What’s So Impossible About Peace, Love and Understanding?

I was in Guadalajara the first time I heard it. I was chatting with a well-educated local, discussing music and politics and culture, when she said, “George Bush was behind the attacks on the World Trade Center.” I thought I misheard her. “What was that?” I said. She smiled and sipped an iced cappuccino and said, “The attack on the towers. George Bush planned it.” I was stunned. We had agreed on everything until this point. She hadn’t struck me as a conspiracy theorist.

It turned out that she was just the first of several people I met over a number of weeks in Mexico who were convinced of this. (Try as I might, I couldn’t change their minds.) If there was this much misunderstanding and suspicion between the U.S. and Mexico, I thought, was there any hope for the United States’ relationship with the rest of the world? What can be done?

It’s a question University of Texas history professor Richard Pells explores in a thoughtful essay in The Chronicle of Higher Education. “How successful has the United States been in making its policies and values better understood among Muslims in the Middle East and Southeast Asia?” he writes. “Based on my experience last summer as a Fulbright senior specialist in Indonesia, the answer is: hardly at all.” In fact, Pells often felt as though he were a character in Bill Murray’s “Lost in Translation.”

He writes:

The breakdown in communication, however, did not result simply from the struggle many Asians have in pronouncing certain English words. In the “discussions” that followed my lectures (which frequently took the form of someone delivering a 10-minute speech before arriving at a question), and in the conversations I had with individual students and faculty members, I found myself repeatedly saying, “I don’t understand what you mean.” That was true even when their comments or queries were translated into recognizable English. The problem was not one of language, but of context. What I didn’t grasp, at least not for a while, were the political and cultural assumptions behind the questions Indonesians were posing.

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