解放军文职招聘考试The Ugly Americans

 The Ugly Americans

Americans seem to live and breathe and function by paradox; but in nothing are we so paradoxical as in our passionate belief in our own myths. We truly be­lieve ourselves to be natural-born mechanics and do-it-yourselves. We spend our lives in motorcars, yet most of us—a great many of us at least—do not know enough about a car to look in the gas tank when the mo­tor fails. Our lives as we live them would not function without electricity, but it is a rare man or woman who when the power goes off, knows how to look for a bum-ed-out fuse and replace it. We believe implicitly that we are the heirs of the pioneers; that we have inherited self-sufficiency and the ability to take care of our­selves, particularly in relation to nature. There isn't a man among us in ten thousand who knows how to butcher a cow or a pig and cut it up for eating, let alone a wild animal.

The paradoxes are everywhere. We are able to be­lieve that our government is weak, stupid, overbear­ing, dishonest, and inefficient, and at the same time we are deeply convinced that it is the best government in the world, and we would like to impose it upon eve­ryone else. We speak of the American Way of Life as though it involved the ground rules for the governance of heaven. We shout that we are a nation of laws, not men—and then proceed to break every law we can if we can get away with it. We proudly insist that we base our political positions on the issues—and we will vote against a man because of his religion, his name, or the shape of his nose.

The result is that we seem to be in a state of tur­moil all the time, both physically and mentally. We work too hard, and many die under the strain; and then to make up for that we play with a violence as sui­cidal. We are self-reliant and at the same time com­pletely dependent. We are aggressive, and defense­less. Americans overindulge their children and do not like them; the children in turn are overly dependent and full of hate for their parents. We are complacent in our possessions, in our house, in our education; but it is hard to find a man or woman who does not want something better for the next generation. Americans are remarkably kind and hospitable and open with both guests and strangers; and yet they will make a wide circle around the man dying on the pavement. Fortunes are spent getting cats out of trees and dogs out of sewer pipes; but a girl screaming for help in the street draws only slammed doors, closed windows, and silence.