While there is a fair amount of animosity toward the weirdoes in
Washington I've found little Anti Americanism outside of the self
defined elites of the world. MOst folks repeat all sorts of things and
really don't believe them. By and large the world is a friendly place
and folks go out of their way to help travelers.
People repeat phrases like ugly american without understanding the
source of the phrase. I would like to have the time and energy to
emulate the Ugly American sometime. Perhaps teaching somewhere for a while.
Your stories are isolated examples of the sort of out of place elites
you find in the world (consider the recent EU referendums) and mob
chants typical of Soccer games.
boowa wrote:
> Mexican fans took up the chant "Osama! Osama!" during a recent
> US-Canada Olympic soccer game held south of our border. Last month,
> protesters in Athens chanted "Sept. 11 every day!" during an
> anti-American rally.
>
> American chief executive of the financial services firm Swift and
> president of the American Chamber of Commerce in Belgium, took a seat
> next to an elegant woman he recognized as one of Belgium's richest
> people. During the pre-dinner chitchat in a room full of
> museum-quality contemporary art, she ventured offhandedly that it was
> "good that the Americans got hit on Sept. 11. Maybe it taught them a
> lesson."
> "She was just repeating what she had heard," he says. "The real point
> is that 90% of the people she talks to every day would agree with
> her."
>
> Philadelphia transplant Susan Steele, head of Forum management company
> in London, has noticed that many Europeans have started using the
> phrase "that's American," which is shorthand, Steele says, for "not
> taking anyone else into consideration."
>
> Three-time gold medalist Karch Kiraly shared his volleyball war
> stories with some of the current crop of American Olympians. He
> described being pelted with ice cubes, raw eggs, tomatoes and D-cell
> batteries while playing in Argentina. In Brazil, assaults on the
> Americans came from spitting fans perched above the court's exit.
>
> In Britain, the United States' staunchest friend, snide remarks and
> downright animosity greet many Americans these days. It's not just
> religious radicals and terrorists who resent the United States
> anymore.
>
> Leading up to the Iraq war,millions of protestors took to the streets
> throughout Italy to protest the planned invasion.One reporter asked a
> protestor in Rome why he was protesting and he replied "Bush is the new
> Hitler and America is the new Nazi Germany and Iraq is the new
> Poland.They all deserve more 9/11s!Our premier is the new Mussolini and
> he should get what Mussolini got!"
>
> "Why do people attack Americans?" asks Tiny Waslandek, a social worker
> in Amsterdam, Netherlands. "Because they have a big, big mouth and
> they mind everybody's business."
>
> "Around the world, from Western Europe to the Far East, many see the
> United States as arrogant, hypocritical, self-absorbed,self-indulgent
> and contemptuous of others," Peterson says. "This is not a Muslim
> country issue. It has metastasized to the rest of the world and
> includes some of our closest European allies."
>
> New Yorker Julia Magnet, a journalist who just moved to London, found
> that out when she decided to throw a Fourth of July party for British
> friends. Between grilled sausages and chocolate cake, her friends
> launched an attack on Bush and the United States. They called Bush a
> "homicidal maniac" and "stupid" and the United States the "world's
> biggest terrorist."
>
> A road trip for a group of U.S. peewee hockey players to a tournament
> in Montreal turned into a foray into enemy territory as the boys were
> barraged with anti-American insults and witnessed protesters trashing
> the American flag, reports the Globe and Mail. Americans watched as a
> crowd cheered when a protester waved the Iraqi flag, and booed the
> U.S. flag. Next, the Stars and Stripes were doused with kerosene and
> ignited. "It went up in a puff of smoke and flames, and the crowd went
> wild. They were all cheering,""They told us we s----, gave us the
> finger and said 'Down with the U.S.A.' or 'The U.S.A. s----,"
>
> "People hate you. Everyone hates you. The whole world hates you." The
> pretty middle-aged woman, a Swiss mother and scholar, at the dinner
> table in Geneva earnestly wants to make that perfectly clear.She isn't
> angry with me. She thinks the American people are totally ignorant,
> misled by the media and a criminal president.
