问答题 6 In the past even as our power grew, much of the world saw us, rightly or wrongly, as a moral beacon, as a country somehow largely outside the bloody, gory, oft-tyrannical history that carved its swath across so much of the world during the American Century. Indeed, in many ways, even as cultural elites in once-glorious Old World nations sneered at upstart, crass, consumerist America, the masses in those nations idealized America as some sort of Promised Land. In many ways, the American Dream of the last 100-some years has been more something dreamed by foreigners from afar, especially those who experienced fascism or Stalinism, than lived as a universal reality on the ground in the United States.
7 Things look simpler from a distance than they do on the ground. Today, I fear, foreigners slumber (酣睡) with dreamy American smiles on their sleeping faces no more; that intangible faith in the pastel-colored hue and soft contours of the Dream risks being shattered, replaced instead by an equally simplistic dislike of all things and peoples American. The Pew survey, for example, found that sizable majorities in countries such as Jordan, Morocco, Turkey, Germany, and France believed the war on terror to be largely about the United States wanting to control Middle Eastern oil supplies.
8 In other words, the perception—never universally held, but held by enough people to help shape our global image—is changing. Once our image abroad was of an exceptional country accruing all the power of empire without the psychology of empire; now it is being replaced by something more historically normal—that of a great power determined to preserve and expand its might, for its own selfish interests and not much else.
9 Maybe the American Dream always was little more than marketing hype. But as the savagery_ of the images coming out of Iraq demonstrate all too well, we live in a world where image is if not everything, at least crucial. Perhaps I"m wrong and the American Dream will continue to sweeten the sleep of those living overseas for another century. I certainly hope, very much, that I"m wrong—for a world denuded of the Dream, however far from complex reality that Dream might have been, would be impoverished indeed.
10 But I worry that that encore I mentioned earlier won"t be nearly as breathtaking or as splendid as the original performance that shaped the first American century.