COMMENT
303
of response on the collective level as it does on the personal. As the
contradictions are prolonged, frustration inevitably leads to
hostility. Because policymakers here do not take sufficient account
of, or do not account at all for, this double image, they are baffied
and annoyed at what often appears as the sheer nonsense that arises
so often in U.S.-Third World relations.
The popularity and dissemination of our movies, television
shows, and rock music-which blares as loudly across the savannas
in Africa as it does on the streets of New York City - presents audi–
ences in the Third World with a one-dimensional illusion that they
take for the real thing; they see the abundance, the excesses, of our
culture without seeing its human cost.
In
Nairobi in 1979, where I
was stationed with one of the U. N. agencies,
Superman
was playing
at the local movie theater, the Academy Awards presentations were
being broadcast over Kenyan television, and the taxi driver who
drove me to my hotel was singing along with Elton John and Linda
Ronstadt on his car radio, though he had difficulty conducting a
conversation with me in English. Out in the bush, one finds a
communal television flickering images of "Carol Burnett," "I Love
Lucy," and "Kojak" into villages that, in all other respects, are the
same as they were one hundred or more years ago. Hearing
American-made rock music or seeing reruns of television shows in
this context, one is immediately struck by the sheer energy of it
all- the amplified, frenetic electronics, the endless car chases and
escapades (so different, even, from the slower pace of European
movies). No wonder we are perceived as having a power far beyond
what we actually possess. One also sees in this context how trivial
and self-indulgent and how filled with innumerable gadgets the
world of our TV sit-corns and movies appears. The audiences in the
Third World see these entertainment fantasies and, because this is
all they see, they assume them to be real. They do not see us bone
tired from our work, nor do they know the wrenching personal
sacrifices, the disruptive social fragmentation, that has occurred to
fuel our society's competitive drives. They see our perpetually
smiling, back-slapping politicians and businessmen, and they mis–
take what is actually a self-conscious, studied style of casualness for
the arrogance of ease itself. How much more in common they must
feel with the stiff, grim patriarchs of the Soviets, who speak of
struggle and sacrifice and the glorification of the common laborer, or
with their recently oil-rich Third World partners, who cling to
traditional religious and social patterns even as they accumulate
Mercedes and Lear jets.
