helped win world war ii," barrett tillman delves into one of the united states' most decorated ships. watch for the authors in the near future on booktv. >> barry sanders examines how people around the world view the united states next on booktv. he argues that the commonly-held belief that the rest of the world has developed a negative view of the u.s. since 9/11 is wrong and that people's feelings about this country are complicated. it's about an hour. ..

>> then we won't continue to receive wonderful authors. the philosophy is kind of like not bringing your own beer into the bar. so that sort of describes it. so i did want to take a moment to explain that to you. and express our appreciation it in advance but if you'd like to get your book signed we are not asking you purchase one from vroman's. your receipt will be your signing ticket. tonight is our great pleasure and honor to present barry sanders who's here to discuss his book, "american avatar: the united states in the global imagination." mr. sanders were born in philadelphia and is a graduate

of the university of pennsylvania, and yale law school. in addition to being an adjunct professor of communications studies at ucla, mr. sanders is also a member of the usc center on public diplomacy's advisory board. a member of the council of foreign relations, and a member of the pacific council on international policy. he is also a renowned international lawyer. additionally, mr. sanders has served as the chair of both the california bar association and the los angeles bar association. barry sanders is an important civic leader in los angeles for answers on the council of the board of commissioners of the city of los angeles department of parks and recreation, the board of commissioners of the los angeles memorial coliseum, and the executive commission of the los angeles opera. that praise for this book has been wonderful, including the following from howard berman.

in challenges assumptions and offers a way forward in this area of great importance to our nation. please help me welcome barry sanders. [applause] >> thank you. it's an honor and privilege to be here at vroman's brookstore. vroman's as a institution in southern california from the altar largest bookstore and it's wonderful to be here today. the book "american avatar" is a book that derives from years of thinking about the issue of images of our country and how people form their ideas. it's a book about ideas, but i try to write in a way that looks at it from the point of view of human nature and commonsense. so what i'm asking what i talk about images of america is not just the question of why they hate us, though there are people out there who do hate us, but you'll find the majority people

around the world have always still to this day have a favorable impression of this country. so the question i'm asking is how do people come by their ideas? how do they derive this idea from an idea about america, or how do they derive any idea? you could ask people about the images of finland or ecuador, and they may have some or they may have none. but it's worth talking to images of america because this is one of the rare concepts that have some landscape in the mind of almost everyone around the world however remote. and has for over 200 years. so that makes it a perfect place to look at how people form their ideas, and also to find lots of things are written to give us guidance about reformed i didn't like today but when it years ago and 200 years ago. there's some surprising continuity. and i think what's particularly useful about what looking at this comp if you want to have an

opportunity to change people's ideas, you ought to start out in my view is an understanding of develop their ideas. it may seem surprising to you but that would be a new approach. so i set out to do it, and in doing it i'm able to base a lot of my thinking about it originally on years of doing international negotiations. as any of you said around to try to make osha with someone across the table, or even without a table, it's important to know what you want. but, frankly, anybody can know what he or she wants. what is just as important are more important is to do with the person on the other side of the table once. sometimes you sit there across the table for days or weeks, and what you are puzzling over is what is it they want? what is in their minds? so i thought i have some ideas about this and i is imprints at ucla who asked me to teach a course about 10 years ago, and i said i'd be happy to do that if i could teach a course about the

interests of america. this book is not a textbook. this is a book that can be read by intelligent audience such as this one, but it is something that contains many of the ideas that is in the course. the fundamental idea, and when it should seem so obvious, is an image of america or anything else is an idea. it's an idea in someone else's head. it's the old beauty in the eye of the builder. and this means that when you're asking questions of images of the america you are asking not about america but you're asking about them. and how people's minds were to the concern that we've had, especially since 2011 about people's ideas about america has typically involve tremendous amount of hand wringing, about what have we done, what are we doing, and, of course, what we have done, what we are, what we do, what we say, those things are relevant, ideas and people's

heads at the beginning of the question, not the end. still the examination is in what's in people said. you will find that image is then are, contradictory, often unrelated to the things that are imagine. let me give you some examples. recent examples out of the newspapers, just the last few weeks a couple months. so it's after this book went to print. here's a quote from the "los angeles times" about some folks in libya in august right after it was clear that gadhafi was coming down, and there were demonstrations in the streets of benghazi. and here's a quote about a fellow. he decided to bring along a flag to the demonstration. it wasn't the ubiquitous libyan rebel flag. he chose the american flag with stars and stripes on a long, heavy pull. quote lydians love america he

explained as he cuts or a boisterous crowd that numbered in the tens of thousands. they love the flag because it stands for freedom and democracy. exactly what they want for libya. so first of all, this is an interesting point of view. this is a statement made by somebody who, since gadhafi had been there for 43 years and controlled everything in the newspapers come you can imagine that praise of america was not something he was weaned on. this is something he didn't learn in school but this is something managed to seep through to people in a closed society. so it's not just praise but there's an image and there. so i go further. i want to see. so much of the concern people have had is about these annual studies that come out now, that the pew global sender does. global attitudes come in jewelry every gym in the come out with their annual study that image of america went down or went out. this is not a study of images.

