Crazy Americans

I have been waiting for an excuse to put up this poster.  It gives a rather fractured view of America, and that is perfect for my topic of the day: Crazy Americans.

It’s no surprise to most Americans to learn that news coverage of the United States is skewed in some countries to unfavorable stories.  If there’s something bad happening, it will get a lot of attention.  A child who murders his parents, check. Rogue businessmen like Bernie Madoff, check.  Hurricanes and floods, check.  

In Russia there's an element of schadenfreude in the coverage of negativity to the U.S. at points around the world.  Troubles in Libya and Egypt?  The U.S. deserves it!  The U.S. meddles in the Middle East and meddles in Russian internal affairs and doesn't understand the resentment it causes.  How presumptuous it is for the United States to push its values onto other people!

American values are well known here -- America is all about consumerism.  Russians see American movies and American television shows and it is obvious that Americans live extraordinarily well.  Of course there's a criminal element and resulting violence in the U.S., but for the most part ordinary Americans live a rather trouble-free life.  

Judging ordinary life through what is shown in movies and on television may present a skewed view.    Two Russian women with whom I had tea yesterday got into a discussion of “Pretty Woman” and whether or not Julie Roberts accurately represented prostitutes in America.  (They quickly decided it would be highly unlikely to come across a suave client like Richard Gere.)

There is another type of impression that is fostered in Russia and perhaps elsewhere.  It is of crazy Americans and the weird things they do.

One news story this week was about a college professor in Iowa who asserts that Jesus Christ was a Muslim.  Since it didn’t make sense to me to think that Jesus could be an adherent of a religion that didn’t exist in his lifetime, I had to go to the Internet to check out the story.  It turned out that there is indeed a crackpot who redefined Islam as not dependent upon the primacy of Mohammed as a prophet.  The guy said that Islam isn’t really a religion but a system of social justice, and Jesus Christ was all about social justice, too.  Did American newspapers waste much ink on this story?  I doubt it.

Radio C broadcast a report about “an acoustic cat” that the CIA spent $20 million on to be a spy.  But on its very first outing, in Washington, DC, the cat went splat when it was hit by a taxi.  There’s a Wikipedia article about this apparently true episode from the 1960s, when miniaturization of electronics wasn't yet particularly successful.  The story has been around for years.  Why is it reported as news in 2012?

An article I remember from years ago in a respected publication called “Argumenti [and] Fakti” was a compilation of outdated laws that were still on the books in the United States. They were the sort of triviliality that gets ignored because they’re not important enough to repeal them.  A quick check of Google brought up some of these from LegalZoom.  In Missouri it’s illegal to drive down the highway with an uncaged bear in your car.  And when parking your elephant at a meter in Orlando Florida, you must deposit the same amount of change as you would for a regular motor vehicle.

Somewhere in the United States there is a very lazy Russian journalist.  He may be, as one person said to me today, “a couch tomato.”  Once a week he gets up and goes to a local supermarket and buys the tabloids.  He looks for news of the weird, and translates it into Russian.  On a slow news day he goes through his stacks of old papers or checks the web.  

This material may be true, but is it real?  What is the real America?