band-aid on a bullet wound at paper graffiti

According to NPR this morning, Karen Hughes is in the Middle East, trying once again to put a positive spin on the image of the United States. Listening to this really pissed me off. PR is not what the United States needs right now. Using advertising techniques and looking for target audiences is not going to help us. The damage has already been done, the scars run deeply. Parts of our target audiences are the ones calling jihad on America and blowing up the tube in London, and I seriously doubt they could give a rat’s whether or not Karen Hughes is in Egypt trying to make us look pretty.

I met Karen Hughes my senior year in college when I went on a trip to Washington D.C. with my department. She was one of the few top officials we still got to meet, since the city had been locked down tight for a month. I left Dallas on October 11, 2001 and got back home the day after anthrax had been discovered in Tom Daschle’s mail. It was a different city than I imagine it had ever been before, and I have to say it was utterly fascinating to be there. We spoke with Karen Hughes during a lull in her extremely busy schedule–you can imagine what the President’s top communications official was going through in the weeks after 9/11. Even then, I was not fooled by the slick, pretty PR exterior of the “campaign” that was going on to boost the opinions of America in the Middle East. The meeting with Karen Hughes left a bad taste in my mouth, and part of my drive to move up to DC and work there as a press secretary or lobbyist was fueled by the fact that I just didn’t buy what they were trying to sell the rest of the world.

Now, don’t get me wrong–I want nothing more than for the Middle East, as well as everywhere else, to have a good opinion of America. But they won’t have a good opinion of America until we change our foreign policy, and frankly I don’t blame them. I am not a very big fan of our foreign policy, either. I am also not a big fan of our policies at home. The United States is so concerned about matters abroad that when we have a devastating natural disaster, it turns into a giant clusterfuck. The hierarchies of power are skewed and nobody really knows who is in charge. The left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing, and *nobody* knows what W is up to. There are people going hungry on American streets every day, children not getting the kind of education they deserve, and now there are entire cities that don’t exist anymore and homes that have been washed away in a matter of minutes. No matter what our foreign policies are, how could other countries respect any of our actions abroad if we can’t even take care of our own people at home?

A shiny PR veneer isn’t going to fix anything. Sending advertising campaigns and slick “Yay Team USA” infomercials aren’t going to change anyone’s mind. It’s putting a band-aid on a bullet wound, and it’s not going to be enough until the government makes a real change. So…maybe 2008?

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