I'm continuing my series of Q&As with individuals who have strong opinions on the America-Europe divide. Martha Bayles, an old friend of mine, writes cultural criticism for The Wall Street Journal, The Wilson Quarterly and other publications too numerous to mention. We first met in 1994 when I interviewed her about her book, Hole In Our Soul, an acute study of the state of American popular music. Martha and her husband, the political scientist, Peter Skerry, were living in Washington DC at the time. After a brief stint in California, they're now back on the East Coast. As well as teaching at Boston College and Boston University, and building up air-miles on regular trips to Europe, Martha blogs on film at the ArtsJournal.com site, Serious Popcorn. She's currently at work on a book about US public diplomacy.
We did the interview by e-mail. I've added links where appropriate.
Q - Do Americans - opinion-makers and "ordinary" people alike - realize how poor America's international image actually is?
Most opinion-makers are aware of the problem, but given the polarization of political debate these days, they tend to give only two explanations: "They hate us because we're so good," and "They hate us because we're so evil." To some degree, these extremes are reflected in popular opinion. But I suspect most Americans have not really gotten the message about our poor image. As many visitors have remarked, the United States is a huge country, a universe unto itself. The only foreigners most Americans ever meet are those who have struggled to immigrate here, which of course only reinforces the feeling that the whole world wants to be like us.
Q - There's a school of thought that MTV will be America's secret weapon in the war against Islamic fundamentalism? If Europe has fallen in love with American pop culture, why shouldn't the Middle East go the same way?
First of all, Europe's love of American popular culture was forged half a century ago, when we were exporting Duke Ellington, not 50 Cent. For all its liberating message to people living under the Nazis and Soviets, American popular culture in the 1940s and 50s was not a counterculture in the 1960s sense. Even during the Sixties (and later), it made sense to continue exporting pop culture, because, as people like Vaclav Havel will attest, America's counterculture had a way of becoming the counterculture of Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union.
But I doubt this will work today. First, much of what we export is not counterculture but gutter culture; and second, we export it to socially conservative countries that do not have a robust concept of artistic freedom. We might make friends if we sent the best, but at the moment we seem to be making enemies by sending the worst.
Q - A decade after publication of "Hole in Our Soul", are you more or less pessimistic about American pop music?
More pessimistic and, I might add, less interested. My impression is that music no longer holds centre-stage, especially for the young, who are too engrossed in the Internet, video games, and other media to care passionately about a widely shared body of music. They download what they like from a huge and eclectic marketplace, then move on to other things. The possible exception is hip-hop, but that doesn't make me feel better, because when Eminem starts looking like an old master compared with, say, Lil Jon (the current king of "crunk"), then you know something is wrong.
I've been writing about hip-hop lately, and it depresses me. Not since the height of nineteenth-century minstrelsy have so many Americans derived so much enjoyment from seeing so many demeaning racial stereotypes. And today the issue is global. The women's magazine Essence recently launched an online debate about the image of black women in rap videos, and according to former editor Diane Weathers, that debate now includes Africans: "They are disgusted by what their African-American brothers and sisters are doing in entertainment. They wonder if we've lost our minds."
Q - Some Americans argue that the European media are so hopelessly biased against the US that there's no point even trying to overcome their prejudice. Do you sympathize with that point of view?
Nah. You don't know till you try, and we haven't been trying. I don't think the European media are about to change their tune about President Bush and his administration. But maybe they could be brought around to not dumping on 290 million other Americans?
Q - Is the central problem anti-Americanism or anti-Bushism?
The two are hard to separate, since so many of the warts, boils, cankers, and running sores attributed to Dubya are also attributed to the rest of us, especially if we live in a red state like Texas. My own state, Massachusetts, is so blue, "Deep Indigo" could be its official song. So I hear Bush-bashing all day. But it bores me. My not very political mother used to express her hatred of Richard Nixon by draping a dish-towel over the TV whenever he appeared. From watching her do that, I learned that hating politicians is a waste of energy and proof of political naivete. As for hating whole countries... well, that's just dumb.
Q - If you were given Karen Hughes' job as head of public diplomacy, what would be your first steps?
1) Demand plenipotentiary powers. 2) Exhume Benjamin Franklin and send him back to France. 3) Sponsor a traveling theatre group performing the Oresteia in Arabic. 4) Hire an assistant who in addition to being Egyptian and speaking Arabic (like Dina Powell) is a Muslim, not a Coptic Christian.
Q - What's the most common European misunderstanding about American life? And the most common American misperception about Europeans?
Hard questions! To the first, I would say religion. We recently had a visitor from France, a scholar who is the daughter of Algerian Muslim immigrants, and she was very surprised to learn that evangelical Protestantism is not something new in America but our oldest and most deeply ingrained religious tradition, excluding Indian beliefs. (By the way, it is now politically correct to say "Indian" instead of "Native American.") Anyway, the Bible-thumpers we have always had with us. Not only that, but they have always been involved in politics. Just to cite two examples: the abolitionists, including Frederick Douglass, were motivated by strong biblical religion; and so was the 1960s civil rights movement. On the latter topic I recommend a recent book by the historian David Chappell (not the comedian) called A Stone of Hope. It highlights the way most academic historians have neglected the religious aspect of the whole movement, not just Dr. King but the rank and file. This perennial aspect of American political culture is in bad odour these days, because it is active on the right, as opposed to the left. But it has always been there, and I do not believe it is "taking over," any more than it ever has.
American misconceptions about Europeans could fill a library. As I said earlier, Americans are amazingly insular, a fact that can be comic, tragic, or just plain infuriating, depending on the context.
