New York Times - November 15, 2002
BOOKS OF THE TIMES | 'THE EAGLE'S SHADOW'
Americans and Those in the World Who Resent Them By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
-------------------------------------------------- THE EAGLE'S SHADOW Why America Fascinates and Infuriates the World By Mark Hertsgaard 236 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $23. --------------------------------------------------
Six years before the events of Sept. 11, 2001, the scholar Benjamin R. Barber wrote a provocative and in some ways very prescient book, "Jihad vs. McWorld," which explored the growing post-cold-war tensions between secular consumerist capitalism and religious and ethnic fundamentalism; between the Americanized global marketplace and tribal movements virulently opposed to modernity. Advertisement
The subtitle of Mark Hertsgaard's new book, "The Eagle's Shadow" - "Why America Fascinates and Infuriates the World" - suggests that the author is going to take up where Mr. Barber left off, exploring the envy, worship and rage that America elicits abroad. But while Mr. Hertsgaard lifts some of Mr. Barber's ideas about the Americanization of global pop culture and the resentment it incurs, he neither delivers on his promise to explore "how we look to the rest of the world" nor communicates to foreigners "why America and Americans are the way we are."
Instead, he has written a hectoring, fuzzy-minded book that devolves into an angry personal rant about what the author thinks is wrong about America: we are treated to long-winded and poorly reasoned diatribes about the presidential election of 2000, the inequality between rich and poor in the United States, and what the author describes as our hypocritical backing of "treacherous dictatorships that serve our perceived interests."
Although Mr. Hertsgaard, a writer who is a contributor to National Public Radio, says he has spent 20 years living and traveling abroad through some 30 countries, his interviews with foreigners are sparsely sprinkled through this book. And they are thoroughly random in nature: a London cabbie here, a couple of South African teenagers there; a Japanese art historian in one chapter, an Egyptian salesman in another.
Instead of seriously probing people's thoughts about America, he settles for making his own clichéd generalizations. "Americans are friendly but boorish, clever but shallow, prosperous but lonely," he says of foreigners' perceptions of the United States. "They are drowning in material possessions but poor in family, friends, and community. They are oddly moralistic; they seem to find sex shameful but violence beautiful. Above all, they live to work rather than work to live." A few pages later, he adds that we are "vulgar yet devout, modern yet old-fashioned, self-righteous yet rootless."
There are many significant issues raised in this book, from the consequences of America's accelerating exportation of pop culture to its current proclivity for unilateral action. But the valid points that Mr. Hertsgaard wants to make about such matters are smothered by his penchant for overstatement and outright distortion - and his consequent unreliability as an observer.
Indeed "The Eagle's Shadow" is filled with dubious generalizations and outrageous assertions. Mr. Hertsgaard writes that "our democracy is an embarrassment to the word, a den of entrenched bureaucrats and legal bribery." He writes that "our media are a disgrace to the hallowed concept of freedom of the press," that they "may as well be a formal part of the government, for all the critical distance they usually maintain." And he compares America's bombing of Dresden during World War II to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, arguing that both acts "pursued military or political objectives by killing vast numbers of civilians."
"When we are ready to face facts again," he argues, "we may see that our country was in crisis before bin Laden's bombers set off on their mission of hate. Politically, we live in a democracy that barely deserves the name."
Mr. Hertsgaard's skills as a logician turn out to be as poor as his skills as a political commentator. He suggests that the country's current economic woes are the result of a drop in consumer spending that reflects a post-9/11 "turning away from self-indulgence and material things" - never mind the drop in the stock market or rising unemployment. And he writes that "achieving economic justice in America is an imposing challenge, but no more imposing than the Wizard of Oz's command that Dorothy and her compatriots bring him the broomstick of the Wicked Witch of the West" - never mind that Oz's command is that of a humbug who simply wants to send Dorothy and her friends off on a wild goose chase.
Not surprisingly, the writing in "The Eagle's Shadow" proves as flabby as its arguments. Mr. Hertsgaard exhorts us to "fight to restore fairness and fiber to our democracy" - Grape-Nuts, anyone? - and he concludes this embarrassing book with a dreamy vision that equates the United States with a lava-spewing mountain. "If volcanoes can be beautiful as well as deadly," he writes, "why can't America be wise as well as powerful, generous as well as rich, magnanimous as well as proud?"