By Syed Arif Hussaini

  April 01, 2005

American Nice Guyism


The Americans bend backwards to be nice and friendly among themselves as well as with foreigners. In their zeal to retain the image of nice ‘guyism’, the Americans go to extremes generally not seen elsewhere and give rise sometimes to very amusing, if not grotesque, situations.
A computer program is called user-friendly, a car is driver-friendly, and a laxative is bowels-friendly. The manufacturers of harsh laxatives appear afraid of being labeled as harsh and unfriendly just because their laxatives are. The need to be nice and friendly is so consuming in this country that even a veterinarian would be wary of prescribing a harsh laxative for a badly constipated dog lest he is regarded as animal unfriendly.
The blacks who constitute the largest minority community in the country are now referred to as African-Americans and not as Negroes, for the latter term is regarded as pejorative like the word ‘rafiq’ used for Pakistanis in Saudi Arabia. A midget is a person of small stature; a queer man, a homosexual is a ‘gay’ and a queer, homosexual woman is a ‘Lesbian’. A jail is a correctional facility.
The military rules debarring gays from entry into the armed services were accepted as discriminatory and therefore unfriendly to gays. President Clinton modified the rules admitting the entry of gays into military service. ‘Don’t ask, don’t tell’, was the formula prescribed. How about the body language?
One can well imagine the repercussion of this nice, friendly act on the devil-may-care gays in the military barracks.
You do not call a spade a spade in this country, as that would be too unfriendly. Even a lavatory is called a restroom. This is a very appropriate term, as that is the only place in the hustle bustle of the workplace where a shirker can find rest.
A traffic police officer would give you a big American smile involving both rows of teeth, address you by your first name in an informal, friendly manner and only then hand over to you the traffic violation ticket that might cost you literally hundreds.
Friendliness is a matter of life and death to a people who want to live by the maxim: the country is full of ‘nice guys’. By the same token, a stranger is a friend you haven’t met yet. These American nice guys are so thoughtful of the sensitivities of strangers that they seldom stop and think about the appropriate approach to each individual. They simply give their big smile with an automatic: “Hi, how you doing”. That should take care of every thing.
During the 1980 Presidential campaign, Joseph Kraft, a syndicated columnist, wrote: “The emergence of President Carter and Ronald Reagan as the nearly certain nominees of their parties, expresses not a failure of the system, but a true translation of how much the majority prefers nice men to effective measure”.
The defeat many years earlier of the eminent intellectual Presidential candidate, Adlai Stevenson, at the hands of the grin-gifted Gen. Eisenhower, was nothing but a reflection of the preference of the people for a friendly, nice guy to an erudite, awesome intellectual with a very impressive track record.
“We want a President”, remarked Florence King, a famous American satirist, “who is as much like an American tourist as possible. Someone with the same goofy grin, the same innocent intentions, the same naive trust, a President with no conception of foreign policy and no discernible connection to the US government, whose Nice Guyism will narrow the gap between the US President and us until nobody can tell the difference.”
There is a near consensus now in the US that Iran poses a threat to its security. A variety of factors might have led to such an opinion; for instance, the labeling of Iran as a ‘terrorist state’, the ruling clergy’s ‘fundamentalism’, the revolutionary changes in the social structure of Iran which go against the American value system, the alleged support of Iran to Islamic ‘radicals and terrorists’ in various parts of the world, Iran’s alleged pursuit of nuclear weapons, and above all the country’s aversion to Israel.
Besides these ostensible factors, however, there could be a deeper and generally unidentified cause. The late Ayatollah Khomeini had conferred the title of the ‘Great Satan’ on the US. This label traumatized and affronted in the extreme the susceptibilities of the American people so very conscious of their image as a friendly nation - a nation of nice guys.
It could be pointed out here that military dictators, foamy revolutionaries and warlords are day in and day out heaping abuses on America, but they are not considered as potent adversaries. For they say: it is the American government we detest, not the American people who are quite nice and friendly. Ayatollah Khomeini, on the other hand, had lumped together the American government, the American people, and the American lifestyle, in short everything under the same category of ‘Great Satan’. That was simply unacceptable and it has continued to rankle even to this day: How dare you call us -the nice guys - by this hateful epithet?
The government is, on the other hand, regarded as fair game. All vociferous Americans appear bent upon saving the nation from their own government.
The government, at the same time, does not tire of presenting an image of being manned by a bunch of altruistic, nice guys. Gratuitous critics, however, point out that the nice guys of this country were the last to set the slaves free and the first to drop the atomic bomb.
The altruistic State Dept. had put both India and Pakistan in financial strait jackets through sanctions following their nuclear tests of May 1998. This was done to take out their atomic teeth in the interest of humanity and world peace and to turn them into harmless, toothless nations of nice guys. How about their own atomic teeth? Well, nice guys do not ask such embarrassing questions.
I couldn’t help admiring this trait of nice ‘guyism’ when I opened my suitcase on return last week from a flying visit to Dallas, Texas. On the top of my stuff was a polite printed note of airport Transportation Security Authority saying that they had gone through the contents in a random check. That reminded me of a news story I had read long time ago in a Canadian newspaper about the note a burglar had left in the iron safe of an ostensibly rich person.
“I have spent three months,” wrote the burglar, “studying your movements from a hired flat opposite your mansion and spent a lot of time and effort to torch open your safe, but I found nothing valuable in it after all that trouble. PLEASE keep some of your money here to make it worth my while when I strike next.” An epitome of nice guyism, don’t you think so?
arifhussaini@hotmail.com March 24, 2005

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