America's Lousy Unreality Show

"Would some Power the gift to give us / To see ourselves as others see us!"--Robert Burns, To A Louse 

Judging from two recent national polls, Americans do not see the United States as the rest of the world sees it. 

"People around the world see U.S. power and influence as a major threat to their country," reveals a Pew Research Center report issued last month.

But a nearly simultaneously-released Gallup poll shows that half the American population is happier about the country's standing in the world than they've been at any time in the past 13 years. They think the world hasn't loved America this much since 2001, in the aftermath of the terror attacks of 9/11, and again in 2003 when the whole world supposedly stood up and cheered when Bush Junior invaded Iraq. Remember, this poll measured not reality, only belief systems. Americans tend to believe what they see on cable TV and read in the establishment press.

America is like the snooty church lady in the Burns poem who is blissfully unaware of the louse crawling through her hair to brazenly perch atop her fancy bonnet. Or, just as likely, she is well aware of the louse, but is proudly and perversely glad that its creepy presence is frightening and disgusting everyone around her. Merely pretending to be blissfully unaware of her vermin problem, she can then act all shocked and dismayed when her lousy bombs of liberating democracy are not greeted with the proper fawning admiration and gratitude.

Don't, in fact, these dueling polls and dueling literary interpretations reflect the combination of ignorance and arrogance which has always made America so exceptional? Because contrary to what our liberal corporate media would have us believe, Donald Trump has not single-handedly destroyed America's global reputation. He has made it worse, of course, but U.S. "global standing" has never been anything to brag about.

According to the Pew report,

A median of 45% across the surveyed nations see U.S. power and influence as a major threat, up from 38% in the same countries during Trump’s first year as president in 2017 and 25% in 2013, during the administration of Barack Obama. The long-term increase in the share of people who see American power as a threat has occurred alongside declines in the shares of people who say they have confidence in the U.S. president to do the right thing regarding world affairs and who have a favorable view of the United States.

America took big reputational hits during the Obama administration when Edward Snowden revealed the National Security Agency's global collection of phone records and emails, along with the United States' eavesdropping campaigns against the leaders of such friendly countries as Germany and Brazil. His drone assassination program also failed to engender a feeling of global love and respect.

Ironically, and somewhat shockingly, the NSA has just announced that it is discontinuing the massive data collection program secretly begun by the Bush administration in the aftermath of 9/11. Either "No Such Agency" is stuffed to the gills with data that it doesn't know what to do with, or it tacitly acknowledges its redundancy, given that such private entities as Amazon, Google and Facebook have taken over data collection and surveillance as the full and equal partners of the Deep State.

But back to the Gallup poll. The breakdown of results purporting to find that more than half of the US citizens polled are happy with the country's global reputation also reveals that a major subset of these allegedly satisfied people are self-described Republicans. That only a third of respondents were satisfied with US standing only a year ago, and with eight out of 10 Republicans now hoisting up the total "satisfaction" percentage so much, also parallels the creeping-up of Trump's own domestic poll numbers.

Respondents believe that although world leaders as individuals don't respect Trump, they're convinced that these leaders' subjects view "America" favorably. They either didn't consult the Pew poll, or they are too entranced by Trump's self-glorification and frequent claims of "winning" to notice the louse on his own orange bonnet:

• The belief that leaders of other countries respect the U.S. president dove from 45% in Obama's final year to 29% last year, and has not recovered at all.
• The percentage of Americans satisfied with the nation's position in the world dipped slightly from 36% in 2016 to 32% in 2017, but then surged to 45% this year -- the highest in 13 years.
• A majority of Americans in 2016 (54%) believed the world rated the U.S. favorably. The percentage with that view fell to a near-record low of 42% last year, then bounced back to 55% this year.

If it's any consolation, the percentage of Republican respondents who think that world leaders respect Trump is still much lower than the percentage of Democratic respondents who thought that world leaders respected Obama.  

Nevertheless, we can't just blame Republicans for all the cluelessness. Even Democrats are not noticing the louse on the red, white and blue bonnet as acutely as they probably should, with more than a third of them still convinced that despite Trump, the rest of the world thinks highly of the United States: 

Last year's decline in this measure to 42% reflected sharply lower percentages of Democrats and independents believing the world viewed the country favorably. This included a fall from 68% to 32% among Democrats and from 55% to 41% of independents. Though Democrats' attitudes this year, at 36% favorable, are fairly similar to their views last year, 50% of independents now think the U.S. rates favorably, and Republicans have gone from 39% in 2016 to 54% last year and 80% now. 

As The New Yorker's Jane Mayer reports, the White House and Fox News are no longer bothering to hide the fact that they are essentially the same corporate entity. Propaganda works, and it works well. When Trump brayed at a campaign rally that "I love the poorly educated," he wasn't kidding, given that 80 percent of his base now believes that the whole world respects America. And that more than a third of Democrats still think the same way is also probably the result of their own steady consumption of pro-war reporting by the corporate media, most recently the liberal clamoring for "humanitarian intervention" in Venezuela. It also helps when Russia has been marketed as the "enemy outside" sowing domestic discord and meddling in our democracy for these past two years. 

Besides investigating creepy-crawly Trump corruption, we really should be pushing for a Marshall Plan to rescue public education in this country -- and that includes building more schools and public libraries and paying teachers at the same high levels that other highly trained professionals receive. Perhaps we can insert such a plan into the Green New Deal as an emergency declaration to salvage America's critical thinking skills at the same time we try to save our planet.

Impudent and arrogant American Exceptionalism is not only a lousy doctrine, it is a global killer. The only thing the rest of the world dreads more than the power and terror of the U.S. hegemon is the climate catastrophe which the U.S. hegemon alternately ignores and intensifies. 

Make America think again.