 |  How to Be an Ugly American for Fun
You may not be aware of it, but if you are an American citizen travelling abroad, you are an ugly American. Luckily millions of people will point this out for you... continuously. Embrace it.
Once upon a time, when Europeans or others started on America I was an apologist for American cultural imperialism, and would listen to the litany of American crimes, our ignorance, blah, blah, blah, trying to get them to see that not all Americans were arrogant and insensitive. I didn't want to be perceived as one of those Ugly Americans, the kind who are blissfully ignorant of even the countries that they are travelling in, the ones with all of the ugly stereotypes about other nationalities... (hey waitaminute...) This usually didn't work. Some people are trying to take arrogant Americans down a notch, and do it in a humorous way, without any real malice - this is a national sport in England and Ireland where your verbally rip the other person a new asshole, and then say "just taking the piss, hahah". They also think cricket is cool. Whatever, it's a pastime. What I'm really talking about here are the other people - the ones who are serious. Their mission is to let the Yanks know just what the rest of the world thinks of them. Like I haven't heard that about 100 times before...
No matter how long you let them verbally lash you, they will never get tired of it, even if you apologize for American misbehavior from before your parents were born. The major reason they're probably travelling is that everyone in their own country already told them to go fuck themselves. One of my favorite incidents along this line, and I am not making this up, was when I flew on an Air France flight from Cambodia to Ivory Coast (note: both former French colonies), and I was sitting in first class due to a ticketing screwup - no proletariat here, right? So the French guy next to me starts up a conversation with me, which is pleasant enough for 3 minutes, and then apropos of nothing he suddenly brings up Vietnam... American imperialism in Vietnam, during the Vietnam War, to be exact. I experienced the mental gridlock you get when you realize someone is both an idiot and an asshole at the same time, and you try to figure out which way to go with this. I continued listening to this litany for a few minutes, but then I dryly mentioned that our 10 year stint there really didn't compare with the 90 years of French occupation, and that the reason that France developed its nuclear bomb was because they were upset when America declined to bomb the Vietnamese near the fortress of Dien Bien Phu to save the trapped French garrison... and also because the United States didn't help out when France and England tried to take over the Suez Canal. He at first disagreed with my facts, until another older French gentleman nearby said that I was right. The next 8 hours were blissful silence, but I came away from the situation somewhat pissed off.
It's one thing when this is coming from someone in a country where the U.S. has a bad history - if the Panamanians have some animosity, so be it - you can still see the ruins of Operation Just 'Cuz in downtown Panama. America has done a lot of bad things in the world - as has just about every country in Europe, down to blips on the map like Belgium, whose good work in the Congo is still with us. Oddly enough though, the main people for this kind of thing are actually the ones who the U.S. did the most positive things for in the past - the Marshall plan, the Berlin airlift, and so on. I've generally had people from Vietnam, Panama, Nicaragua and the Philippines be friendly to me, and I get this crap from Europeans, Canadians and Australians, and at the risk of engaging in some stereotyping myself (ah, what the hell, might as well start here), particularly some of the French.
Then a few years ago I saw the movie Barcelona, and I finally realized that the person getting stereotyped here is me. It's one thing to talk about politics, another to have an axe to grind. People abroad (particularly Europeans) do this to Americans a lot, but they also do it to other groups of people - young Germans down in Central and South America are regularly greeted with a sieg hiel, and Anka mentioned that a French guy also had pulled the same conversational ambush on her, being totally nice and then out of nowhere bringing up World War II as the reason that Germans would never be trusted - in between toasts at a wedding. The English people my age get their share of shit wherever they go for things that happened before they were born. But in the case of Americans the traditional stereotypes are now amplified by global animosity towards Bush's foreign policy - misgivings which I happen to share, not that it helps me at all.
I read the book The Beach (unfortunately), and there were two guys from America talking to the main character who is English, and he's patronizing them because they are surfers, both knowledge free zones. He's enjoying taking the piss out of the ignorant Yanks, until one of the surfers screws up and makes a reference to George Soros or something and blows his cover - turns out that they're from Harvard. At first I thought it was just a funny story, but this actually works great in real life.
When the bar game of "Ignorant Yank" gets going, I play along in the part they designated for me better than they would have expected, and if they have a sense of humor, they realize I'm taking the piss out of them, but if not I can really get them going and have a lot of fun. Idiots are unfortunately plentiful in all countries, so to sort them out from everyone else I usually lob back a combination of their own history (in nauseating detail) with some in-your-face nationalism - the kind they always accuse us of but never think anyone will dare to really say. To do this, you actually don't need to know a great deal of history, just the soft spots of their thinking, which are many.
My first successful attempt at this was in Rome, where I was vacationing with my friend Paul. We went into an ex-patriate bar, the kind you head for when you need a break from trying to speak the local language. There Paul and I had some burgers and a few beers, and were having a pretty good time, when I noticed some guys near us speaking English. They were Canadian, and I offered to buy them a round, for no good reason other than to be friendly. We got along great for about 10 minutes, then somehow they at first half-jokingly, then with more seriousness started in on the "If someone who speaks two languages is bilingual, what do you call someone who speaks one? American." bit, which generally leads into American cultural insensitivity.
