Posted on 07/04/2006 9:54:31 AM PDT by West Coast Conservative
Here’s what I want to know, and here’s why I want to know it. At what point in history, exactly, did the Pew Center decide that it knew how to measure world opinion?
I ask this because almost every week I seem to read a study of how the rest of the globe thinks (or at any rate feels) about the United States. The polls in this country are unreliable enough and are often used to measure intangibles, such as “approval ratings,” which is why there is so much fluctuation within and between them. But who’s doing the random samples in Somalia and Tajikistan and Ecuador?
I ask because these polls tend to inform Americans that the rest of the world has a decidedly low view of them. That this is true in large parts of the Middle East, and among large swathes of European intellectuals, is something that I can already tell you from experience.
For that matter, it was at one point true that the majority of Pakistanis, say, believed not just that all Jews had left the World Trade Center on time, but that (therefore) they had all reported for work on time, hung around for a bit — presumably whistling and wearing unconcerned expressions — and only then left; doubtless offering some clever Semitic excuse. Not even al-Qaida’s pilots had as exact a schedule as that.
Nonetheless, and despite the absurdity and hysteria of much of what is said and believed, we seem almost ready for a poll of Americans on what they think the rest of the world thinks of them in opinion polls, where the “finding” would be that most of those Americans polled think that most other people polled think they stink.
There are several possible responses to this.
One of them — no doubt to be found in the presumed “red states” — is to say “who gives a flying flip?” Another is not to surrender to impressionism, and to do some work of one’s own.
Large numbers in India, for example (another multiethnic federal and secular democracy), report highly favorable views of the U.S.
A very important poll in Iran (where polling is illegal) found that a huge majority of Iranians considered better relations with America to be the single most urgent priority. One of those who conducted the survey was a former American embassy hostage-taker, who was jailed for publishing his findings.
Then there is the question of method. Polling in the U.S. depends on finding a lot of people who are identifiable by name, and at home in their kitchens when the poll-taker calls. How is this feat replicated in the Andes, say, or in the Congo? Who pays for the work? When is it decided that the time is right?
For example, I am quite certain that an opinion poll of any kind, taken in the Muslim world in 1992, would have discovered enormous resentment at the failure of the United States to intervene militarily in Bosnia. But this ingredient in the famous mixture of Islamic grievances is seldom, if ever, mentioned, and certainly wasn’t head-counted at the time. As a result of that just and necessary intervention, large numbers of Orthodox Christians, not just in Serbia, now record strongly “anti-American” opinions. Which goes to show that you can’t please everybody.
It also goes to show that you probably shouldn’t try. A country that attempted to be in everybody’s good books would be quite paralyzed. The last time everybody said they liked the United States (or said that they said they liked the United States) was just after Sept. 11, when the nation was panicked and traumatized and trying to count its dead. Well, no thanks. This is too high a price to be paid for being popular.
Measurements of opinion are in any event static, and they assume passivity, and a consensus upon knowledge. If you had asked people in 2001 whether they thought it was likely that Afghans and Iraqis would be holding free elections in a couple of years (not that any polling group ever did even suggest such a question), I doubt you would have got a very good response. And how, in any case, could people have known enough to know what they were supposedly talking about?
If I was to interrupt this article every few sentences, asking you whether or not I was making a good impression on you, I hope and believe that you would think I was a servile jerk. Yet this is what our politicians are doing in every speech (most notably in the absurd recent debate on “flag-burning”) and this is apparently what we hire Karen Hughes to do in our public diplomacy.
Faced with a complete beast like the late Abu-Musab al-Zarqawi, who has been trying to kill us for several years, millions of Americans appear to believe that he only appeared in Iraq because in some way we made him upset. Well, even if this was true — which it is not — it wouldn’t be such a bad thing. (What would you say to a policy that made him contented, instead?).
Thus, for a Fourth of July message, I would suggest less masochism, more confidence on the American street, and less nervous reliance on paper majorities discovered by paper organizations.
Happy Independence Day.
It's the same with the Jews. When they are being shoved into ovens, there is some sympathy. When they fight back, very few will give them the time of day.
Consider the source of any and all org's conducting polls and what their hidden agenda is. Don't give a rip what the rest of the world says. Their liberal leftist media like the BBC and others want to down American much like our media at home. To h*ll with them.
Thank you Mr. Hitchens for telling the truth.
Though Hitch doesn't believe in God, Thank God for his wisdom and concrete common sense when it comes to analysing true American concerns and facts.
BTTT
Wow.
I always ignore anti-American polls. As soon as the foriegn countries want something, they'll come begging again.
bttt
Ignore them today? Hell, I ignore them everyday, LOL.
Great post. I'm going to send this to some of my Euroweenie friends who need a little smacking around this July 4th.
The Pew Center. Pronounced like it is spelled.
"Isn't the Pew Center the same organization that convinced congress that the #1 subject on the minds of Americans was campaign finance reform, and then later admitted that they had rigged the polling and the results that saddled us with McCain/Feingold CFR?"
Yes.
Let me guess, their next project is to sign over our rights, sovereignty and first-born to the UN.
Bitter, envious people (especially the global left) hates America they way most people hate a rich neighbor who goes around being blatantly happier than they are.
Happy Independence Day!
Never had a very high opinion of a culture that used their thumb instead of toilet paper.
I concur
So some of this is, IMHO, a result of natural envy, some of it resentment against power that is only imagined (it is, after all, the French and not the Americans who are building McDonalds in Paris) and some of it the result of decades of the cleverest and best-funded propaganda on the part of the inveterate enemy of the United States, the Soviet Union.
Persons unwilling to make the intellectual effort often tend to revert to a political shorthand positing that all power is equally oppressive and hence equally evil and that its holders are indistinguishable from one another. It is difficult not to suspect that on the part of ex-colonial Europeans this tendency to view the United States as a hegemon striving for empire is based not only on what they'd do in our place, but what they actually did do. It is not only cynicism that denies that we might have something else in mind, it is also willful ignorance.
In any case I number myself in the "no longer care" portion of the population. You beat a horse with a stick often enough and he loses interest in the carrot.
Happy Independence Day, all! Let freedom ring!
"I'd rather be a junkie in a New York City jail than King, Queen, and Jack of all you Europeans."
P.J. kicks ass.
Love PJ. My other favorite of his is "Giving money and power to Government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teen age boys".
Excellent.
Who-gives-a-flying-flip-about-polls- BUMP.
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