Subconcious.
It is unnerving to realise how little most countries know or care about the insular concerns of others. There just isn't time to follow the threads of their quarrels with their neighbours or, say, the relative levels of lying amongst the French and Italian politicians. So you have to take a quick snapshot of the situation .. probably from a newspaper headline ... and file it away to be brought out whenever that subject is mentioned. Eventually your snapshot may be months or years out of date.

Or centuries.

As you saw, I was so incredibly angry the other day. Although probably no one is ever coming back here again .. I still want to write down that finding your blogs changed my ideas about Americans for ever. I can't apologise for what I wrote because I still think that huge numbers of Americans are like that. But I now see that huge numbers - on the West Coast at least - are not.

It is absolutely standard for Americans arriving in Europe to be stunned by the taken-for-granted (by us) dislike and contempt for America at every level. Especially when, at home, there seems to be a media tradition of casual, superior, putting-down of just about every other nation in the world. My daughter was saying that as she was leaving for a few days away last week the hostess rang her, 'I thought I'd better warn you that we have an AMERICAN staying ... but, honestly, he's really nice'. How many people in America would imagine that scenario as a possibility?

After I was angry I realised that it was partly my endlessly supressed fury at the way England is treated and portrayed by America. What are you thinking? We are your really good friends .. politically at least. Most of the snidy asides are about 'imperialism' for f.ck's sake ...errr ... how recent was that? Does our media constantly make scathing references to your treatment of the American Ind1ans? Well, NO .. it doesn't. Because that would be ludicrous as it was really rather a long time ago.

And why are all the villians in American f1lms British? Invariably cold, cruel and heartless and, in case that doesn't do it , ... let's, invariably, make them cowardly and without honour or decency too. Cool. While we're about it, we could make more films that totally re-write history. Let's take some famous incident where the English portrayed real courage and selflessness or showed amazing cleverness and ingenuity and .... CHANGE ALL THE FACTS. So that some tribe of vicious savages appear to be wise, superior and blameless. Or the brave soldier who saved the day was, (a fact concealed by the vile British), actually a black American. Or the brilliant discoverer of the solution to the En1gm@ c0de was not, as we had always thought , British, but was in fact an Afr1can-American w0man. And so it goes on ... and on .. and on... There was a really funny parody in some m0vie magazine which I have sadly lost .. which pretended to review British films of famous events in American h1story where we had done the same thing. F.cking hilarious but can you imagine the outcry and outrage in the US if we actually did that? So why do you think that it is all right for you?

I don't mean YOU about any of this, obviously. I am trying to show the bubbl1ng underb3lly of my day-to-day feelings.

A final scenario. It is just after 9/11. The Queen has agreed that 0sama b1n lad3n can visit England and has invited him to the palace where she is hosting a glittering cocktail party in his honour. When he asks if he can solicit money from rich English people to fund his 'cause' she says 'Yes, of course'. Although she knows that some of that money will be used to buy weapons to attack American c1vilians. When the US pr3sident asks her to reconsider as there is massive evidence to show that b1n lad3n is an evil terr0r1st leader, the Queen says, in effect, 'F.ck off. I don't care about your concerns as this man has many followers whose support I need'. And when this is reported in the Br1tish press the journalists joke and gloat about how amusing it is to irritate the Americans.

And if you just change the names to Cl1nton and G. Ad@ms. That is exactly what happened. So HOW can non-Ir1sh Americans think and behave that way? Or even Ir1sh-Americans with any kind of decency and half a brain?

All of which contributed to why I felt so furious.
- posted by Iris @ 7/16/2005 10:51:00 AM comment