{"id":328,"date":"2018-08-04T11:03:54","date_gmt":"2018-08-04T18:03:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bruceramsey.net\/?page_id=328"},"modified":"2023-06-22T22:04:30","modified_gmt":"2023-06-23T05:04:30","slug":"the-american-difference","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/bruceramsey.net\/index.php\/the-american-difference\/","title":{"rendered":"The American Difference (1995)"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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This was a column that started out with a quotation that would have been taboo except that it was said by a Mexican. I thought about it for several weeks until one slow day I<\/span>\u2008<\/span>spun a column out of it. It ran on the business page of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer on September 6, 1995. Of all my columns, it is perhaps my favorite.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Antonio Haas, award-winning columnist with the Mexico City newspaper\u00a0Excelsior<\/i>, asked a discomforting question: \u201cWhy have we never had, among Mexicans, a good commercial idea? We recognize the good ideas, and immediately copy them. But when Kleenex was invented, why didn\u2019t we think of Huggies, and Americans did?\u201d Look at Costco, he said, which has been spreading all over Mexico.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Of course, a Mexican may well have thought of disposable diapers or warehouse retailing. What Haas meant was they were done first in the United States.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Haas\u2019s audience, brought together Aug. 17 by the World Affairs Council and the Washington State Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, was skeptical. Mexicans are very entrepreneurial, said one man. Even kids sell things, and help support their families.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0People everywhere buy and sell, Haas replied, but people in the United States hatch new ideas. \u201cThe atmosphere is different,\u201d he said. \u201cI don\u2019t know what it is, but everybody who comes here does better than in his own country. We\u2019re making good films in Mexico now for the first time; the Chicanos were making good films long ago.\u201d<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0I can\u2019t verify Haas\u2019s \u201cno ideas\u201d claim, but he\u2019s right about the atmosphere. It is our chief competitive advantage, particularly over all the low-wage countries that are always supposed to be on the verge of doing us in.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Those countries typically stress duty and obligation; ours stresses self. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness \u2014\u00a0your\u00a0<\/i>happiness, not someone else\u2019s. Our society\u2019s rite of passage is the driver\u2019s license, and its greatest novel,\u00a0Huckleberry Finn,\u00a0<\/i>is about a boy who runs away from his dad. America says, \u201cHere you can do what you want.\u201d<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Other countries temper that more, or suppress it. In Hong Kong, which is one of the freest places in Asia, I knew a family in which the only son was his parents\u2019 support \u2014 and could therefore take no risks. He figured he couldn\u2019t afford to marry until he was 35. One generation earlier in that family, the daughters had been yanked out of school to work so that the sons could study.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Foreigners are proud of the support they give families, and often rightly critical of Americans\u2019 neglect of theirs. But talk to immigrants, and you find that, for many, this country gave them crucial breathing space to get away from families, at least for a while, and pursue their own dreams.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Even those who live in America only a few years are often affected, if they\u2019re young enough. I once edited a string of stories from Tokyo about women in their 20s and 30s starting \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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design shops, temporary-help agencies and even a barbershop for kids, where the customers sat in little cars. Most of these women\u00a0<\/span>had been educated in the United States. In Japan they were considered culturally contaminated. Shunned by the cradle-to-grave corporations, they were developing new commercial ideas.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0A friend from Pakistan once said that he, too, was contaminated. An American could go abroad for decades, he said, and return home. After 10 years working for a U.S. employer in Hong Kong, he could not.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0Many of the foreigners who come to study here also become contaminated; it is one reason that many stay. It\u2019s not an easy choice. America is a\u00a0<\/span>strange, exotic place where people eat weird food like brown rice and\u00a0vegi-burgers, pancakes and pumpkin pie. It’s a place where a woman may boss a man, kids insult their parents and even sea lions have rights.\u00a0<\/span>But as a British friend once pointed out, it is not a place where family connection trumps, or where your accent betrays your social class.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0America is the world\u2019s No. 1 magnet for immigrants. That\u2019s bound to make us different from a country that isn\u2019t. But the crux is why we attract the immigrants: because our culture is shot through with the corrosive and exhilarating idea that you can do what you want\u2014and if you don\u2019t, buddy, it\u2019s your loss.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0America doesn\u2019t have a corner on that idea. Other countries have done well with it, too. But we specialize in it.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0It\u2019s not just capitalism. Japan has capitalism; so does Singapore. We have Steven Spielberg and Bill Gates. We celebrate them not just because they are rich, but because they created new things.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0It comes at a price. A high rate of divorce, child abandonment, drug addiction and even homicide seem to come along with all that pursuit of happiness. Americans fulminate about this. We admire Singapore when it canes Michael Fay*. But we are not willing to become like Singapore, or like Japan. It might fix a number of problems if we did, but it would also be dissipating a major asset.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a9 1995 The Seattle Post-Intelligencer<\/i><\/span><\/p>

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Sometimes it takes a foreigner to tell you who you are.<\/span><\/span><\/p>

\u00a0<\/i>*In 1994, an American, Michael Fay, 18, was sentenced to six lashes by a Singapore court for vandalism<\/i>. The punishment became an international issue, and when President Clinton asked that the boy not be caned, Singapore reduced the number of lashes from\u00a0<\/i>six<\/i><\/span>\u00a0to four.<\/i><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This was a column that started out with a quotation that would have been taboo except that it was said by a Mexican. I thought about it for several weeks until one slow day I\u2008spun a column out of it. It ran on the business page of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer on September 6, 1995. Of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-328","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bruceramsey.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/328","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bruceramsey.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bruceramsey.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bruceramsey.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bruceramsey.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=328"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/bruceramsey.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/328\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1086,"href":"https:\/\/bruceramsey.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/328\/revisions\/1086"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bruceramsey.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=328"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}