What Kind of Country!?

One’s reaction is to seek causality where there may in fact be none: A long and harsh economic recession; anxiety associated with the approach of the traditional Winter Holidays; a nation still deeply divided after a bitterly contested presidential election; too many Americans ingesting too many anti-depressants and other personality-altering drugs; the list goes on …
 
When I was an exchange student at Leningrad State University, the Russians with whom I associated would regularly ask me, usually wishing to be polite: ‘What is it like in America?’  What I did not initially understand was their skewed vision of my country.  During the course of my studies in Leningrad I began watching the ‘Vremya’ daily television news and I started to notice that news clips from and about America were generally of three set genre-types: There would be file footage: (1) of American military might (preferably nuclear missiles); (2) of unemployed ‘exploited’ workers (often minorities); and (3) of victims of violence (often scenes from hospital emergency rooms).  Besides brief, carefully edited snips of the American president speaking, that was pretty much all that Soviet citizens saw of America.  So the polite ‘What’s it like?’ question from Leningrad’s natives actually masked a more horrified, unstated question such as ‘What kind of crazy country do you live in!?’ or ‘How could people possibly live like that!?’
 
Ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the same question has been regularly asked, but usually in the opposite direction.  Anyone even vaguely familiar with Hollywood portrayals of post-Soviet Russia knows that Moscow’s population is limited exclusively to oligarch-warlords with multiple prostitute-girlfriends who drink enormous quantities of vodka when they are not busy committing Godfather-style murders.  President Putin plays the role of Capo di tutti capi.   This is pretty much all that Americans know about today’s Russia.  The only significant difference is that the Soviet-era perception of America was carefully controlled by government censors, whereas the Hollywood-era caricature of Russia represents in large part a self-imposed absence of objective and reliable information.
 
Now, it’s Russia’s turn again.  Only this time no propaganda-driven censor is involved and wouldn’t be necessary if such existed.  How could such random and meaningless carnage possibly be exaggerated?  Watching CNN, BBC and the rest, I’ve suddenly become accustomed to people, overcome with emotion, not being able to finish their sentences.  And Obama wept.
 
Russia is an outlier country for many reasons.  Although a delicate subject, Russia at its core is not fully a European country and certainly not an Asian country.  America is also an outlier country.  Both nations and peoples proudly assert their specific national characteristics – their distinctiveness, their non-European-ness.  The Russian soul; American exceptionalism.  In both cases, criticism from outside – even if well-intended – is worse than useless.  Such commentary is received hostilely, with immediate suspicion as to its purpose.  Try telling a Russian – whose country is still the largest nation on earth – that neither Kaliningrad nor the Kurile Islands are traditionally Russian, and that giving these occupied territories back to their ancestral peoples would be an appropriate if long overdue gesture.  Try telling an American that having a national average of 90 guns per 100 persons is not only statistically abnormal – almost twice that of Yemen, the next highest ranking nation, and nearly three times the Swiss average – but also the direct cause for such repeat tragedies as Newtown, Connecticut.  In each case, there is a collective absence of cognition – a nation-wide blind spot.
 
Two of the world’s largest nations, each of whose citizens are apparently incapable of assessing themselves at arms length – What chance is there of fostering a non-polemical and productive dialogue, of getting beyond name-calling?