How To Do It
The main thing to remember is that if you're in a bar, you're not going to be actually changing anything in the outside world, even if by some miracle you change the other persons mind - it's just a conversation, and if it's not fun, why bother? The best way to not have to defend any particular position is just keep asking obnoxious leading questions... a drunken perversion of the Socratic Method. Most people who are thinking emotionally (just about everyone after a few beers) totally fall for this.
On the other hand, you have to resist escalating to the conversational equivalent of the neutron bomb before they're really invested in the conversation.
Examples of this include:
1) "Yeah, the reason you French guys were so fucking happy about the world cup in '98 was because it was the first thing you won without our help in a hundred years..."
2) Girl: "Oh, you're American," sounding disappointed. "You Americans are always coming to Ireland to look for your roots..."
3) Brit: "If we followed your logic on the war on terrorism, we would have bombed Boston back in the 80`s."
This is kind of satisfying, but it will end the conversation pretty much instantly, and you won't have the fun of stringing them along, where they're not totally sure if you're serious, the kind of thing that they will go back home and tell their friends about - the incredibly arrogant and ignorant American. They want to do this anyway, so why not just help them out? Lines like this can be saved for when you want to go to a different bar (and you may just have to). It's best in the beginning to seem somewhat reasonable (i.e., your opinion is open to change), a little ignorant in a childlike, innocent kind of way, and unquestioning patriotic, as all of us Americans are, right? And while you're at it, slide into a slight Texas drawl for effect - most of the time they won't even notice, since we're all supposed to talk like that anyway.
If they´re from the European Union, there are a couple of different ways to go about totally disrupting the conversation. As in the larger political scene, most Europeans in bars prefer to bicker among themselves over just about any other activity. Sometimes you get lucky, and you have English people and another country present, and just say the word "euro" and you can sit back with a beer and watch the fireworks. Farm subsidies are also a good one - there is a grossly unfair system in Europe, where essentially the Germans pay the French, among other countries, to farm. "Boy, you Germans really got screwed with the latest round on farm subsidies - why did Schroeder let them keep going until 2007? Are you guys going to pay the Poles to farm too?" Believe it or not, the definition of what chocolate is in the European Union also strikes a painful nerve that can be mined richly, likewise restrictions on banana imports that were put in place to favor former French colonies over Central America. You don't need to know anything about these subjects, because this is a request for them to inform the poor ignorant Yank of something you've vaguely heard of in two or three lines in the paper - and as the Europeans give their conflicting national views on the subject, the conversation will probably bloom into a low level conflict.
Boring as these things are on the surface (and below the surface), Europeans will actually get more worked up about them than Iraq, and if you know a little more about history you can really go to town. I think it's unfair to throw the Hitler thing in the faces of people my age from Germany, because in my opinion Germany has grappled with the darker parts of its history and tried to make reparations in ways that America, France and Japan haven`t. However, they are usually very pro-European, and another favorite of mine which is much more subtle is explaining to Germans that Bismark originally began the unification of Germany into one nation (under Prussian control) from hundreds of small principalities by first creating a German customs union, and then a political union, and that the European Union would appear to follow this pattern exactly, with Germany in the role of Prussia. Not something that I really believe, but it really throws them off balance when they start talking about Bush and American global hegemony. Even better, most of them have only a dim idea of what I'm talking about, but they'll probably realize it's true.
You can ask Europeans about the Euro-battalion... the prototype core of a European army - and ask if they´re really going to help out France in their sphere of influence in West Africa when they knock over the Ivory Coast again next month. And there's always Bosnia and Kosovo. Most Europeans are keenly aware that they did fuck all in the Balkans to stop the war absent American leadership (the movie No Man's Land, made by a Bosnian is a wickedly funny and bitter luck at the European attempts at peacekeeping before the U.S. started bombing and forced the Dayton Accords). Partly as a result of the Balkans, there actually seems to be a growing European sentiment that Europe needs to develop as a power - to keep the peace in Europe, and maybe also to counterbalance the U.S. Great idea. What are they going to do with this new power? What exactly are they going to do besides talk us to death? Go to Mars? Intervene in Iraq to save Saddam Hussein? Liberate Guam? Maybe they could go back to some of their former colonies like India or Algeria... And when exactly are they going to raise their taxes so they can spend money on the kind of defense they'd need to do this, since right now they can't quickly get tanks to Bosnia... a weekend road trip in peacetime... without our help?
The French in particular like to talk about American cultural imperialism - they call us a "hyperpower". Ask them about the protests against McDonalds - a national hero was made of a farmer who sacked a MickeyD's, and this is becoming a fairly regular event whenever they get pissed off at America. They are totally right, American food sucks. But why not go further? Why don't they pass laws forcing people not to eat bad food? That way they could get rid of McDonalds easily. They could then move on to bad movies from the States also, and perhaps then to books. You can also mention that unlike Airbus, McDonalds does not get a dime of taxpayer support, and we can't really do anything about them being there, but maybe if all of the French people stopped wanting to eat there, they would close on their own... I like to close by saying that it just doesn't seem fair, since in America we love their chain Au Bon Pain. This will make them apoplectic because Au Bon Pain is a "French" fastfood chain based in Boston. "You don't have them in France? Hmmm. Maybe in a few years they'll expand there." American "French" fastfood exported to France... that's probably where they will start cursing unintelligably and possibly reaching for weapons. The key here is to totally not understand why they are upset.
