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
