Americans and Emotions

I mentioned before (‘People and Cultures’) that there are similarities within the people of some countries. There are, for instance, some common characteristics that many English people share and similarly with Australians and Americans.

Americans are often perceived as brash and insensitive and certainly American tourists in Europe have this reputation. Movies such as Rambo present them as lacking subtlety and using a brute-force approach to solving problems. There is some truth in this but what I want to explore here is another characteristic that seems to be common in Americans.

Many Hollywood movies manipulate people at an emotional level, a characteristic that people in many other cultures find cloyingly sentimental. There is invariably a black-and-white quality in these movies. Real life is not like that.

Some time ago I heard an interview on the BBC with the advisor to George Bush on Islam. I can’t remember his name, but he was American and studied in a seminary, later on he became a Muslim and studied Islam. He was thus trained in both Western and Eastern ways. He made a comment that struck me – he said that Americans will never understand the East until they understand emotions. The cloying Hollywood understanding of emotions is completely divorced from the picture of a Palestinian women frantically screaming after her son has been killed by the Israeli army. In fact there is a perception that this is somehow not quite savoury. Emotions must be expressed within tight limits.

I was reminded of this when I saw that one of the Democratic candidates, Howard Dean, was pilloried in the US press for ‘screaming’ in a speech on Martin Luther King Day (it was dubbed ‘I Have a Scream’). What was strange to non-Americans is that the scream was really quite tame, but the emotionally uptight Americans were taken aback at a display of real emotion and questioned whether he was presidential material. According to The National Post:

Thirty years ago, Edmund Muskie's campaign for the U.S. presidency was cut short when he violated political decorum by weeping in public. During the New Hampshire Democratic primary, the Manchester Union Leader published a story describing his wife as "emotionally unstable." Outraged, he mounted a truck in front of the newspaper office and defended her with such passion that (The New York Times said) he "broke into tears."

Today his tears would attract sympathy and votes, but in 1972 they ruined him. Tears can change their meaning in a single generation. Crying may be natural, but the way we think about it reflects our culture. No man now hesitates to weep over the deaths of soldiers in Afghanistan or the passing of the Queen Mother, and we can even weep with joy. Michael Jordan, no less, cried when the Chicago Bulls won the NBA championship in 1996.

Maybe tears have become respectable; for men to be perceived to be in touch with their feminine side is politically expedient. However, I'm not so sure that the basic understanding of emotion has changed. Ironically, if there were to be a female candidate and she cried, I'm sure that would be the end of her political life.