The Man in the Mirror

I was in the Hong Kong airport a couple weeks ago when it finally hit me how pervasive American culture had become. It wasn't the sight of teenagers dressed in Abercrombie and Fitch jeans, or the smell of McDonalds wafting from down from a terminal. No, it was the unmistakable shriek of one Michael Jackson.

The source of this cultural intrusion was an electronics store, playing a concert DVD of Jacko live in some Eastern European country on one of its mini DVD players. Not only did it strike me that an electronics store in Hong Kong was using Michael Jackson to hawk its DVD players, but the actual content surprised me even more. The Europeans were hysterical, teary-eyed and sobbing while the King of Pop crooned about the "Man in the Mirror." For people who were under the iron fist of Communist rule when Jackson first emerged onto the scene to have now fallen under his spell--we'll, we've come a long way baby.

I was reminded of this cultural exchange during a discussion today between my Stanford colleagues and Kishore Mahbubani, a former Singaporean ambassador to the UN and current dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore. Mahbubani, who gained a reputation for being a "refreshing" diplomat for his acerbic candor, was unapolgetic in his defense of the Singapore model, which he described as a combination of meritocracy, pragmatism and honesty that threw concern for democratic institutions and civil liberties effectively out the window.

It got to the point where I think Larry Diamond, who is visiting Singapore with us for a few days, wanted to reach across the table and shake more diminutive Mahbubani around until he came to his senses about the benefits of liberal freedoms.

But Mahbubani, playing devil's advocate as he was, did raise a valid point. And that was that the moral basis for America's ideological push for democracy and human rights had been flushed down the toilet along with the Korans in Guantanamo.

America's moral standing "collapsed in a profound way," he said. The human rights abuses in Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib demonstrated "a reversal of what America stood for."

This is disconcerting, especially as its stems from the actions of an adminstration that claims to "stand for liberty, for the pursuit of happiness, and for the unalienable right for life." As President Bush makes his push in Congress to establish guidelines for the treatment of prisoners in this "war on terror," we must tread lightly. Five years after 9/11, we've lost the widespread support and sympathy we gained from nations around the world following that terrible tragedy.

If the war on terror ultimately rests on the liberation of the repressed and alienated Muslims of the Middle East--which I believe it does, to a certain extent--America must start with the man in the mirror. We cannot continue to push for democracy when we've lost all credibility on the international stage. Leaders who once considered reforms can now point to our failures in Iraq, our abuses in Guantanamo, not to mentino our pathetic response to Hurricane Katrina and say, "Is this what democracy looks like? No thanks!"

No message could have been any clearer. And when making a pragmatic argument for democracy, we may be losing as well.

Take, for example, the marketplace of ideas. Mahbubani made the distinction between the freedom of expression, and the freedom to think. What Singaporeans lack in American style freedom of expression, he said, they make up for with a superior freedom to think.

While I think this distinction may be fundamentally flawed, the intellectual laziness of America that he cites is troubling. After all, while American media was consumed by Michael Jackson's most recent criminal case in the spring of 2005, tens, if not hundreds of thousands were dying in the Darfur region of Sudan. The glorified free press of America barely raised a peep.

..."Then make that change," indeed.