “keep the world safe for democracy” in World wars I and II, but insinuated itself in a civil war in Vietnam and now feels entitled to wage preemptive wars on false pretenses. There was the America that used to conform to the Geneva Conventions even if other nations did not, but now engages in torture, renditions, and illegal detentions. There was the America that preached human rights, but violated its own code. There was the America that stood for truth, but blurred the lines between truth and propaganda with a government that plants “news” stories in various media at home and abroad. There was the America that stood for fairness and equality but lets corporations rob their employees and pursues tax policies that continually expand the distance between rich and poor. There was the America that stood for openness and merit, but where politicians funnel money to favored corporations. The growth of corruption in America is shown to the world when the government of this putatively “most powerful nation in the world” showed its indifference and ineptitude in responding to its own hurricane victims. This is the America that preaches democracy around the world, and yet conducts elections that mirror the corrupt practices of pseudo-democracies, whose politics is ruled by money and favoritism and is conducted with lies and deceptions. There was the America that was founded with clear separation between church and state, and now is eroding that wall with the siege of evangelists who have forgotten that many of its first settlers were refugees from religious persecution in countries where such practice was conducted under “divine right.”
There is now an America that all but stands alone in its view as exceptional, whose current leaders feel no obligation to join treaties such as the Kyoto accords on environment, that scorns the United Nations when it chooses and invokes it when it chooses, and of course, employs its overwhelming military force with bullying self-interest. This American excpetionalism is no longer the exceptionalism of the admiration and respect of others, but of its own arrogance.
The measure of this rapid and profound can be discerned in headlines and on the streets around the world, a world that mostly expressed sympathy and support after the attacks of 9-11 to one that has expressed derision and dismay to the response of America’s ignorant, deceitful and arrogant leadership. That attack came only a few months after I somewhat proudly handed my American passport to that young Chinese interpreter in Beijing and explained one of the reasons I regarded my country was “exceptional.” I can’t do that anymore.
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©2005, James A. Clapp (UrbisMedia Ltd. Pub. 12.14.2005)
[1] There are, of course, considerable exceptions to this. Many Chinese are not born in China, the language has many dialects, and there are Chinese who do not even speak Chinese and have, certainly among the fifty or so “minorities,” quite different cultures. But she was doubtless referring to the central Han ethnic group in China and its speaking of Mandarin Chinese.
[2] See Susan Jacoby, “Original Intent,” Mother Jones , Vol. 20, No. 7, December 2005