Culturally I feel both sides are losing their way, due to a shared misunderstanding of what it means to be democratic. The American Scholar, a famous 1837 essay by my fellow New Englander, Ralph Waldo Emerson, throws a tight-rope across the culture gap between fretful, inferior America and serene, superior Europe, and invites the audience to cross.
My touchstone here is a seeming contradiction in Emerson's argument. In one passage he praises modern literature for paying attention to "the near, the low, the common"; in another he condemns "the mind of this country" for being "taught to aim at low objects." To sort out this out, we need only ponder what Emerson means by "low." In the first instance, he is referring to people of humble origin and modest means, the daily round, and local and regional life as opposed to aristocratic heroes, exalted deeds, and fabled foreign lands. In the second, he is speaking about the baser aspects of human nature, its vices and failings.
If this interpretation does not leap out at us, it is because the two meanings of "low" have become tangled. We think of our societies as democratic, yet increasingly, the lesson being conveyed to young people not only by the grossness of popular culture at its worst, but also by much of what passes for higher education, is that the sensibilities of those at the bottom of society are necessarily base, and that equality consists in privileging that baseness over anything that resembles liberal learning, because the latter is just a fig leaf over elite greed.
The logic is similar to that of the old aristocratic idea that the "lower orders" are morally inferior to their "betters." Emerson took strong exception to this notion, and held up America as a country where, ideally, virtue and cultivation could abide among the low, and vice and vulgarity could be recognized and corrected among the high. I find this a congenial ideal.
Q - What do you consider the best American and European films of the last decade?
Could we skip this one, please? Not because there haven't been any good ones, but because I can never answer questions like this. My mind goes blank.
Q - Is there a solution to Hollywood's current box office malaise? What do you think of the red-state view that the "values gap" is to blame?
The solution is to make going to the movies an appealing prospect, which it is not. Long before we humble consumers figured out that we were not alone in preferring to watch DVDs at home, the industry had us pegged. For some years now, Hollywood has been happy to take its real profits from shiny little discs ("Blood Out Tha Wazoo! Own it now!") than from all those dreadful cineplexes with their icky decor, endless ads and previews, crummy projection and sound, and sticky floors.
Yet much as I dislike cineplexes, I regret the prospect of no more movie-going. Like railroads, movie theaters are so full of memories and meanings, it hurts to think of them as obsolete. At the moment such feelings attach mainly to those theaters that have a sense of place and history. Fortunately, many of these in the States are now part of a chain called Landmark, which does a pretty good business showing first-run independent and foreign films. But Landmark theatres do not exist in many parts of the country, and that leaves millions stuck with the choice between cineplex and home. I wonder, then, why some smart entrepreneur doesn't enter this market with a new kind of cineplex.
Think Borders. Think Starbucks. Millions of people gravitate to these places, because while not historic or exclusively highbrow, they offer pleasant, interesting surroundings and fare suited to human beings over the age of 12. Why not do the same with a chain of small, classy movie theatres? They could even serve latte!
Q - You say in your recent Wilson Quarterly article on public diplomacy [see end of post for full text] that Hollywood films no longer portray American values in a positive light. Is there any way of correcting this without resorting to censorship?
I don't think I put it quite so sweepingly, but there is reason to worry about the increasingly coarse and violent tone of movies (and the rest of popular culture). In his book, The New American Militarism, military historian Andrew Bacevich notes the recent heightening of Hollywood's usual tendency to glorify high-tech warfare against dehumanized enemies. And I must say, this aspect of many blockbusters, even those occurring in fantasy universes, is troubling. "Hollywood" is not a monolith, of course. For all the debasement, it can still work wonders. But even the best films often violate the norms of reticence still honored by most people in the United States, never mind overseas. Our entertainment industry now operates with less constraint than ever, and foreign governments have lost their grip on what their people can see and hear. This new freedom confers many blessings. But it also drives a global version of what the old Hollywood moguls called "a race to the bottom."
Q - If you could move to a European city, which would it be?
Berlin or London, because of the terrific people I know there.
Q - What's the most important attribute Americans could learn from Europeans? And vice-versa?
Americans could take a few lessons in how to behave in public places, and how to deal with people who do not happen to speak their language. Europeans could learn how to treat all kinds of people with the same casual friendly respect. I am describing the lessons taught by ideal types on both sides, of course.
****My thanks to Martha for sparing the time to answer my questions.
****Go here to read the previous Transatlantic Voices interview with Jeff Gedmin, of the Aspen Institute.
****UPDATE: See below for the full text of Martha's Wilson Quarterly article, "Goodwill Hunting".
It's safe to say that a lot of people on both Left and Right will be irritated by Forgive Us Our Spins, Jesse Larner's biography of Michael Moore. The film maker's fans won't like seeing their hero's reputation taken to the cleaners by a writer who's every bit as left-wing as the big man himself. (I was pleasantly surprised to find that Guardian columnist George Monbiot was willing to supply a glowing blurb on the cover.) And Larner offers no end of incendiary comments about American conservatism in general and George W. Bush in particular. I don't go along with many of his observations on the American scene: for instance, we've just had an e-mail disagreement about Joe Lieberman, whose political demise has brought a smile to Jesse's face. But what I admire about his work is his willingness to face up to some of the myth-making on his own side. As he explained in our first interview last year, he generally agrees with Dave Kopel's detailed, must-read critique of Fahrenheit 9/11 and David Hardy's debunking of Bowling for Columbine. A: Never heard a word from them about the UK edition. I tried very hard to get an interview with him, but never did. There's really no percentage for him in talking to someone like me: I can't offer him national exposure and I won't let him control the interview.