>
> I was traveling on a London bus when a well-dressed woman boarded
> with her equally-respectable son in his school uniform. Ahead of her
> was an elderly American woman, who said, 'I beg your pardon, I didn't
> mean to bang into you.' This prompted a tirade from the Englishwoman
> -- let's call her Lady E -- that resembled a verbal assault by a
> brownshirt against a hapless Jewish pedestrian in 1933. The American
> -- call her Mrs. A -- sat down and cowered as the tirade continued:
> 'I
> rejoice every time I hear of another American soldier dying!
> You people all deserve to die in another 9/11. You are destroying the
> world.' Mrs A fought back: 'I personally am NOT destroying the
> world.'
> This only provoked Lady E more, and as the bus driver and passengers
> laughed, she screamed into the American's face 'I wish every one of
> you would leave this country and not set foot in it ever again,' and
> Mrs A began to wince, crying. 'Thank you for ruining my day and my
> trip.' At this point Lady E lunged at the American and began to shake
> her. I jumped up and shouted at the top of my voice for the driver to
> stop and for her to leave the woman alone, prompting Lady E to come
> over to me and grab me. 'Another bloody American
> accent! You come here and think you can strut about, well, you are
> scum.' Thankfully, the woman next to me pushed her away. I left the
> bus as the American woman sat sobbing.
>
> A few weeks before, I had attended a party at which I was lambasted,
> intimidated and mocked by a group of people I had known for some
> twenty-odd years. It reminded me of a comment made to me by an
> American expatriate shortly after 9/11: 'Now I know what the Jews
> felt
> like in pre-war Germany.'
> During the tea break I asked a man at one of the booths for a
> leaflet. Instead of welcoming me and asking for a donation, he had
> detected my accent and duly launched into a loud and red-faced
> screeching session about the evils of the American Empire and of the
> 'Naziism' and 'Fascism' promulgated by the United States. A black
> man
> came over and began shouting about America having 'invented slavery'
> and soon a delicate elderly lady joined the fray to bellow about the
> Zionists running America (did she mean Robert Rubin, Dennis
> Ross, Sandy Berger -- after all, it was the pre-Wolfowitz/Perle time
> zone) and the 'genocides' perpetrated by Americans since the days of
> William Penn."You Yanks should look at yourselves in the mirror and
> wonder why every so often there is a Holocaust or massacre or pogrom.
> You bring it on yourselves. Just look at the way you are and then
> figure out why the rest of the world wants to flatten you."
>
> The English are not known for public displays of fury except perhaps
> at soccer matches, but there is something about an American accent
> that brings out their pent-up rage.
>
> Many Americans are leaving their homes abroad and returning home after
> decades in foreign countries. Notwithstanding the loss of free medical
> care and pills (and that is one hell of a sacrifice!) afforded by
> their adopted countries, they can no longer endure the daily abuse and
> the ugly posters and stickers that proliferate across European cities.
> When the many anti-war rallies were held in February 2003 young people
> in European cities were seen wearing headbands with slogans wishing
> death upon Jews and Israel.
>
> America now faces "the sorrows of empire": a state of perpetual war,
> soon with weapons of mass destruction; the end of constitutional
> democracy, with a Pentagonised presidency; and the bankruptcy of the
> US economy.US imperial ambitions are designed to overcome the inherent
> failures and contradictions of the American economy.Bush's open-ended
> claims for US power--including the unilateral right to invade and
> occupy "failed states" to execute "regime change"--offend
> international law and are prerogatives associated only with
> empire. But Bush's greater vulnerability is about money. You can't
> sustain an empire from a debtor's weakening position--sooner or later
> the creditors pull the plug. That humiliating lesson was learned by
> Great Britain early in the last century, and the United States faces a
> similar reckoning ahead.
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