Donkeys, Elephants, Crocs and Delicious Yogurt!

Maybe the US should start exporting our yogurt to improve relations with the world?

For the past few weeks one of my daily must-reads has been a new project by Larry Pintak who runs the Adham Center for Journalism Training and Research at the American University in Cairo. It's a blog called, "Donkeys, Elephants and Crocs: Egypt Blogs America." The project has taken eight Egyptian bloggers and sent them to the US to blog about the presidential election. What's developed has been a fascinating level of insight and understanding about what it means to be us.

When we first launched the USC Center on Public Diplomacy in 2003, my notion as director, was that US public diplomacy could best be improved by doing more to let the world know we were listening to them, rather than telling them about us. Former Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy, Karen Hughes, attempted this for better or for worse with her much-maligned "Listening Tour".

It was my contention that the world knew plenty about the United States. The real challenge is in getting the US to understand the world. This fact is substantiated by anyone who travels outside the United States and watches non-US television, or surfs the web for news outside the United States: Events in the United States are on the front pages of the world's newspapers and on the evening news in their living rooms. Conversely, and sadly, news of the world is not in front pages, living rooms or home pages of the most of the US population.

To wit, last Friday's presidential debate. In a CNN audience pre-presidential debate poll, drawn from a small group of about a dozen viewers who CNN had invited to watch the debate and whose opinions they were tracking throughout the debate, not a single member audience of the participants listed the war in Iraq as a priority. Instead health care and the financial crisis was on their minds.

Egypt Blogs America is capturing this and more. Although around half of the posts are in Arabic, I've managed to follow along. (Google translator, while inexact, has given me a pretty good inkling of what they are saying.) The project is funded by the US Agency for International Development (AID), which for those who track this kind of thing puts a twist on who and how US public diplomacy projects are being funded. USAID is not technically part of the State Department's official public diplomacy efforts. Yet they fund projects that clearly move public diplomacy goals forward: Namely building better relations between the US and the world. To AID's credit, the bulk of the projects they fund are grants given to organizations and I think this allows for a broader range of creative solutions to some of the ideas they are trying to fund. It was reassuring at the recent Meridian International summit to see David Boyer, USAID's director of Global Development Alliance Coordination in attendance.

The team for Egypt Blogs America includes bloggers who are famous in their own country for blogging in the midst of violent crackdowns on free speech, including the much-lauded Wael Abbas, who I met this past spring at the Aspen Institute, The Sandmonkey, Zeinab, and EgyDiva. Their posts are candid, no-holds-barred, take on the US. They've tackled everything from Sarah Palin, to Racism, man-on-the-street interviews with street preachers and buskers, strident and informed writing about the bailout, and loads of other reflective, existential posts such as whether they should even be doing this blog about the US. They cast a shrewd and necessarily serious eye on the serious and sometimes ridiculous ideas our popular and political culture serves up to the world. But they never forget that they are Egyptian. They are all proud of their country and culture. In fact, they are fighting for it. A September 17 post from "EgyDiva" really struck me. I'll end with an excerpt from her post.

My uncle moved from Egypt over 30 years ago and he has never been back. He has Canadian citizenship and will get the U.S citizenship one month after the elections, so he won't get to vote this time but come 2012, I suspect he'll be voting Republican. Since I'm in New york I met him and his wife for dinner and he told me that he doesn't know what's going on in Egypt anymore and that in the US you can go for weeks without hearing anything about any other country because there's so much going on internally. "and frankly, there's not enough time in the day to worry about anything else". Perhaps my uncle is the perfect specimen of the "melting pot" nation. He works in a 12 billion dollar consulting agency, owns an apartment in Manhattan and takes domestic flights all around the U.S like its a bus. If that's not "the American dream" that everyone can make it if they work hard, I'm not sure what is.

But it raises another point. Why is it that Americans are so inward looking. I find it hard to believe that there is more "going on" in the USA than in Egypt. There most definitely is not. What it is though is that you have to SELL the outside world to Americans. how? By relating it to America. If its not related to America, American soldiers, or American money (in the most obvious way possible of course since I don't think there's a corner left on earth that doesn't involve American money)- then I don't see how you would get Americans to read about it. Its not that there ISN'T anything going on in the U.S, surely there is, you know- elections, hurricanes, financial crises that sort of thing- but the stories are so comprehensively and consistently regurgitated and so meticulously uncovered that it distracts and overwhelms from any other going on.

If EgyDiva is right that Americans are inherently self-focused, with all the inward focus, where is the new awareness? If people in the US are really so focused on our domestic issues how is it that catastrophic financial meltdowns and misguided wars continue to happen? Against this backdrop of the financial sector crumbling, the US presidential race up for grabs, a group of Egyptians has been provided an amazing first-hand window into what makes the US tick and has, to our benefit, been translating it through their well-informed prism and thus, hopefully, explaining ourselves to us. Let's hope that people are listening. That or enjoying our delicious yogurt.