Hating Americans for Sport

Hating Americans for Sport

We're halfway through this year's Brit trip and I would guess the British loathing for America is about on par with last year. It's mostly about politics - and I should point out that people are nothing but nice to me and one of the first questions is always who will win the November election.

Besides the prominent display at the local bookstore of a silly book called "Fat, Dumb and Ugly: The Decline of the Average American," I didn't have a lot of hit-you-over-the-head examples of what I was sensing. (The book, by the way, is printed in New York, and has a completely unsourced, one-sentence fact on each page about the rise in plastic surgery, or hamburger consumption, etc.)

However, The Guardian has helped me out by printing this odd column on page 3 of the its Weekend section. It starts off like this:

Is it just me or (h)as hating Americans become really childish and silly and tedious? ... I used to enjoy this as much as the next person - I liked the frisson of being allowed a racism carte blanche, as it was obviously so absurd to be accused of bigotry in reference to a place so very large and rich. I delighted in the pompous, table-thumping, "Substitute the word 'Africans' and see how that sounds!" response it would sometimes elicit. I took a great deal of apparently "ironic" pleasure from how many Americans could find only America on a map, and how many couldn't find Iraq, and how many of them didn't have a passport, and that one I met once thought Milton Keynes was related to Maynard, and the size of their portions and, commensurately, arses.
But it's suddenly become very depressing - almost everything we find hilariously bad about them is either located in and wholly limited to the person of George Bush, or it was his idea, or it was one of his friends' ideas. And let's imagine you can judge an entire people by the government it elects: we're still left with the fact that a greater proportion of us voted for Blair than Americans ever did for Bush.

- posted by Amy @ 8/22/2004 03:40:00 AM