it's more of a popular to contest, the study of attitudes because the last people are you favorable or are you unfavorable? favorable or unfavorable is not an image. want to talk about images i mean the things like stands for freedom of democracy, or its races or its imperialist, or land of opportunity. or rich or poor. you could have that image, to but those are images. so we have seen these radical shifts in our attitude surveys, but they are not necessarily a measure of imagery. and that's an important part of what i'm studying. so here you have a fellow who, despite a lifetime of indoctrination and anti-and passionate anti-americanism as an image in his mind at the american flag stands for freedom and democracy. interesting. then almost simultaneously a few days later, in egypt, where they

have also had the arab spring, and here we are quietly providing funding to many of the nongovernmental organizations that are promoting democracy. here's a quote. america does not want for egypt to become the largest democratic country in the region, says the chairman of the secular and liberal bosque party. that one of the -- the aim for funding is to create chaos to over the egyptian guys and traditions. that's in the adjoining country, simultaneously a different set of images. then here's another one from libya just about the same time, a couple weeks later. a 24 year-old student with bullet wounds in his stomach and arm disputed that the intervention was primarily humanitarian, that's the intervention by americans and nato, they didn't do it for us, he said. they did for oil. but in his next breath he added

i love america so much it is the land of freedom. so there's some images, images that america is there to create chaos and over the egyptian values, that we envy not for them but for oil, and the same man saying i love america so much it is the land of freedom. so you see energy has quality that people's minds have, the ideas and their buddies mindset. images are ideas that you achieve it all your life. they are the product of your perceptions, things we've heard, things you have seen, things you have been told. maybe you came and visited disney world, and you sought and given a with a perception. of course, you didn't see the rockies and you didn't see the south bronx and you didn't see the sierras and you didn't see texas but you have a perception. it's partial. no perception can be totally accurate or acted at all in the sense that any perception anybody has is going to be partial when it deals with the subject so broad and noble as

america. but you go with a perception to her maybe her brother-in-law went to disney world and he came and told you. or he came and told someone else who told you. maybe it's always a game of telephone were someone says something similar who said something, by the time gets to your brain does resemble what they said. third of all these problems of perception, problems of communication. so it finally gets to your mind with images are collected a somewhat imperfect. more than that, you have things that you invented entirely. i don't know who have had the experience of not really being sure whether something in mind is something to remember. or something you imagined. maybe it was a dream. these sorts of conditions between the real and invented are typical of the brain. you to build a storehouse of imagery through your life. but the imagery may be an

accurate the moment it hit your brain. certainly as i said partial the moment they hit your brain. or it can be something that you simply created, or something that is degrading in your brain that the memories we have, we start to forget. we may have remembered a very well right away and then a couple years later we don't remove it so well. they related we don't remove it now and we are not sure. so you have this storehouse and it sits there. it is a movie star as. the brain is soft tissue. it's not the perfect stone collection but it is a big collection. and because of the nature of these perceptions they are often conflicting to each other. f. scott fitzgerald said it's the son of a great mind of conflicting ideas at the same time. the sign of every mind. nobody fails to of conflicting ideas at the same time. think about it can happen. imagine a youngster born toward the end of world war ii in

germany, and grows up with bombs dropping from american bombers on his home, only to find american occupying troops offering him chocolate bars. american planes supplying berlin with an airlift in 49, saving the city from starvation and then a continuing american occupation, people marching around like they own the place, and demonstration in the 1960s about intermediate missiles being placed in germany where they thought maybe they were trying to make germany a workaround for our defense. so on and so on and so forth. in the person's life, remembered collected images, conflicted images, they're all there in one form or another, however degraded or. so which of our images of american collected over 250 years, actually before the. your images place, places a fascination for people in europe, especially well before the founding of the republic. images wealth when the confused doors arrived around santa fe in

the 16th 16th century they were looking for gold. this was the place where the streets were paved in gold, those immigrants who moved here in the 19th century. all we have seen as a place of love an opportunity. democracy and freedom that the fellow in benghazi talked about, that dates back to 1776, in the early. user images that we promote, we advertise in, we sell them but we don't have to. i remember being in tiananmen square in beijing in 1989 during the demonstrations, and my wife, nancy, and i went down to the square. we talked to people, largely young people throughout the square who had grown up in the country that certainly dramatically sealed from outside. and there was a styrofoam 30 foot-high version of the statute of liberty. somehow the image was there but it got there.

