My country's better than yours

By Deauwand Myers

As an American expat, I'm sometimes surprised at how other countries view the United States. With a mix of inferiority and superiority complexes, some countries take issue with how they feel they're viewed by the global community juxtaposed to America.

Korea is concerned with national identity and national pride. Understandably, North Korea looms large in the shaping of how Koreans view themselves. Plenty of Koreans who travel abroad are shocked and saddened to find folks asking them "are you from North Korea?" or confusing the two countries as if they were the same.

Korean "hallyu," a wave of K-pop music, movies, and other media forms, is important to the Korean government's strategy of broadening awareness and appreciation for Korean culture and increasing the nation's prestige.

Americans are uniquely privileged in this regard. Our place atop the world stage after WWII, where, along with the massive sacrifices of the Soviet Union, America defeated fascism and protected Europe and elsewhere from the spread of communism, has made too many Americans' worldview myopic and ethnocentric.

You can see this played out in American politics, particularly foreign affairs. The political right, or at least vocal parts of it, long for the good, bad old days, where America played world cop with impunity, installing and deposing dictators for our own advantage, and often with disastrous results (the Congo, Iran, Iraq, and much of South America are examples).

This largely white, male fetish with playing the good knight has cost America dearly in terms of lives, money, and in the end, prestige.

The atrocious foreign policy failures of Bush II accentuate this point. America needlessly invaded Iraq, a country with no connection to 9/11. Bush, et al, failed to properly execute the war post-invasion, dispatching Iraq's military elite (a vast majority of which joined insurgency groups and later, Isis, in its highest echelons, providing expertise and intelligence the legitimate Iraqi government so desperately needs). Invading Iraq strengthened Iran throughout the region, and gave rise and power to Isis.

Further, the Bush administration completely ignored Iran throughout the eight years of Bush's unfortunate tenure. When Iran wanted to discuss nuclear talks with the Bush Administration, their nuclear program was new and underdeveloped. At the end of Bush's second term, Iran had vastly improved and invested in its nuclear technology. Predictably, the same people who proselytized the untruths about an easy invasion of Iraq and a light strike in Afghanistan, now blame Obama for his own Iran deal, a deal that should have been done a decade earlier.

Further, "American exceptionalism" was eroded by the Right. Lack of investment in infrastructure, medical care, and education, while eviscerating unions, cutting taxes for the wealthy, and rarely increasing the minimum wage, have led to a stagnant and decreasing middle class, whose wages have barely risen over the past generation, while the wealthiest have prospered handsomely. Whilst we were steady constructing roads, bridges, and schools in the Middle East, unsuccessfully trying to build nations, America's own infrastructure was and is crumbling beneath our feet.

Some Republican and fiscally conservative luminaries, like former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan and Keith Hall have declared Reaganomics, trickle-down economic theory, and the rest of this voodoo pseudoscience as inherently and empirically false, something most people who can read and write already knew years and years ago.

America's laughably inferior healthcare system, where we spend more than double other industrialized nations do and get poorer health outcomes for the trouble, is a problem Republicans and conservatives have neither noticed nor cared about.

Yet, some Americans, even those abroad, act as if our country is the best in the world, in 2015. We still have the biggest economy on earth, the most advanced and powerful military ever devised, and the largest nuclear arsenal too.

But big militaries and lots of atomic warheads cannot feed you, educate you, insure your hospital visits, or provide gainful employment. In key metrics, the quality of American lives is not as good as most other wealthy democracies, in no small part due to America's playing world cop without any monetary compensation for many decades.

I explain to Koreans who fret over how Korea is or isn't perceived by the global community not to worry as much. Korea's crime rate is low. Korea has universal healthcare, clean, accessible public transportation, and balanced budgets. None of these things America, the richest, most powerful nation in human history, can tout.

More remarkably, Korea achieved these and other accomplishments in less than thirty years. A high suicide rate, stagnant wages, underemployment for young adults, sexism, misogyny, and expensive private education are just some of the challenges facing Korea.

But I tell Koreans that if they encounter foreigners who think or claim "my country is better than yours," particularly Americans, they should relay the aforementioned data.

Deauwand Myers holds a master's degree in English literature and literary theory, and is an English professor outside Seoul. He can be reached at deauwand@hotmail.co m.