Note from My Desk: The Midbrow American Project of Hating America

I have been lucky enough to live all over: rural America, Washington, Chicago, New York and now Paris.

A time-honored tradition among the urban monoculture American expat is “discovering” that Europe is good and America is bad.

“Oh, finally—fresh vegetables.”

Really? Where were you grocery shopping in America, a Shell station?

America has problems. So does France.

But the Americans most committed to this narrative are not people who experienced the worst of American life.

They tend to come from New York, Chicago, Washington, or affluent suburbs.

They are usually upper-middle-class, highly educated, and pleased with their own percieved cultural sophistication.

Yet the story they tell is utterly midbrow:

America bad. France good. Me buy baguette. Me no like hot dogs.

There is something very funny about people who believe they are intellectually and culturally superior to ordinary Americans repeating opinions that are one standard deviation away from reality television and Burger King.

Disliking ranch dressing and buying leeks at an outdoor market doesn’t make you “sophisticated.”

This is why communications matter.

1.) We create a story that explains our own choices: I did not merely move abroad; I escaped a crude country for a more enlightened life.

2.) We repeat that story publicly until it becomes part of our identity.

The same dynamic shapes institutional messaging. Audiences bring status anxieties, class assumptions and moral stories about who they believe themselves to be.

That is why communications must begin with the question, “What story has our audience already told themselves?”