Condi Rice's America

I have a little update on US public diplomacy for you today.

You see, Delhi actually plays home to a branch office of the Library of Congress, charged with obtaining publications and dailies from Asian sources. And I wanted to find out if any of their acquisitions are available for perusal (the answer is no). Finding that out meant paying a visit to the Delhi America Center, the centerpiece of which is the American Library, whose mission is, broadly, “to promote a better understanding of the culture, history, institutions, values and policies of the United States.” These seem to exist at a number of embassies and consulates, actually, so that is something to bear in mind should you ever find yourself abroad without access to a Martin Van Buren biography.

Public Diplomacy: Team India can be proud—the library was very full and all the patrons were of South Asian extraction, although, of course, many of them may well have been US citizens, too. But the free internet and AC no doubt has some charms for locals.

I spent awhile perusing the shelves, wanting to get a sense of the image of America the State Dept was projecting. I was expecting something rather wholesome and folksy, lots of smarmy biographers of the Founders and what not. But somewhat to my surprise, the government’s preferred public face of America is pretty much an NPR listener: This All-American family owns a large number of books, mostly non-fiction, concentrated on history and world affairs. Their DVD collection is overwhelmingly produced by PBS and their interest in religious literature is entirely sociological. The collection contains such syllabus-friendly works as Dreier, Mollenkopf, & Swanstrom’s “Place Matters: Metropolitics for the Twenty-First Century” and Katznelson & Milner’s “American Political Science: The Discipline’s State and the State of the Discipline,” suggesting advanced degrees or maybe even an academic career.

Literature runs toward the classics, thinning considerably after about 1950, with exceptions made for such literary luminaries as Tony Morrison and John Updike. Our All-American family apparently has no use for Patricia Cornwall or, indeed, any book that one can purchase at an airport. They own many books on the Native American experience but only a few on sports, and these include such not-exactly-the-Budweiser-crowd titles as “The Thinking Fan’s Guide to the World Cup” and a biography of Arthur Ashe.

This felt a bit misleadingly high-minded but perhaps welcome as an aspirational statement. But I was very distressed by the way the lefty, intellectual portrayal of Americans stops short of presenting current events: there were basically no books on the war in Iraq. When you type “Iraq” into the catalog, in fact, you get only a few hits from the Congressional Research Service. The catalog can’t be that good, though, because their collection also includes Kenneth Pollack’s “The Threatening Storm” and a rather obscure edited volume on the merits of the invasion. But no “Fiasco” or “Imperial Life in the Emerald City.” Bob Woodward’s flattering early take on Bush is represented, but not “State of Denial.” (Notice all the puns about denial of this book’s existence that I could have made there, but didn’t). To be fair, they do have Richard Clarke’s “Against all Enemies” and a rather exuberant book on Al-Jazeera’s dominance in Middle Eastern media.

When one adds this lack of engagement with current debates to the rest of the collection, I think the government’s preferred public face comes off as something of a limousine liberal. Someone who probably hasn’t read any of the books he owns. But if he liked books, they would be serious books with a vaguely generous notion of the rest of the world. After all, the nanny is from Trinidad and she's been great, hardly ever asks for a day off.

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In lighter news, I found some St. Ives Apricot Scrub today. I actually remember the first time I ever saw this product. My older sister must have just started taking an interest in cosmetics and she showed me the Scrub she had procured and explained the importance of adequate exfoliation. I was quite impressed, assuming that St. Ives must be some kind of high-priced Swiss import, the use of which was unbearably sophisticated. In retrospect, I doubt those exfoliations did much for me, not only because I wasn’t very faithful about them but also because the scrub used to come in a tub (like Noxema) and repeatedly sticking ones hands into the face wash seems sort of unsanitary now. Anyhow, this was all before the current hegemony of bath poufs and shower gel (for my male readers: a bath pouf is a bunch of nylon netting scrunched into what is vaguely a sphere, to be used for gentle removal of dead skin—ask your girlfriend or sister is bath poufs could be right for you) and I haven’t used Apricot Scrub in awhile. But I recently noticed that what with the heat and moisture and lack of poufs here, I’ve started to molt. Which is both itchy and icky. So I’m looking forward to getting back to the good ol’ days of St. Ives—if my blog becomes unbearably classy, you’ll know why.