US: The most popular kid in school

By Deauwand Myers

There's a kind of paradoxical, even nonsensical dynamic at work when some people encounter Americans. On the one hand, people admire and envy the accomplishments of the world's longest democratic experiment, one that's built the wealthiest, most powerful nation in human history.

I've lived in China, Japan, and Korea. Lots of citizens in those respective countries admire America. For all the nationalist fervor (and anti-Western rhetoric) ginned up by the Xi administration of China, or the anti-American beef protests during the Lee Administration in Korea, wealthy and middle-class Chinese and Koreans often send their children to American high schools and universities.

In the 2012-2013 school year, American tertiary education welcomed the highest number of international students in history, with 819,644 undergraduate and graduate students, many of them from China. (Chinese enrollment in American colleges and universities increased by 21 percent, nearly a quarter of a million people). Koreans, Chinese, and Indian students make up nearly half of all international students entering institutions of higher learning in the U.S.

On the other hand, particularly during and after George W. Bush's disastrous presidency, there's the critique of America's role in the world; its involvement in foreign countries (the United States has bombed fourteen Muslim nations over the past generation or so); its hyper-consumption of the world's resources, far and away the highest, per capita, of any nation; its ethnocentric, myopic view of the international community, and its religious, anti-science, individualistic philosophy on guns, universal healthcare, social welfare programs, and social justice issues.

I've encountered this viewpoint, about the brutish, spoiled, ill-mannered American needing a good dressing down, while living in Japan. A few years after September 11th, out of the blue, a British national said to me in the break room at work: "No one cares about 9/11. It happened. So what?" I said to him, in effect, "You're rude and you lack breeding." Then I left.

Anyone who reads my work knows I'm all for a vigorous critique of America. I tell other fellow Americans: patriotism and nationalism are two very different things. Being proud of your country means you praise its virtues and critique its faults. Nationalism is, in the end, a kind of destructive religion enabling a nation's decline and ultimate ruin.

Many American conservatives miss this point. They often whitewash the evils of America's past: the genocide and land theft of the indigenous people of America, slavery, Jim Crow, the creation of banana republics, etc. Denying or obfuscating about America's sins and challenges means a possible repetition of past ills, and never resolving social injustices hindering our union.

However, critiques, unsubstantiated by facts, are where I draw the line. A reader's correspondence about one of my articles on American foreign policy asserted some things about America I had to correct. A European, he argued America's safety net was not as generous as it could or should be due to its belief in self-actualization and the vigorous defense of individualism.

He's right, up to a point. America as a land of opportunity buttressed by a meritocracy is one of the central myths in the United States' ethos: Work hard, and you'll succeed. Thinking people know this to be, kindly, an incomplete ideal. More harshly, it's an untruth. Plenty of people, particularly colored women, work hard, and have worked hard, for generations, and haven't much to show for it.

Single, American black women's wealth averages about $100, even as they're nearly at parity with their Asian and white counterparts in achieving tertiary education. One hundred dollars; let that sink in for a minute. Moreover, black women support their households, extended family, churches and mosques, and their community disproportionately more than any other demographic, all while working longer hours for less pay to boot.

The reader argued America spends the majority of its budget on the military. America spends more on its military than the next eight nations combined ($640 billion in 2013), but that's very different from saying the majority of the American budget is spent on war and defense. The notion that America's military budget is its biggest expenditure is patently false. Around 19 percent of the American budget is devoted to the military, while over 75 percent is allocated for social programs (Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare, for examples).

Empirical evidence is a beautiful thing. I get that being the most popular kid in school is sometimes tough: The envy. The jealousy. The simultaneous edifying and denunciation. Yet, America saved the world from fascism, helped win the Cold War, and may very well keep the new, red wave of an ascendant China from washing over the earth. All this, without asking for money, or even gratitude. The kid's popular for a reason, and it's not just because of her/his new shoes or good looks, either.

Deauwand Myers holds a master's degree in English literature and literary theory, and is an English professor outside Seoul. He can be reached at deauwand@hotmail.com.