CSotD: A lousy public image
Skip to comments
Dylan Horrocks has created this faux-Tintin cover as an auction item for a crowd-sourcing effort to send freelance journalist and fellow Kiwi Jon Stevenson back to Afghanistan for another look at the situation there, where New Zealand has SAS forces stationed.
Of course, it's brilliant of him to riff on the current interest in Tintin, whose impending cinematic opening may well drag me back to the theater for the first time in awhile. But when you look into Stevenson's previous blockbuster report from the front, the picture gains in significance.
The story itself is apparently not available online, but that linked interview with Stevenson, his editor at Metro and a Green Party politician, provides the gist of it, and it's not only damning for the New Zealand government but ought to be chilling for Yanks as well.
The report touched off a political scandal in New Zealand because of Stevenson's accusation that the SAS were turning prisoners over to Afghan security forces and Americans, which would place them in grave danger of torture.
Here's what's chilling: This is not a case of a left-wing rogue journalist making accusations that nobody else would take seriously.
As you Google through "'Jon Stevenson' SAS Metro", you find that the rest of the world takes as a given that both the Americans and the Afghan security forces torture their prisoners.
You won't hear a lot of talk about "enhanced interrogation" outside our borders. Nor does there seem to be a huge debate over whether knowingly handing prisoners over for torture is a violation of international law.
The scandal in New Zealand, rather, is over the government's failure to follow up on the reports, and over the demoralization of the special forces soldiers who find themselves in the position of being complicit with what they fear may be war crimes.
Robert Burns famously wrote of a beautiful woman in church who, unbeknownest to herself, has a louse on her bonnet. It would not be so alarming, he observes, on the neck of some low-born person, but is particularly shaming in this case because the lady, unaware, carries herself as if she were a faultless, flawless flower of society, little dreaming that the people around her are thinking of her as someone who is, quite literally, "lousy."
And, of course, the last stanza of his poem, in Scottish, contains the famous line, "O wad some Power the giftie gie us, to see ourselves as ithers see us," or, translated:
O would some Power the gift give us
To see ourselves as others see us!
It would from many a blunder free us,
And foolish notion:
What airs in dress and gait would leave us,
And even devotion!
People, here and abroad, often remark on the fact that the majority of Americans don't speak a second language, but, while it is beginning to be wise to know a little Spanish, we really don't need a second language to get through our lives here. The country is large enough, and our culture and media are so massive and of such global impact, that we can sit comfortably in the splendid isolation of our own world.
But the same lack of outside influences that makes it easy to get along entirely in English also makes it easy to go through our lives without the slightest notion of how others view us.
Those who come here, for the most part, do so because they like us, or, in the case of trade representatives and diplomats, are at pains to act as if they do.
And those who criticize us at a high enough volume to reach our distant shores are so over-the-top that they can be dismissed as extremists and screwballs. Hugo Chavez roasts us with a standup comedy routine at the UN and the world guffaws, but our friends there assure us "No, no, he's crazy. Nobody listened. We were all appalled."
Meanwhile, those who quietly disapprove, we do not hear.
It's not a matter of us not caring what others think. We do care. But, like Burns's woman in church, we simply aren't aware of how others view us, and so we go blithely along assuming that they admire us, except for those who are consumed by jealousy.
Which makes Horrock's Tintin a more striking piece, because, to a non-American eye, even to a moderate non-American eye, the boy detective and his dog are surely in grave peril.
The whole world is watching, indeed.
Note: This entry has been edited to reflect the following change:
"As you Google through "'Jon Stevenson' SAS Metro", you find that the rest of the COUNTRY takes as a given that both the Americans and the Afghan security forces torture their prisoners" now reads "As you Google through "'Jon Stevenson' SAS Metro", you find that the rest of the WORLD takes as a given that both the Americans and the Afghan security forces torture their prisoners."
That was my original intent. I wish my sole concern was simply what Kiwis think of us.
Comments
Comments are closed.