No Map

Over the years I have grown a little wary of initiating any discussion primarily relating to global affairs with Americans. (I'd probably need to carefully qualify this caution as relating to 'many' Americans, but down here this usually segues into 'most'.)

For years we had a neighbour from up there who was patently well-read, intelligent and broadly receptive to other opinions, but just minutes into any debate would start mentioning something clearly very significant to him called the 'New World Order' or NWO.

A populist conspiracy culture seems to run deep in the American psyche whichever end of the spectrum one is dealing with. Maybe they find their surfaces are sometimes so monotonous that they must constantly be looking beneath them.

But this is not the essence of the problem. This is more broadly the use of matters outside the USA as a fairly primitive filter for whatever fairly rigid and tribal perspective they have on matters inside the USA. You might think you are discussing global affairs with them, but in reality you almost never are.

Before their minds have boarded the mental flight beyond the international border, they have usually abandoned any attempt to pack any kind of analytical flexibility for the journey.

So, if the domestic politicians they don't like are in any way involved in global affairs, whatever they are involved in must be a practical and moral morass. And vice versa. And if their politicians — appreciated or unappreciated — are not substantially involved, is it even happening?

An extension of this projection, is that foreigners in general appear lack any real agency of their own. Their actions, and the needs driving them are as of children. (The exception is Israel, typically seen as little more than a malign extension of whatever is already darkest in America's own apparent conspiracy against the world. It's the only occasion when they consider that their own POTUS might not be the ultimate puppet master.)

And any foreign politician who in any way pushes back against an unloved domestic one is immediately heralded as some kind of lionheart, no matter how big a muppet they might actually be. (viz Petro in Colombia, Sánchez in Spain.)

On some levels this is worse than trying to converse with people wearing those distorting ideological googles, because a US passport often seems to add an extra 10-stop filter.

It’s not that Brits aren't ever like this, just not all the time.

There's no question that we spent several centuries treating the world as our plaything, yet today we are more of less capable of talking about large parts of it without mentioning members of our own government in every sentence.

As such we can appreciate a play of forces 'out there' in which we are mere spectators, tempted to actually see...or at least more readily comprehend on some intuitive level that beneath whatever mask we might habitually apply to the map, there is beneath it a face written over with complicated features laid down by historical experiences — a 'road map' to a life which is other.