those are positive images to print images of a racist nation, certainly well founded on slavery and jim crow. we have an image of imperialism, an image of arrogance, all sorts of images that are there by the thousands. so i've been looking at imagery that you can't stop there. that's the beginning of the issue, the beginning of the issue in "american avatar." the real question then becomes how in the world do people decide which image to invoke, which image to articulate? if you come and walking on asking people their opinion, and then they give you more than opinion, favorable or unfavorable. they may tell you things, here is a pakistani journalist writing, the wave of anti-americanism is writing about the fans and pakistan even among many who once admired the united states and the short reason for that is plain, that, presume it is american plans to bring peace to afghanistan for.

the killing is to going on and excuse that they of americans have now expanded the war into pakistan. invoking what they did in the 1960s when the vietnam war moved into cambodia. moreover, while pakistan's die for american war, washington is giving favors to into. they are the journalist is saying that people are evoking an image they had. an image from the time, and patients of and cambodia. how do they choose the image? why then, why never ceasing their choosing and that because something is happening now that causes them to go back in the mind and pull that went off the shelf rather than some other image off the shelf. they were serving plenty of images even though osama bin laden certain had some good images of america summit in the back shelf of his mind, supposedly his favorite television show was bonanza. which when you think of it is sort of saudi with the family off in the wilderness and all hang together with the bad, but more than that some nice images

about when we're supplying with the missiles to fight the russian but those aren't the images he chose to choose. so the meat of this book, "american avatar," and in need of the study has to be how do people choose among the multiplicity of images because their storehouse of images could come up with anything. they have got most anything there. they've got there because of their experiences plus tv and movies and business and all of that. so i turn in the majority of the book starting about one-third of the way through, to an analysis of the predispositions, the biases, the way people's minds work, not americans, but the person who has the image of people abroad. out of their minds work to help them choose an image on a given day. and whether those choice mechanisms, those web browsers that these to go to the collection of images can be affected in ways that would help the american policy of public diplomacy. there are bunches of these

predispositions, not as many as images but they're plenty of ways you can categorize them. my book couldn't possibly cover them all. there is certainly a general seen a photo that is hardwired in most all these people, comes when they were cavemen warning about stranger. if all you know about someone is that they are strange, that was never good news when they're coming towards your case. and it still isn't. some people, they just love the idea of strangers automatically but most people you have to overcome strangeness but it is easily overcome. a lot of predispositions are fleeting, a lot of them are minor predispositions are a lot stronger and a lot are probably. there are predispositions of mob psychology, people find this is in the crowd, so that they're shutting what of the crowd is shutting. that dissipate. they can be shouting pro-american anti-american things, whatever, that sort of the conformity of people feel the people of any portion of society that is pro-american and

are such straits of societal and one which would naturally be pro-american or even not just american, they can consider india a month the old elites in india still is pro-british while most of india remembers years of colonial rule as years that they don't approve of an anti-british tendency in india but among certain, there is that for america, too. conformity matters. that can be fairly permanent. they can be permanently in that group. there are other attitudes. additives that are religiously based the attitudes that pertain to traditional societies. attitudes that are actually anti-modern. george w. bush used to say they don't like our freedom. i don't agree. i think people most at work like freedom. but that everybody likes our culture. the other element of her culture, materialism, the rationality of our culture, the individuality of our culture.

there's quite a yen for our game after and it can be a totally permanent attitude. there's another related attitude that has about 200 now 10 year history beginning in europe, but spreading elsewhere but as i said quite a bit of time, i call romanticism, or romanticism versus the lightning dash of enlightenment. on 18th 18th century and licking 17th century european philosophers will be implemented it before they did. we pretty much, doesn't matter what your political stripe from the left wing to the right wing in america, there's a unanimity and accepting jeffersonian democracy of a society built up from the individual worshiping progress, rationality, these sorts of issues of here in the but as i said, a qaeda better the success society there's not much debate here. and after the french revolution that became accepted in europe

by the majority of people, growing majority over the years. but not by everybody. there were then after the french revolution in such chaos and disarray and bloodletting, considerable disappointment, anger in the old aristocracy and in some of the ports composed of european society, that rejected the idea of the enlightenment that didn't seem to work and i spent quite a bit of time talking about how, to this day, their attitude especially among european intellectual and cultural elites, that look down on the middle class of europe always have what they call a term we don't even use here, and because of the attitude about their, when you look across the ocean, collateral damage, sort of road killed over here, because they don't like the own, the attitude is this country is entirely, and attempts to control attitudes of america by

some people in your. you can see the special and cultural elites to think of harold pinter's, he resorted i but before doing that, he gave a nobel prize acceptance speech, got the nobel prize except for one very reason that need to be a lot. he showed up, accepting the nobel prize for literature, not for peace, not for politics, for literature. he spent his entire speech excoriating the americans. may be as right. maybe he is wrong. but besides the point, is this is a fixation on anti-americanism that you find among culture, then they turn also to another example, i have another example that interest be the most anything may be something most importance in the book. if you look at the examples i chose, sort of cultural attitude, that is a lifelong attitude.

