America...A View From Central Asia
Travel Notes
As a few of you know, I’ve decamped from the US to Central Asia, and this has given me a golden opportunity to think about….the US.
By one token, the US is doing very well in Central Asia. Glancing around the street, there seem to be a lot of Yankees fans in Bishkek, as there are Miami Heat and Los Angeles Lakers fans. Everybody has strong feelings on Snoop Dogg and Eminem. Gladiator Dva is the big movie at the moment. The music in the shops is all the worst possible covers of the worst possible American pop. Even for those steeped in Russian or Islamic propaganda, the allure of the US is irresistible. “Everybody hates America but everybody wants to live there,” an older person told me wistfully not long ago.
But the sense — at least where I am — is of a tide that’s going out. The feeling is that the Adidas sweat pants, the sports t-shirts — of which nobody knows the meaning — the tinny pop songs, the unconvincing ‘New York pizzas’ all belong already to a different era. I am teased for not having a touch screen on my computer like in the Chinese models. My students subscribe to a whole complex array of Telegram channels. Women in coffee shops may be using iPhones to take pictures of themselves for Instagram, but they are also wearing hijabs. The sense is of a developing culture hurtling towards the future, but the US is only one input of many.
It’s worthwhile, from this distance, to try to understand what the US means.
It means, only in part, military might. There used to be a military base here, which now seems like the monument to Ozymandias or something — the memory of a brief moment when it seemed like the US could just control the world. That base — closed down under Russian pressure — has left no discernible trace, but the US does still have a military clout and this is on the whole, I would say, a source of respect. It’s like the mall cop controlling the whole commercial empire: people like to know that Eminem and Dr Dre also have the Marines behind them.
The US also only mildly means democracy. I think there’s a certain begrudging respect for how resilient and flexible the US’ governmental system has been in comparison with a century’s worth of autocracies, but I don’t think anyone in the world now regards elections in and of themselves as a panacea for ill government, and American democracy has real theoretical rivals now, the China model, the Singapore model, I suppose the Putin model, which give the appearance of providing more nimble and effective governance than in the cumbersome checks-and-balances system. I’ve been very struck that ‘human rights,’ which in the 2000s I thought of as an uncontroversial, universal good is generally viewed as a tool of American soft power — and this speaks, I believe, to Russia’s success in the information war.
If there are very few illusions that the US is an empire just like any other, Americans still have, I think, a shaggy, amiable image in contrast to rivals. On a personal level, I’m treated very well here. People report bad experiences working in Russia where racism towards Central Asians is endemic, and everybody seems to be a bit in terror of how hard Chinese work. Americans aren’t so bad. They’re smiley and kind of dumb and surprisingly polite and (so say the people I talk to who have relatives in the US) they don’t treat workers too badly.
What the US really means, of course, is capitalism. It’s like the capital of capitalism, even if there are other major nodes. And, in practice, capitalism means just the wash of stuff — Hollywood and the music industry and the whole entertainment complex. My students have seemed to be strikingly uninterested in Israel’s invasion of Lebanon, but they care a great deal about the P. Diddy trial. There are other points of global culture emerging that are outside of American cultural horizons — K-pop is probably the biggest one at the moment — but there is still no challenge to that cultural machine.
And what is most interesting about watching American culture from a distant shore is how much of it — in a way, almost all of it — is about race. Rap is, really, the spear tip of globalization, and rap creates with it the idea of a underclass that is proud and cool and that stands defiantly apart from mainstream culture and rap, more than Hollywood, is a generator of identity. I’ve had people here insist to me that they are ‘black,’ which is a surprise to me but has to do with Russian racism and fuses into the black pride culture that comes with rap.
If rap and pop culture are being let in, what is excluded is gay rights, gender fluidity, etc. I’ve had students write — out of nowhere — that they are “opposed to the LGBTQ agenda.” The allegedly trans boxer at the Olympics was a big deal here. I can’t quite tell where things stand on sexual freedom and feminism. I think people are intrigued by the sexual looseness and the girl power role models that they see in American films, but the general consensus is that that’s good and well for Americans and for movie characters but not here really. A conservatism prevails.
My students do want to be part of a global culture, they do want to speak English, they do (often) want to live somewhere else. The US is understood to be the capital of the global culture, although the picture is becoming muddier, fast. The US seems far away and is often incomprehensible, but, even from Central Asia, people are paying very close attention to what happens in the US, in the culture even more than the politics.
Sam Kahn writes the Substack
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Fascinating, Sam, and a reminder of how little one really knows as an outsider. I'm most perplexed by the appeal of the alternate models you describe, and the notion that somehow a dictatorship is more nimble. In responding to what, exactly?
You're focusing here mainly on your students who seem just as ignorant as U.S. students of the historical norms being broken in the Trump presidency, the downfall of a media system that has long been trusted (perhaps naively after the advent of cable TV) as a watchdog of sorts, rising income inequality, etc. Is that a generational thing? Surely people your age or older have deeper historical memories.
When I taught and lived in Uruguay in 2000, my cowboy boots were a big hit, and some local musicians adopted me in their rock n roll band. But the major cultural influences were all coastal, and I think people didn't really know what to do with me as a working class Joe with ties to the Mountain West, Midwest, and Southeast. I made one good friend who was deeply interested in politics and enjoyed drinking yerba mate and whiskey, but a lot of the local culture seemed shallow to me. Perhaps because it was, like American culture, fairly new -- post WWII -- and European influenced.
I remember thinking at the time that even my native state, Montana, had deeper cultural roots in some ways than Uruguay. I'd often felt that few people, other than indigenous communities, had any real nativistic claim on Montana. Everyone, a few generations back, came from somewhere else. But by my childhood in the late 70s and 80s, there were some fourth and fifth-generation Montanans. Not so much in Uruguay.
This reminds me of the famed DFW graduation speech. You've removed yourself from the water that we all swim in over here. It's good to get your perspective. As a cultural export, rap would not have occurred to me.