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This week's media coverage of Arizona's new people-control bill is whipping up a storm of protest. It's also reacquainting our country with our unresolved relationship with our American identity.
Helping things get better and get worse, the media has a few neuroses of its own to de-kink. In 2009, CNN stepped up to the pro-immigration plate by releasing TV host Lou Dobbs, who had opined loudly that our nation was going to hell because of Latin American immigration. On the con side, Fox News is still the number one rated cable news channel, proving the power of American entertainment over culture at a time when we could use a real stab at the news.
We may be saved from our claustrophobic video-dome by our new online tools of crowd-sourcing, social media and social activism. Have social media replaced the face in the mirror with the faces in the crowd? Will American cultural leaders heed the call to move from Visionary Narcissism to Visionary Social Entrepreneurship because, in the end, diversity profits?
There are over 6.8 billion people in the world. The United States has 310 million of them, meaning that if the world were a democracy where every person had a vote, America would have to make friends quick in order to influence policy. "Friending" India or Indonesia or Brazil could do a lot to lift our numbers; and many public and private hands have turned to the task of firming up those connections. Still, a better online connection with our global knowledge base has reintroduced some facts that are fanning US paranoia, aided by our stubborn insistence on blindly confusing the news with entertainment.
The United States represents less than five percent of the world's population. As our relative size sinks in, it's also whipping up a familiar destructive instinct to protect our borders with force as the last bastion of America's eternal influence. Of course broadband power, courtesy of America's largest media distributors, has delivered the tools to break those illusions down to size. And, at cross purposes, media content is giving neo-American-isolationism a greater berth than reality actually affords.
American media influence on the global dialogue remains far larger than one might expect for a country with 5% of the world's population. The American GDP exceeds $14 trillion--three times the world's second-largest economy in Japan and twice the GDP-per-person of China. And even though the national debt has soared to 87% of US GDP, the American economy remains the largest in the world. The American media voice breaks through walls around the world--a nearly $1 trillion global industry--some of which now carry the angry faces of Arizona and the angry faces of the rest of us facing Arizona.
Some of the American media influence comes from the commonality of the English language--the prominent language in the most socially mobile parts of India and, up until recently, the prominent language on the web. But English language web dominance is changing rapidly as different world voices are building web businesses and social media in their own languages. A rapidly growing percentage of today's internet sites are written in a language other than English.
For the English-speaking parts of the world, there are web translators, but these translation engines make English trade places with each site's native tongue, fueling our language isolation and failing to provide a real taste of our dialogue with the rest of the world. Our media economy may be missing more than a few coins in its sofa cushions as a result.
America's largest loss may be a newer deal than our nationalist approach to language. US media content has embraced commercialism so completely that much of the news isn't even the news anymore. Newspapers were always faced with this dilemma--the one that pits making a living against making a profit from hysteria that scorns objectivity. Today, even the liberal news media give too much press significance to hate-mongering and far-right-wing bathos. The coverage given to extreme Tea Party activists throughout 2010 is one example of the so-called liberal media falling off the other side of the horse.
Comforting news persists from the media cynics who've studied our historical ideological dialogue closely. The media point-of-view swings between left-and-right via a very narrow arc. The difference between the American right and the American left is small when looked at closely--in part because the American fabric has interwoven diversity through constant cycles of immigration into its DNA.
People coming up always moderate the views of those running in place. The viewpoints of the young balance out the viewpoints of the old, for better and for worse. New immigrant struggles remind us of how America became the nation that dreams of freedom and justice in the first place. Our idealism balances our fears armed with statistics and hope.
In this light, it would be pretty to think that the Arizona legislature will walk its recent immigration bill back a giant step toward a constructive position that's actually on our ideological arc. That process would be hastened if we acknowledged that--as mighty as our economy and our military make us--we are routinely digesting and transmitting a relatively small arc of ideas, making us less than uniformly great and less than uniformly hateful. Our highest point on the American arc is reserved for hopes and dreams, balanced on our lowest point by fear.
When American ideals soar, they represent some of the greatest egalitarian poetry of the human spirit. We should expect nothing less from this nation of immigrants that built its 20th century wealth fighting some portion of its wars to free the world from tyranny, influenced by the often liberal immigration policies that have given America its trans-cultural face.
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