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So, returning to Berger's point, the problem is not so much, I
think, that the Third World sees wealth as theft, but rather that it
sees our excesses and cannot understand why some of our apparent
abundance cannot simply be transferred to them - which is, after
all, precisely what they are requesting. In other words, just as we
project onto .these countries an illegitimate past that revises or
evades our own stages of development, they project onto us an illu–
sionary future that skips the progressions of necessary "develop–
mental stages." Until we confront and assume some responsibility
for the unrealistic expectations we have raised, however uninten–
tionally, in the Third World, the situation is not likely to improve. I
should say that I am not particularly optimistic about the outcome.
We Americans, in particular those who make their careers in the
public sector, are too action-oriented to undertake the deflating
ordeal of self-examination, especiall y when something so apparently
superficial as public image is the object of the analysis. At the same
time, the hard-line approach taken by the current administration is
ce rtain to increase the hostility the developing countries feel toward
us, and will probably make their utopian dreams of the future even
more compelling. Many of the Third World countries will probably
slide from their present oligarchic and feudalistic structures into
Soviet-brand socialism, and for the farm laborers and factory
workers in the Third World, little will have changed: instead of
large, land-holding families or the heads of tribes, the elites will be
the Party bureaucrats. America will become the official, rather than
the convenient, enemy ... and "Kojak" will be banned.
