|
April 11, 2003
The American Nice Guyism
The people of America bend backwards to be nice and friendly among themselves as well as with foreigners. In their zeal to retain the image of nice guyism, they go to extremes rarely witnessed in other societies and give rise sometimes to very amusing, if not ludicrous, situations.
In their invasion of Iraq, their troops have kept distributing food packets and water to the Iraqi villagers while moving towards Baghdad and decimating Saddam’s war machine and citadels in unprecedented aerial bombings. They appeared as keen to eliminate Saddam and his regime as to project their image as “nice guys” whose occupation of the country would replace a tyrannical rule.
At home, a computer program is called in this spirit of ‘nice-guyism’ as ‘user friendly’, a car is projected as ‘driver-friendly’, a laxative as ‘bowels-friendly’. The manufacturers of laxatives - usually harsh - appear wary of being labeled as harsh and unfriendly just because their laxatives are.
The need to be nice and friendly is so consuming in this country that even a veterinarian would be afraid of prescribing a harsh laxative for a badly constipated dog lest he is regarded as animal unfriendly.
The blacks, who constitute the largest minority in the country, are now referred to as African-Americans and not as Negroes, for the latter term is regarded as pejorative like the word ‘rafeeq’ used for Pakistanis in Saudi Arabia.
A midget is ‘a person of small stature’; a queer male, a homosexual, is a ‘gay’ and a queer homosexual female is a ‘lesbian’. A jail is a ‘correctional facility’. Yet, many first time offenders step out of it so corrected and conditioned as to seek a quick return to their friends inside and to their peculiar subculture.
The military rules debarring gays from entry into the armed services were contended as discriminatory and therefore unfriendly to gays. Accepting this contention, ex-President, Bill Clinton, modified the rules allowing the entry of gays into military service. Don’t ask, don’t tell, was the only condition prescribed. But such niceties are of little relevance to those already out of the closet and flaunting their queer conduct in the name of gay and lesbian pride.
One can only imagine the outcome of this friendly decision on the devil-may-care gays in the military barracks. The formula of ‘don’t ask and don’t tell’ holds no significance once the body language takes over.
Fact of the matter is that you cannot call a spade a spade in this country as that would be too unfriendly. Even a lavatory which was once called a toilet or washroom is now, more euphemistically, called a rest-room. That is a very appropriate term, as that is the only place in the hustle and bustle of the modern day workplace where a shirker can find rest without raising an eyebrow.
In the commercial airplanes though a lavatory is still called a lavatory, as it is perhaps too small and unstable in a turbulent weather to admit of any rest.
A traffic police officer would give you a big American smile involving both rows of teeth, address you by your first name in an informal, friendly manner and only then hand over to you the traffic violation ticket. That nice and friendly act might cost you literally hundreds and denude you of all your meager savings, if any.
Friendliness is a matter of life and death to a people who want to live by the maxim: the country is full of nice guys. By the same token, even a stranger is a friend you haven’t met yet. The American nice guys are so thoughtful of the sensitivities of strangers that they seldom stop and think of the appropriate approach to each individual. They simply give their big smile with an automatic: ‘Hi, how you doing”. That should take care of every thing.
During the 1980 Presidential campaign, Joseph Kraft, a syndicated columnist, wrote: “The emergence of President Carter and Ronald Reagon as the nearly certain nominees of their parties, expresses not a failure of the system, but a true translation of how much the majority prefers nice men to effective measures.”
The defeat many years earlier of the eminent intellectual Presidential candidate, Adlai Stevenson, at the hands of a grin-gifted Gen. Eisenhower, was nothing but a reflection of the preference of the people for a friendly, nice guy to an erudite, awesome intellectual.
In the last Presidential election too, the top contestants - Gore and Bush - weighed almost equally on the electors’ scale of nice guyism. Their agendas overlapped. As for national issues, Ralph Nader and Pat Buchanan offered some very interesting viewpoints. But to an ordinary voter, they struck as risky radicals and therefore not like the typical American nice guys one could depend upon.
George Bush fitted fully the profile of a nice American guy, despite his ignorance of the names of foreign leaders including that of the Chief Executive of Pakistan. His charming, disarming smile - his opponents derogatorily called it a ‘smirk’ - might have attracted the few hundred crucial votes that made all the difference.
“We want a President”, remarked Florence King, a prominent American satirist, “who is as much like an American tourist as possible. Someone with the same goofy grin, the same innocent intentions, the same naïve trust, a President with no conception of foreign policy and no discernible connection to the US government, whose Nice Guyism will narrow the gap between the US President and us until no body can tell the difference.”
There is a near consensus in the US that Iran poses a great threat to its security. A variety of factors might have led to such an opinion. For instance, the labeling of Iran as a ‘terrorist state’ by the US foreign office, the ruling clergy’s ‘fundamentalism’, the revolutionary changes in the social structure of Iran that do not square with the American value system, the alleged support of Iran to Islamic ‘radicals and terrorists’ in foreign lands and Iran’s aversion to Israel, the darling state of America.
Besides these ostensible factors, however, there could be a deeper and generally unidentified cause. The late Ayatollah Khomeini had conferred the title of the ‘Great Satan’ on the US. This label traumatized and affronted the susceptibilities of the American people so very conscious of their image as a friendly nation -a nation of nice guys.
It could be pointed out here that military dictators, foamy revolutionaries -Castro of Cuba, for instance- and war-lords are day in and day out heaping abuses on America, but they are not considered as potent adversaries. For, they say it is the American government we detest, not the American people who are quite nice and friendly.
Ayatollah Khomeini, on the other hand, had lumped together the American government, the American people, the American life-style, in short every thing American under the same category of ‘Great Satan’. That was simply unacceptable and it has continued to rankle even to this day: How dare you call us -the nice guys- by this hateful epithet?
The government is, on the other hand, regarded as fair game. All vociferous Americans appear bent upon saving the nation from its own government, as mentioned by Florence King. The government, at the same time, said the satirist, does not tire of presenting an image of being manned by a bunch of altruistic, nice guys. Gratuitous critics, however, point out that the nice guys of this country were the last to set the slaves free and the first to drop the atomic bomb.
Millions of cynics at home and abroad, who have taken to the streets to protest against the war in Iraq, attribute unpalatable motives to the inner ruling circle despite its constant efforts to present itself as the liberator of the people of Iraq and the harbinger of peace and prosperity to the region. In the absence of any genuine move towards a settlement of the Arab-Israel question, it is often pointed out, the altruistic declarations would continue to sound hollow and stemming from motives other than America’s nice-guyism.
(The writer may be reached by e-mail at: arifhussaini@hotmail.com or by post at: 4385 Rocky Point Rd., Anaheim Hills, CA 92807. April 3, 2003)
| 
