Recently, Hurricane Sandy bashed through the East Coast of the United States, flooding areas like New York City, and causing fallen trees and other debris to block a few roadways around my apartment in Washington D.C. Even though the storm was light in comparison to, say, Hurricane Katrina, which wiped out the beautiful city of New Orleans in 2005, it was still severe enough for my mother to call me every 10 minutes, anxiously checking-in on my well-being and offering kindly advice like, “make sure to have a flashlight, extra batteries, and bottles of water for when the power goes out.” It didn’t.
But, interestingly enough, when my mother and I discussed the contrast between inland and coastal areas, and she asked me which bodies of water were near D.C., I paused, thought hard, and had absolutely no idea. For Americans, this is normal. When it comes to geography, we’re clueless.
Americans’ poor knowledge of geography is a leading cause of our absence in knowledge about global affairs, and, in that sense, it is inexcusable, especially given the enormous size and omnipresence of the U.S. military. But, what exactly are the causes of this ignorance? With this article, my hopeful achievement is to explain these causes. My intention being that a global understanding of America’s misunderstandings of geography and global affairs will offer some much needed elucidation to our behavior here and abroad, which should also lead to the exchange of a few antipathies for emphathies abroad, inshallah.
The first step in understanding our lack of geographical insight is to look inside our own geography. Americans are cut off from everyone else. To the east, the Atlantic Ocean keeps Europe, Africa, and the Middle East at bay. To the west, the Pacific does likewise for all of Asia. To the south, we are discouraged both by a tangible metal wall guarded meticulously by xenophobic minutemen and an intangible wall of traumatic news coverage and other horror stories. While to the north, Canada, though with colder temperatures measured in Celsius instead of Fahrenheit, is not all that dissimilar culturally. Essentially, we our geographically isolated.
The theme of isolation also describes our culture. Few Americans could name a Japanese rockband. But, I’ll guarantee you Snookie and the Jersey Shore are known in Tokyo. True, we are a nation of immigrants, not discounting Native Americans, who have inhabited North America for a minimum of 12,000 years; Western Europeans, on the other hand, did not start settling until the late-16th century. Indeed, it has only been in the last 500 years that the majority of Americans arrived here, all coming from someplace else. As of late, however, there is a paradigm shift. Whereas Europe once dominated ethnically, as of this year the majority of babies born here have non-European origins.
We are taught in school that America is a melting pot, where different peoples all come together to form one unified entity. This is obviously a highly simplified rendering, but, for the most part, it’s true. We buy burritos, kabobs, and egg rolls all on the same street. America amalgamates cultures. But it doesn’t import them. Westernization has exported Levi’s to the furthest corners of the earth, but when it comes to popular culture, the current of globalization runs in one direction: downstream.
It’s important to understand that everything in America is commodified. Everything revolves around a capitalist lifestyle, where advertisements, endorsements, and sponsorships are pervasive. Holidays were once just that, holy days, and there were lots of them, mostly determined by seasonal agricultural cycles based on the lunar calendar. Now, we have condensed our holidays, spread them out strategically, and promoted them at every store. For Christian holidays, Saint Nicholas, or Santa Claus, as he exists in his modern form, was invented by an early-20th century advertising campaign from Coca Cola, while Saint Patrick brings charitable liquor sales. For Jewish holidays, Hanukkah has been given primacy by its close proximity to the Christmas buying season. The transformation of this minor Jewish holiday into the biggest of the year speaks to the power of commodification. Islamic holidays are also promoted similarly. For example, the U.S. Postal Service sells stamps that say Eid Mubarak during Ramadan. And just like Nike, Pepsi, and Levi’s, America has become a brandname; a product for sale. It is sold in the U.S. as nationalism and patriotism, while it is marketed abroad as modern progress.
Commodification is not all bad, though. It also drives innovation because companies are always in competition with one another, constantly vying to create a better technology, and ultimately a better-selling product. But, what does this do to news coverage in America? Well, news companies here are just that, companies. Journalism used to be a public service. Now, it is another commodity. So, as a commodity, it has to make money, and it does this through commercial advertisements. Whichever news company has the better news then makes the most money from advertisements. So, news coverage in America is determined by . . . ratings. The news company doesn’t broadcast what’s necessarily most important. Instead, it shows what people want to watch, in order to have the best possible ratings. And what’s most important, is not global affairs, but what’s happening at home, in America. The world’s worst conflict is not Israel-Palestine, but the Congo in Central Africa, where innocent people are suffering tremendously. And what about Darfur, where upwards of 3 million people have been displaced? Or Nigeria, where violence between Muslims and Christians frequently claims the lives of women and children? Or Western China, where the Uighurs, a Turkish-speaking Muslim minority, are persecuted by the Chinese authorities? We don’t see that. None of it.
Hence, the biggest problem: global affairs are deemphasized in American culture. In 2006, CNN polled college students about geography, and, after three years of war, 60% of them did NOT know where Iraq was located on a map. These were college students. Educated youth. Imagine what the majority of Americans, who don’t attend college, know about geography and world affairs. It’s not that we don’t care. It’s that we’re conditioned not to look. We can go weeks at a time without hearing about the war in Afghanistan, even though lives are lost on all sides of that conflict everyday. And as far as showing the violence of war on television news, forget about it. It isn’t like Aljazeera, which broadcasts wounded bodies. We see images of someone shooting, but never the target that is hit. Thus, we are also desensitized, because the human elements of war are a mystery, unheard and unseen.
When it comes to not knowing geography, Americans are guilty as charged. But in some ways, we’re innocent too. Unlike in the newspapers, nothing in real life is black and white.
View the Original article
0 comments:
Post a Comment