it's a lifelong attitude and is anti-american. if you look at an attitude about religious indoctrination or traditional society, the shaman iand in primitive village come t this modernity through t-shirts with mickey mouse on in and talk about cell phones and so on, it threatens her position. you're never going to accept it. life is fine, as the chief of shaman others but maybe the rest of the village wants change, but you don't. it's a permanent attitude towards that person to not necessary at the end of traditional village, but that when. it threatens his or her life position usually. but there's another kind of attitude, that is very pro-american, and is the one that has the greatest dangers force. they people who start out with a fixed anti-american attitude sees the midst it's doing things of which they don't approve, and they shrug. it's what they would expect,

what they always do, it's the america they seek him it's the america they know. it has no particular shock when. at the world as i said has a considerable majority, always had, of people who stand in admiration of what this country has, what it's done, what he stands for, and what they think it could and should do for them. some of this is our own self-promotion, some of it is purely in the imagination. let me give you just one paragraph in the book that might see better than i can off the coffee. .. -- off-the-cuff. ..

>> people wanting visas to come to this country, a place where they can change their life. the most famous bo live yang novel first written in the 990s --1990s is called american visa. it tells the story of a man who was a rural teacher in bolivia who ostensibly is trying to get a vis a vis to the -- a visa to the united states to visit his son who is in florida. and be it tells his story of moving to la paz, finding a room, going through his money, trying to get advice from people, walking around the american embassy near the

consular door, afraid to go in and be interviewed, fearful of what might happen. goes out, has a whole serious of awful incidents. as his life gets worse and worse, loses all his money and destroys his life without having the interview. it was such a moby dick whale for him. it was sitting above his head, taunting him. a fixation, in fact, an obsession, and this is a book that really stirred minds in bolivia. in fact, as you read the book, you don't even know that the man actually had a son in florida. probably didn't. it's just about the united states as an obsession. this is something that's true in many places in the world. don't get me wrong, i don't mean to say everyone. this is just one of the biases or predispositions you run into, but it's an important one, and it relates to the concept you'll see almost never written about -- i can tell you because i looked for the books in this country -- and that's envy.

there are talk about images. the pew study, the latest one this last year, in addition to asking favorables, they asked the question of what is the largest economy in the world, biggest gdp. ask they found that for europeans, western europeans and americans about 50%, slightly above, of western europeans said that china had the biggest economy. had, now has the biggest economy. this was question's asked in may, published this june. there was a similar gal line up poll of -- gallup poll of americans in february who said about the same thing. the rest of the world didn't think so, but western europe and the americans thought it was china. as of the most recent numbers before they were asked which is the end of 2010, the american gdp was almost three times the chinese gdp. and that's before you look at questions of per capita income. i think just the total gdp. ours about 15 trillion, theirs a

little over five. no question china has been growing faster and may well catch up, but no time soon, incidentally. and this image we have as well as europeans have of a shrunken america to the point where it's less than the largest economy is one of these, again, disconnects between really. some of the rest of the world, though, has this reality in their mind, and american and, for that matter, the rest of the west's economic lead over their lives is enormous over their life expectancies, over their economies, their personal wealth. for that matter, the lack of, relative lack of chaos in our society versus theirs. there are many differences, and there are many reasons for them to look at this place in the way that it can be envied. and not only, though, can it be envied for its reality, for these images that should be seep as real, but for their other

images, the images of shangri la, the images they simply invent, and they cherish these images. these give rise to this emotion, and that's what's important, it's an emotion. not some intellectual idea. an emotion of envy that we don't talk about in this society. envy is something that's universal. we've all felt it, don't tell me you haven't. people have all envied you too. you may not even realize it. someone can envy you walking across the street, they think you look wonderful, they'll envy you. they don't have to envy you for your money or your looks, maybe it's because you're tall, but there's all sorts of ways to be envied, and while leveling -- and i'll talk about it for a minute -- has been tried many places, you can never level away all the things that involve envy, all the qualities one can wish they have. what envy is, is a resentment by people who compare themself to

someone else and see that that person or that group of people have, has or have something they'd like to have, but they're blocked from getting it. envy is different from jealousy. envy's when i want willing, and i can't get it -- something and i can't get it. jealousy is when i have something, and i'm afraid of losing it. i'm jealous of my girlfriend because someone might steal her away. so i'm speaking about envy narrowly defined. most of the time when people say envy, they're not thinking about that either. they're thinking about coveting. if you have got that wonderful car, you've got your prius -- and i say that advisedly -- and i want it, and i think i can get it, raise the money and get it, i covet your car. it's between me and your car. but if there's no way i can get your car even by stealing it, i don't just covet your car, i resent you for having it. that's different. that's between me and you.