As the argument starts getting heated (and it will) you can also switch to the U.N. If Europe is going to be a great power... well, the Germans want a permanent seat on the U.N. security council, but it would seem that Europe should actually lose one seat - the French and English both have one each right now, and that should really be a single European Union seat. They could give France's to India, Brazil or Japan... that would be fair. After all, Texas and California don't have their own seats. One seat for Europe should be no problem at all once Europe is speaking with a single voice. Leave all of those decisions about war and peace to the fine people in Brussels right?
If the conversation winds up on Bush - as it always does - I ask them, "Well, why didn´t you guys intervene in some way when our election was stolen in the first place? I mean, we're pretty nosy, but I don't think an election can be run, much less stolen these days around the world without our meddling..." (They will usually agree wholeheartedly with this.) "Perhaps if you saw what was going on, you'd feel some responsibility to democracy in America, given how many of our boys died fighting for your democracy... [Roll Battle Hymn of the Republic in the background]... but I don't recall anyone even saying anything." That usually leaves them flabbergasted (but I actually had one guy from Holland explain that what I was saying was true, but the Europeans were deathly afraid of destabilizing America because it is so powerful, and it was only four years. I had a good laugh at that one. "It's turning into a very long four years, isn't it?")
When they bring up oil, I ask "Cruised down the autobahn in your LeCar lately?" Many people don't remember LeCar - it was a rechargeable battery powered electric car... went about 20 miles (excuse me, 32 kilometers) at about 30 mph. We have these, we call them golf carts. "No? Well how many cars do you have now that don't run on gas? Maybe you guys should co-invade Iraq. Or maybe Qatar or Oman or somewhere."
If they try the avenue of how much more terrorism the Gulf War II is going to create, and how America unfairly supports Israel, start asking about Turkey. "You're right... We should be fairer to Muslim nations, like Turkey. By the way, why exactly are Slovakia, Romania, and Bulgaria being invited to join the European Union... after a mere 5 or 10 years of democratic experience... and some pretty bad human rights records... when Turkey is not?" Then in a low, conspiratorial voice, "It's because they're Muslim, isn't it? You can tell me." (And actually, it is. In one of those rare lapses in diplomacy that the French have, a few weeks ago Valery Giscard d'Estaing said that if Turkey were to join the EU, it "would be the end of Europe.")
Towards the end, if they´re particularly obnoxious and I really want to wind them up, I just ask them why they don't want to be a state in the U.S. I keep repeating it totally seriously, asking them to come up with logical reasons better than America sucks. This is especially fun when they are from Australia, Canada or New Zealand, because after I get their nationalism really going and they tell me off, I can then ask who that lady is on their money (i.e., Queen Elizabeth), which I follow up (for New Zealand and Australia) by saying what's the difference, since legally speaking, their countries are not actually totally independent from England yet (a referendum on a republic in Australia was defeated a few years ago). For Canadians I sometimes ask them to look at their parents passports from the 50's, and find the bit that explains that Canadians are "English Citizens Living Abroad", which officially they were until the 60's. There's also the Canadian constitutional change in 1982 which allowed Canadians to further change their constitution without English approval. Perhaps the reason they are having so many problems with their constitution is their relative inexperience with independence...
If you do know some history eventually they'll often think you work for the CIA. No, I'm not kidding, I wish I was... I've been asked this at least five times. For everyone that asked me outright, I'd guess at least one other harbored suspicions. Apparently Americans only come out of their stupor and learn something of the outside world so they can hatch some evil plot. Hey, if someone asks you if you work for the CIA, just say look away evasively and say "No, no - of course not. What would make one think that?"
Now I'm not fucking with these people to be mean, only to short circuit any conversations about Bush or the Middle East or the impending war before we get to Israel, oil, terrorism and imperialism, things that I´m a little tired of talking about. The main point here is that I am a) not my government and b) not exactly the same as every other American they've ever met. And if they want to think that every American other than me is completely ignorant of everything (which I think I've been told a few times) fine, as long as I don't have to hear it. A lot of Americans are in fact pathetically ignorant of geography, history, and current affairs, and so are some Europeans or Australians. Maybe there is a higher proportion in the U.S., but I'd appreciate it if they gave me the benefit of the doubt (and a lot do.) To be fair, I usually start by telling them that I'm against the war and Bush, and if they leave it at that, we can talk about other things. But quite often they just keep on going, at which point I'm just content to drop the conversational land mines at random, and keep talking politics until they're bored, confused, or pissed, or better all three. Sure, I could go off and play pool instead, but I think I'm providing a service to these folks, giving them a wall that they can bang their heads against. Another round, anyone?
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