I’d love to have you all over for Christmas this year just to listen to hours of this.
I travel fairly regularly to the UK and find no more anti americanism among those great people than I find in Santa Monica. (especially with a lot of bumptious rich russians in London now). What i do find (the point of the article I believe) is a disconnect between the US as it is and what they read.
If you relied on UK media, you’d think every American totes a semiauto, eats at McDonalds and wants to invade every coutnry we can find (like I’d conclude that everyone in the UK was being knifed this summer, or you couldn’t go to Paris without encountering rioting, car -burning “youths” not long ago).
They don’t “get” guns anymore than I get their royalty and regular pub hour; their judgmental view of the death penalty is mostly among the same people that oppose it here: out of touch self styled elites that would switch overnight if they encountered a real criminal–or if the people had a right to vote on it as we do here.
They don’t understand that a lot of decisions here are made directly by a vote: to have a Three Strikes law; to reinstate the death penalty etc. That is a popular will; not a dictated result from some council of the out of touch.
The ignorance of the young in Berlin is not much diff than here: my oldest superbright kid admitted to UCLA and Berkeley has little understanding of the 80′s and almost none of WWII: the Berlin Wall? Junk bonds? S&L crisis? A glimmer at best.
About 40 years ago the authors of the Ugly American had as one point–the failure of the US to promote itself and its ideas. Not just its acomplishments. Some teachers here are often ashamed of the US. They assume its a default condition of the world because they dont know better.
The US consistently assumes that freedom and the choices made to sustain it–not just military ones but civil ones like guns, the first amendment, our tedious legal system, the 4th amendment, etc–are self obviously desireable. And that all the lessons we learned from history (all those amendments to the constitution) ought to be self evident to everyone. They’re not.
Sometimes people get it: Canadians caught a glimpse this year of what it means when you don’t have a First Amendment: you get an anonymous official charging an author with a crime and saying “free speech is an American concept.”
For all the complaining that the US has “no sense of history,” its often people elsewhere that do not. But we’re not helping much, and we are the ones that ought to be doing the preaching. A lot of it. We ought to have good tour guides instead of indifferent hacks with bad microphones; better hostels with “About the US” DVD’s and foreign education programs better than the obviously miserable ones we have now.