so it's this blockage. it's the fact that i'm comparing myself to you, a person with the car that i love, and the fact that i have to way of getting it, and it's shot fair. it's not fair. so it's not between me and the car, it's between me and you. it's an emotion, it's a resentment. and it feels bad. i mean, we tell people envy's one of the seven deadly sins, and we enforce it around here. that's why people don't discuss it, don't ever mention it, because it feels bad to have it. you resent that person, and then you feel guilty for resenting them because you know it's a sin. and then you feel angry at them for making you feel bad about yourself. so in a really bad case of envy, it spirals downward, and it can get to the point where you actually just want to bring the buildings down on yourself and everybody else. think of these cases of the stalker of the beautiful model, and he ends up slashing her face. that's not going to get him the beautiful model. but it's the resentment and the destructiveness that comes from it. so this is a very dangerous

emotion. an american example, wanda holloway. there was a movie made. this woman in the 1990s, texas, town in texas. her daughter does not make it on the high school cheerleading squad, but the neighbor's daughter does. so what does mrs. holloway do? she hires a hitman who was an undercover fbi agent to go -- not kill the neighbor's daughter, no, to kill the neighbor lady, the mother of the daughter. it's the resentment against the person who has, who has the daughter on the team. not this sort of functional relationship of wanting something and going out to either buy it or steal it. this is very disruptive. societies know that envy is a universal emotion. they have to tailor themselves to dealing with it. and every society's found it own way. we in america have probably a way at the outer extreme of dealing with it, of suppressing

the expression of envy. letting anybody flaunt what they've got. go ahead and do it we consider it an incentive for others to try, and because we have considerable still to this day social mobility and economic mobility compared to other places -- though europe has caught up in economic mobility -- because we have mobility and we're perceived to have it, we're the country where people say that any child can grow up to be president, well, 43 men have grown up to be president out of, what, 600 million people have lived here all these years. that's as close to a fib as you can get. but we believe it, we accept it. and that attitude of hope plus the suppression of expression of envy lets the society move along pretty smoothly. and you can compare that to some of the recent occupy issues and see whether that's eroding. other societies are dealt differently. we went a few years ago, quite a few years ago to the highlands of new guinea, thought it'd be

good to vacation there. stone age people living village after village nearby, often at war with each other. but when not at war, their economies were based on pigs, the dowry of someone -- had to provide a dowry for a wedding, you do it in pig price. you provide five pigs if you had them, only three if that's what you had. and over time some villages would get richer than others because they had more pigs, and every few years they'd get together for a two-week-long festival, and they'd all bring all their pigs, and they would all contribute their pigs to the pot, and they would eat what was, basically, the surplus of the villages that had more pigs. they would deal with envy by flat out leveling. now, i don't know what they were doing with people envious of those who were taller or smarter, but they were sure or dealing with leveling on the pigs. and not just in the highlands of new guinea. for hundreds and hundreds of years, the russian nobility handled envy among their serfs

by every few years doing a repartition of the land. big families would get lots of strips of land, small families would work fewer strips of land. and it made sense for the noble who owned the land because, of course, a small family could only work fewer strips of land. a large family could work more. and they would distribute them based on family size, and every few years small families would become big families, they'd do a repartition. well, many analysts say that the success of the russian revolution in 1917 in the rural areas where it wasn't expected to succeed is because there hadn't been a repartition for over 100 years. people had been waiting for it. the resentment and envy of one serf to the next serf who had more land was growing to a boiling point and, in fact, of course, stalin gave them the ultimate repartition about ten years later by taking all the land and starving so many of them. it wasn't what they bargained for. but they did bargain for a

leveling. the other thing the russians did, though, is they could avoid envy problems, they had to avoid envy problems among the serfs with leveling. you had to also avoid an envy problem from the serf to the owner. the noble. well, that was done by the enormous gulf between the lives of the noble and the lives of the serf ofs. the lies -- for envy, you have to compare yourself. so the queen of england goes through in her carriage. lots of londoners may envy lots of things, they may not like the queen, but they don't like the carriage. she's from outer space basically. you'll go through a small indian village with your camera in your car, the local people may envy the next farmer his two water buffaloes, but they won't envy you your life. you're from outer space. noncomparison is one of the other solutions, and it works. the indian practice of castes

for a number of reasons, one of them was to separate people off from the phenomenon of envy, the lack of comparison. this is eroding now. people can see on electronic media the lives of people who they never considered comparable to themselves. there are, there are satellite dishes in every mud hut in the dry river valley in southern morocco. so this is not so easy anymore, it's not so easy in india anymore. and it certainly stopped working in russia. another thing you can do is you can hide the differences that are there throughout large parts of the world. you see great assumption of that people will be envious of differences, and if you ever see the figa that in brazil people sort of, an amulet people wear around their neck. it's supposed to keep away the evil eye, envy. they'll put a blue button on a

