cubbie

You thought I was being sarcastic when I said I'd never heard anyone say anything bad about Canadians? Seriously? Do you know anybody who badmouths Canadians? You've gotta be pretty mean to badmouth Canadians.

I clearly stated that my assertions described my own experience. What I said was "I've never heard in my life.." You're recasting my assertions as extreme in trying to suggest that I am describing all Americans, all halo-clad. You're experience with people you have encountered personally may well be different.

Don't expect me to defend the vitriol that some people from all walks of life in all parts of the world spit out onto the internet, and don't suggest I'm pretending hate crimes don't occur in the US and everywhere else. Are there hateful Americans? Of course there are. There are hateful people everywhere.

But what I am talking about is the social acceptability of personal (as opposed to political) anti-Americanism --- and that is routinely directed not solely at the hateful, shameful, evil actors in American society but at Americans as a whole for no better reason than that they are Americans. I'm not talking about criticizing the current Presidential administration, I'm not talking about US govt policies, I'm talking about disparaging American people personally just for being Americans, with all the stereotypes and prejudices that that suggests. I read six different snotty comments about Americans in various forums here on FlyerTalk just in the half hour or so before I wrote my earlier post today, and that's on FT, where so many people pride themselves on being more enlightened than the average Joe on the street, and that's a typical day, and like anyone else, I only read a small fraction of what's on FT. You can rationalize anti-Americanism on not just a political level but also a personal level but you can't convincingly deny that it is real and it is pervasive. I just think it deserves to be said that you shouldn't assume that Americans, in general, reciprocate the degree of hostility toward people from other countries that so many people from other countries feel toward Americans. You can't have it all ways: despise the farmer in Iowa because he doesn't have a passport, then find out he does have a passport and has travelled to Cuba and China and the EU in groups looking for international markets for his crops, then make fun of him because you can tell he's an American from a mile away because of what color shoes he wears, and then assume all sorts of things about how unsophisticated and narrow-minded he must be because he's American, and then if it turns out you're wrong about all that, rationalize despising him because, being American, surely he feels superior to people from other countries and despises them. You just don't know any of that about someone you don't even know. But we all know people who like to think that way.

Perhaps you'd consider these earlier statements of mine more believable if I modified them as follows (underlining, italics):

"But I wonder if people in other countries realize or appreciate that we in America don't all talk about you the way some of you talk about all of us or talk about each other. I think that's partly because, for many of us, that's not our idea of humor and partly because that's not our idea of good manners. Just thought maybe some of you would like to know that many of us like you and respect you, even if you don't like and respect us.

I spent ten years living in a country where anti-Americanism is virulent. I'm not so naive as to think you can talk anyone out of it, no matter what kind of personal example you might try to set or what reasonable arguments you might make. My point, again, very specifically, is that you may be making a mistake projecting your feelings onto someone else and assuming they feel the same contempt for you that you feel for them.