Notes on a Foreign Country: An American Abroad in a Post-American World

by Suzy Hansen

my years as an American abroad in the twenty-first century were not a joyous romp of self-discovery and romance, the kind we see in movies; mine were more of a shattering and a shame, and even now, I still don’t know myself.

Even when I disagreed with America’s policies, I always believed in our inherent goodness, in my own. I would never have admitted it, or thought to say it, but looking back, I know that deep in my consciousness I thought that America was at the end of some evolutionary spectrum of civilization, and everyone else was trying to catch up.

American exceptionalism did not only define the United States as a special nation among lesser nations, it demanded that all Americans believe they, too, were born superior to others, a concept of goodness that requires the existence of evil for its own sustenance.

You have to think of Turkey as a bus. And the people riding the bus are the citizens. And the people driving the bus are the politicians. And any time the bus swerves a little this way or that way, the guardrails are there to keep it on course. The guardrails are the army.”

unassailable, perhaps unconscious faith in my country’s inherent goodness,

Here’s the thing: no one ever tells Americans that when they move abroad, even if they are empathetic and sensitive humans—even if they come clean about their genetic inability to learn languages, even if they consider themselves leftist critics of their own government—that they will inevitably, and unconsciously, spend those first months in a foreign country feeling superior to everyone around them and to the nation in which they now have the privilege to live.

“We are told it is the greatest country on earth. The thing is, we will never reconsider that narrative the way you are doing just now. Because to us, that isn’t propaganda, that is truth. And to us, that isn’t nationalism, it’s patriotism. And the thing is, we will never question any of it because at the same time, all we are being told is how freethinking we are, that we are free. So we don’t know there is anything wrong in believing our country is the greatest on earth. The whole thing sort of convinces you that a collective consciousness in the world came to that very conclusion.”