rug in turkey to keep away the evil eye. people in the middle east, they'll tell you good news. my son got into the university. and you'll spit. the spit's to keep away the evil eye. you can't tell good news without spitting. it's done in the large parts of the world. this is because instead of suppressing envy by eliminating differences, it's -- they're aware the differences are there, they have to do what they can to get the envier to go away, and the solution in the middle east and in lots of other places is to hide the differences. so if you go to saudi arabia and you go through residential areas, there are high walls made of stucco, stand, and they're the same. even -- each one look like the other. behind them, fabulous palaces. the same is true in sicily.

filthy walls, placards on them and political stickers, and you go inside, and there's a magnificent palace sew. you hide what you've got. when she comes out, she comes out in her old beat-up fiat 500. you hide what you've got. and the europeans, not quite so americanized as we americans, are much more concerned about flaunting wealth. so the prescriptions against flaunting wealth, the prodescriptions against flaunting wealth, they exist in large parts of the world because they though this danger of envy, in the evil eye. and that's the solution that they'll choose. so everybody's got a solution. the problem with the solutions is that they work within their own society only. they're built for enclosed societies. another example in the middle east of hiding wealth, we think of the saudis and their clothing. the men in almost identical white robes. those robes look identical so

people have e author mouse wealth -- enormous wealth can look at least to the naked eye -- in fact, they may not be the same -- no richer than the next man. but when it gets behind those walls, the robe comes off. in fact, when it gets on a plane to england, the robe comes off. the women cover inside black gowns covering everything but their eyes. they're not only doing this for the religious reasons that are ascribed to them which are true or for the reasons of modesty which are ascribed to them which are true, but they're doing it because a woman this these older societies the man's -- societies is the man's finest possession. he doesn't want to show his wife's beauty to others not just because she might find that others are attracted to her, but because it's, again, a sense of flaunting your wealth. and flaunting your wealth is not done, but it is done here. and as we see the greater ability of the world to look at

us, to watch "dallas" on their tv shows, we have to confront the fact that we're in a kind of dissonant culture around the world where we are exposed to the disappointment and disaffection to the extent that the opportunity to participate is denied. to the extent that this is a place that anybody could come to as they could in the 19th century, we could have our streets paved with gold in their minds. fine. it wasn't envy, it was ambition. people came, and they participated, and they were often disappointed. found it, well, wasn't paved with gold, and some went back. but not many. we saw that problem with the -- we solved that problem with the sense of hope that your son or daughter can be president idea. we solved it with, in fact, delivering for a lot of people. my students in my classes at ucla, at least half of them year in and year out, are people who either themselves or their parents moved here from another country, often the first person in the family to go to the

university. we still deliver remarkably well for a remarkable number of people. not avoiding noting for a large number of people who are multigenerationally trapped in poverty. that's also true of our country. but we also have this land of opportunity. but we don't have it necessarily for people abroad. and we'll find that people seeking visas who are presume my our, quote, greatest friends because they're the ones who want to come here, are the people who often bear the greatest anger; the man in bolivia, that thing this his mind that he can't participate in, that blockage. the comparison he can do, the unfair blockage that he feels. so we can't let the whole world move here. but visa policies even against visitor are issues that create real matters of image, an image that are not just intellectual images, but resentments that are strong emotions, a kind of real anger. the other kind of acker that's a dis-- anger that's a

disaffection is a disappointment. we've been telling people around the world what we stand for. bolivia doesn't tell people what it stands for. belgium doesn't tell people what it stands for. china always acts in its own interests, doesn't have to stand for anything. this is a unique place. and because we are also a nation that's national security is the first obligation of its government, we've always had to run policies that whether they're wise or not -- and they're often wise -- will run in conflict with our announced goals, with our announced principles. it's often avoidable when you're a society based on principles. the things we do are things that people expect us to do the way they see them. when we do come to the aid of those seeking to bring down gadhafi, we're meeting that expectation. when we are the people supporting mubarak, we're flying conflict with that expectation. it doesn't mean we have to do what others expect of us. we have to do what we have to do.

