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A call to charms
By
Abid Aslam
WASHINGTON - The United States
government is on a propaganda offensive designed to
blunt a presumed rush to anti-US terrorism and to
convince publics - especially in Arab and Muslim
countries - that the land of the free is also the home
of the tolerant.
The efforts evince a
simultaneous dedication to the proposition that people
abroad must not hate the US and a determination to
ignore the question that so vexed the nation after the
terrorist attacks of September 11: Why do they hate us?
The job of putting a smiling face on Uncle Sam
has fallen to an advertising executive best known for
making famous the beaming face of Uncle Ben, the
African-American rice grower whose copyrighted name and
visage grace a leading brand of quick-cooking rice.
Charlotte Beers, once known as the queen of
Madison Avenue (the New York thoroughfare considered the
advertising industry's hub), has crowned her government
career with a US$15-million "public diplomacy"
television ad campaign that, according to the State
Department, has reached 300 million people around the
world.
Few of them have been in the Arab
countries originally targeted as the audience. Egypt and
Lebanon banned the "Shared Values" ads as paid foreign
propaganda and focus groups in Jordan, assembled to give
an indication of how wider audiences might react, said
the spots left them cold.
One ad featured a
Muslim paramedic with the New York fire department
talking about the religious diversity of his workforce
and another, a headscarf-wearing mother cheering her
pre-teen sons as they played softball with apparently
non-Muslim children.
Beers soon could have other
means of carrying the message to the Middle East:
President George W Bush's 2004 budget request includes
$30 million to set up an Arabic-language TV network.
Also taking up the call to charms, State
Department official-cum-novelist Mark Jacobs has
collected essays by 15 top authors aimed at promoting US
values abroad. The anthology reportedly is being
distributed free at US embassies worldwide (an
anti-propaganda law makes it illegal to disseminate the
works in the US, although they are available on a
government web site aimed at foreign audiences).
Participants in what the foreign ministry termed
an experiment include Jacobs himself; author and
performance artist Elmaz Abinader; poet-novelists Julia
Alvarez and Naomi Shihab Nye; literary essayist Sven
Birkerts; Pulitzer Prize-winning novelists and
short-story writers Robert Olen Butler and Michael
Chabon; poets Billy Collins and Robert Creeley; Civil
War historian David Herbert Donald; novelists Richard
Ford, Linda Hogan and National Book Award recipient
Charles Johnson; fiction writer and English professor
Bharati Mukherjee, and former poet laureate of the US
Robert Pinsky.
"If we were to ask a contemporary
group of American poets, novelists, critics and
historians what it means to be an American writer,
Jacobs proposed, the results could illuminate in an
interesting way certain American values - freedom,
diversity, democracy - that may not be well understood
in all parts of the world," the volume's introduction
states.
Although Beers' marketing targets mass
audiences and Jacobs' the lettered classes, the
statement each makes - that the US treats Muslims and
Arabs well; that it is a pluralist place that greets,
nay encourages, dissent with tolerance - inspire some
degree of disbelief.
When the TV ads hit the
airwaves in Africa, the Middle East and Central and
South Asia, thousands of people from those regions
living in the US had been rounded up, detained without
charges or evidence against them, or subjected to
interrogation on the basis of their ethnicity or
presumed religious affinity.
Citizens of 25
countries deemed suspect have been required to register
with, and undergo additional screening by, immigration
authorities. Thousands reportedly have found themselves
subject to immediate detention and deportation; others
have fled to their home countries or across the border
to Canada - in some cases by dead of mid-winter night
with their children and what few possessions they could
manage to carry - even as their governments protested
Washington singling out their nationals.
In
fairness, there have been countless stories of US
residents standing shoulder-to-shoulder with their
Muslim and Arab neighbors in the face of communal
discrimination since the attacks on the World Trade
Center and the Pentagon.
However, while the US
government touts its record of benevolence, its TV ads
are being contradicted by news of the latest injustices
and insults - a good deal of it from neighbors and
relatives who have fallen victim to the latest US
"homeland security" reflex or who know people who have.
Even if some TV viewers in these countries end
up believing the US line, will this help or hinder
Washington's cause? Will people whose US visa
applications have been rejected feel bitter at having
their noses rubbed in images of the "good life" they
have been denied?
Likewise, Jacobs' experiment
in plugging pluralism comes as the Bush administration
expands its repressive USA Patriot Act and proposes to
supplement it with a Domestic Security Enhancement Act,
apparently modelled on the internal security laws of
countries that Washington is accustomed to lecturing on
human rights.
It follows countless attempts -
some successful, others not - to censor creative
expression: comedian and political commentator Bill
Maher's TV show was pulled from leading markets -
including Washington DC - for statements considered
unpatriotic; musician Steve Earle received demands to
ban his song John Walker's Blues, a song exploring the
psyche of the man who came to be known as "the American
Taliban". Leading US radio chain Clear Channel issued a
list of hundreds of songs and artists not to be aired by
their 1,000-plus stations.
Given the emergence
of an impulse, if not a program quite yet, described as
the "new McCarthyism" for its similarities to the
anti-communist smears and purges of Hollywood and the
cultural establishment in the 1950s, contributors to the
State Department literary anthology could be construed
as making a cautious investment in career security - but
for their solid reputations.
US residents have
long taken for granted many freedoms others only dream
of. This has never been at issue and even the most
jaundiced observer must acknowledge that a relatively
thoughtful Congress has tempered the Bush
administration's most stifling predilections and likely
will trim the proposed security law.
However,
what has irked so many people the world over is that the
US has installed or backed despots and dictators
overseas while hoarding the fruits of democracy at home.
This contradiction, long lamented overseas as
hypocritical, is left untouched by the collection of
essays touting pluralism as a defining US value.
All the same, the writers underscore the notion
that the United States comprises a nation of
individualists - people with wills and voices who are
free to stand apart from the pronouncements of
government. The implications of that position brim with
promise. But celebrating the freedom to dissent is not
the same thing as actually exercising it.
(Inter
Press Service)
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