but we shouldn't be surprised when we're running into the resentments and anger that comes from disappointment, disaffection because we're being held to a standard that even if we were to try better than we try, we can't possibly achieve. so those are just to give you one example of a kind of bias or predisposition i deal with in the book. there are others, and there are things that i think can explain how a lot of what you read comes about. i do spend some time at the end of the bookmaking some suggestions on how we can use an understanding of the way people form their ideas, to make changes in what we do which will make changes in how their ideas exist. you shouldn't spend your time trying to persuade the unpersuadable. anybody who's done an election campaign knows that. persuade the people, these very same people who start out with a very favorable view, but where we run the risk if it's turning and curdling into something

sour. focus on those. they're persuadable. they're subject to change for us or against us. what we've tried to do is tell them we stand for freedom and democracy. they know this. and, in fact, that can with one of the reasons -- that can be one of the reasons they're angry, if they are. we don't need to tell them we're rich. they think we're richer than we are. we don't need to tell them about opportunity. they think we have it for ourselves. what we need to do is go to the things that bother them, the things that they worry about, that they're not sure of at all. the first one is our steadfastness. will we stick to it once we start something? we're going to withdraw from afghanistan. we need to, we will. but make no mistake, there are people in helmand province who have signed up with us, have gone to our side because they think it's the winning side. if we leave them in the lurch, as we did creating a sort of permanent image around the world

as people cling to the skid marks of helicopters leaving saigon's embassy, if we leave them in the lurch, you can expect that disappointment that comes from not being steadfast. we also have to worry about our openness. this issue of can i get a visa not just to move here, can i get a vista -- visa to visit? we're not spending five months examining their application. we put it at the bottom of a pile for five months and then look at it for five minutes. people who want to come here to visit are people who are our natural friends. we're creating an anger, and that anger comes back and bites. but more than openness to visitor and openness to people wanting to move here to the extent this it can be done, we d an openness of mind. we need to listen to people. people like to be listened to. even if you don't agree with them. and you usually learn something when you listen. and it's critical if you're

going to try to change their mind because it's about what's in their minds, not about what you want to say. then we have to worry about acting in the interests of others. remember that man i quoted to you from libya saying they did it for oil. gadhafi would have sold us all the oil we wanted at world prices. no problem. we didn't do it for oil. but people think we do it, we do it for reasons other than their interests and, in fact, no country in history has been expected to act in the interest of others. we're unique in our power, unique in our position, unique in our philosophy that we say we do, and people expect us to. we have to worry about being compassionate. most people, most -- almost everybody of the world, 99% of people are much more concerned about their lives, their families' lives and their welfare than anything political. they worry about compassion. when bill clinton used to say i feel your pain, he was on to something of political power.

people -- even if they have what you would consider no pain, they still think they have pain. you have to show compassion toward people, and when we are engaged in military engagements as we necessarily often will be, you have to understand that people get hurt in those things. we've done much better than we ever could of at targeting and at collateral damage, but never can you do well enough. compassion there and compassion as we show it so very well when we're always the first responders after an earthquake of tsunami, we have the only but ocean navy. we can get there, and it matters. in the pew survey, favorables from 2011 versus 2010 went up 19% in japan. obviously, it was our compassionate reaction to the earthquake. though, in the same one year, it went down 14% in china, and nothing happened. it's very interesting. these favorables go like this. our favorables in these pew studies are now just as high as they were at the end of the clinton administration. and, um, so that all this talk and hand wringing during the

intervening years, turns out we're right back there. very volatile. but the pool of imagery? it doesn't change. except by slow acrergs of new images. and lastly, we have to try to live up to these ideals. if we're worried that people are, if we're worried that people are going to be disappointed in what we do, they will sometimes be, but we have to be aware that they will be, and when we are speaking about what we're doing, we have to act with that awareness and address ourselves directly to these questions. and if we do that, i think we can find some greater acceptance among the people who are persuadable. there'll always be a lack of acceptance among those who are unpersuadable, and you know what? that's just life. so i'd be delight today take your questions -- delighted to take your questions and answer anything i can and actually hear your comments more than your questions. thank you. [applause] >> well -- >> thank you.

>> [inaudible] i have an observation or a comment. i have been aware of when we have been in very remote areas, i mean, deserts and villages that american culture, especially music, seems to be everywhere. and they somehow can have devices that i don't even know what they are anymore, but american music, you mentioned "bonanza" and "dallas," tv has been very important. and american movies, i think, introduced america to the world in a way that maybe newspapers didn't. so anyway, do you have a comment on that? >> absolutely right. we are a spreader of culture in an enormous way and in a way that's considered disruptive in traditional societies. so, again, the chief or the shaman may not be happy by the new music that's come in. but it's, they're not happy particularly because of how desirable it is to the vast majority of the population.

the american brand, as they say, is the strongest brand in the world, but especially when it comes to mass culture. europeans, um, will stand strongly on their claim to high culture, but they'll stand without total justification. if you look at the record, the american record as producer of high culture is every bit as good as europe. even when it comes to that nobel prize for literature. the french have won the most, but we're two behind them. that's all. and we've won the highest number of nobels in every single other category. so there's a high culture strength here, but the mass culture strength is enormous. you get in a taxi anywhere, and they turn on the radio, and what you're hearing is american music. now, one of the reasons for that is that one of the strengths of this culture is its absorptive quality. and that's always been true.

it was true of the roman empire. that our music has music from everywhere in it. it has musicians from everywhere. it has performers in its movies from everywhere. so many of the -- you look at this movie, avatar, that shares a title with american avatar, my book, well, it was a canadian who made it and made it mostly in australia, but it's still called a hollywood product. there's something about america as an avatar, america as a symbol and a symbol of all that's modern and new. architecture, a new high-rise will go up in some city in england, they'll say, ah, they're americanizing the town. well, it may have been a german architect which is, of course, where stealing glass got started. and it's america because of what's here and america because of what we absorb as well as the technology that puts it out which itself is american. so the old line from marshall mccroon that the medium is the message is important too. that thing you don't know what it is? well, the parts may be made in

china and japan, but it's probably something designed here. it could be a nokia, but it's probably something designed here. probably by apple. and the devices themselves create that longing. the device tells you, ooh, this is american. you want to fly somewhere, well, now you can fly on an airbus. about 30% of it's made in this country. historically, if you wanted to fly somewhere, you had to get on boeing. these devices of transmission and delivery and the music which doesn't require language, so that's another reason why it's so important for spread, all these things create a lot of this longing that you can either satisfy or not satisfy. yeah. other questions? >> barry, i remember george w. bush appointing karen hughes, one of his favorites, to be sort of -- i took it to be kind of a pr effort into the middle east,

and then she sort of disappeared into the end of his administration. had there been or is there any kind of maybe is it a proper function of government to overtly and in a coordinated way manage these images that you talk about? should there be a department of public relations? >> historically, our country had been allergic to it. our country, of all countries, was able to have a reputation around the world without trying. it, as i said, the images were sometimes negative, but the reputation spread without trying. we started overt efforts at what some might call propaganda during world war i, and then as soon as the war was over, they dismantled what was called the ceil commission. didn't start again until world war ii, but starting after 1948 when there was talk, again, about dismantling this, the sort

of feeling there's something not american about promoting yourself, about propaganda, well, we did start then the united states information agency, the usia. after the cold war ended, it got dismantled during the clinton administration. it was, whatever functions it had, radio-free europe and voice of america were moved over to state, and the usia was dismantled. and then after september 11, as you on serbed -- observed, people say, why do they hate us, and turned around, and there was a whole new push to try to do something about the image of america. and the undersecretary of state for public diplomacy was established. and this position had a number of people fill it, one of whom in the middle of the bush administration was bush confidant karen hughes who did quite a good job for about a year. before her was charlotte bierce who came from madison avenue, very talented, enormously respected madison avenue

advertising executive. she was the first person to do it. the last clinton administration -- not clip torn, bush administration appointee, jim glassman, who did an excellent job. and then we had an appointee by the obama administration, judith mchale. the seat is now essentially empty, there's a place holder in it, and tara sonenshine is awaiting confirmation. what happened with the beginning of the effort in the bush administration was not promising. charlotte bierce's effort amounted to as its highlight -- not the only thing they were doing because we continued our broadcasting and radio -- amounted to putting together a series of television ads showing people in the middle east that there are arab-americans who prosper here, who are happy here. this doctor would be shown, that pharmacist would be shown, this person, that teacher. and american lives in dearborn

or southern california where they were not discriminated against, and where they were living fulfilling lives in the america, the land of opportunity. broadcasters around the middle east didn't want to show them because they were propaganda. also more important than that, when they were shown, they rapg exactly the wrong bell -- rang exactly the wrong bell. as i said earlier, you don't have to persuade people this is the land of opportunity. the people, though, on that end who aren't here are saying it's opportunity for those people who got their visa to dearborn, and i've been turned down. so all you've done is rub salt in my wound. more than that, people don't always like emigres. people who leave their country. going back into the 19th century, there's a long history of people decrying emigres as the trash from their society. who would leave? it's sort of vaguely treasonous to get up and go. so that was not a good idea. they didn't go over well. karen hughes did much better. she went around, and she made a

point of listening. but there was no connection between the listening and policy. and it's hard to make that connection. jim glassman worked very hard to try to bring us into the internet age and all the tools of social media which is where it needs to be because it needs to be a two-way conversation. it's not just telling people. and we're going to see how well they do. the biggest problem is that even though the obama administration and hillary clinton came into office with strong support for public diplomacy as to whether we should be doing it, the budget was frozen and will probably be substantially reduced in the 20% reduction of state department budget's now about to get. so there'll be no money for it. now, on the other hand -- oh, and incidentally, other countries always do it, think of the france alliance, the centers from germany, think of the japan foundation, think of the new confucius centers that china's putting all over the world, thousands of them.