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A voice from Italy: http://thejoyofknitting.blogspot.com/
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About a year ago I happened to talk with an acquaintance of mine, a teacher of Belles Lettres, and she expressed her distaste for American culture. She said it lacked depth. I replied that I had read several works by Americans and that I didn't find them superficial. At which she insisted, and I asked her if she had ever actually read anything written by an American, to which she replied "Not really". "Not really what? Almost, but not quite, or never?" I went on, feeling terribly nasty indeed, and stated quoting some well known authors. Henry David Thoreau? Herman Melville? Edgar Allan Poe? Henry James? Edith Wharton? "Not really, no." Not even oft quoted poets? Walt Whitman? Emily Dickinson? "Ehm, no."
Then she she said solemnly, "I don't need to know American culture to understand that it's worthless."

This, in a nutshell, is the essence of European anti-americanism. A mixture of ignorance, arrogance, and prejudice. I always thought that to judge a culture you need to know it, at least a bit. But no, why waste time when superciliousness can do your work for you?
I quote this episode because it illustrates a feeling quite common over here. Americans are superficial. They lack depth. They lack complexity. And so, no matter what they do, they're always wrong. Better sit gracefully on a fence than actually do something, it's so vulgar.

# posted by Joy @ 2:36 AM

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But yes, it is possible to hate something without understanding it at all. In fact, that's the EASIEST way to hate something.

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Very well said

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But yes, it is possible to hate something without understanding it at all. In fact, that's the EASIEST way to hate something.

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But in the other way, hopefully, when you get to know something or someone, you can less easily hate it or him
In my adolescence, anti-Americans speech didn't bother me. Now I met Hatrack and all those wonderful people here, I just can't stay sit and let someone say that all Americans are obese or violent or stupid. Internet is a good and a bad thing, but it allowed me to meet those I thought were very different from me, in a certain way they were, but in other ways they were like other myself. A good way to try to learn tolerance, if you ask me.

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Wait, how is this different from the vast number of Americans who hate France?

Or are we just agreeing that there are a lot of idiots in the world?

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Bob

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Which part of American culture is, or will become, part of the world culture?

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[incomprensible]

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It's "and I'll never forget the way it was grrrl!"

duh.

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Hey I asked all the guys in the barracks how many of them had ready anything by any of those authors I received 49 nos, 1 yes ( myself), not to mention a whole lot of " Hey Jay Stop talkign about books and grab a beer."

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When the order came to take Hill 19 the Sergeant ground his cigar stub into the fine white sand of Tojaida Island and bared his corn-yellow teeth. "Not that it's ours to take!" he said, rubbing his thick, calloused hand over the stubble of his square jaw. "You mugs understand we have property right in the hill, or any moral claim to the area it encompasses." He shifted his packed, hard body and spat into an overturned C-ration can.

"But is it correct, from an ethical standpoint, to allow physical force to be the deciding factor in disagreements between nations? What would Thoreau say?" It was Dough-Boy, the freckle-faced infantryman with the crooked, Mid-Western smile and innocent grey eyes that blinked whenever you poured pencil shavings in them.

"Difficult to say," the Sergeant replied, pulling a cigar stub from its wrapper. "Kant would subscribe to the deontological theory of moral imperatives."

"Check!" interrupted Grease-Monkey, the cherub-faced mechanic and former professor of Linguistics at Cornell. "He'd want us to examine our motives in a neutral environment, not the biased circumstances of war."

Bull, resting his muscle-bloated body on a rusted oil drum, had been shoved to the breaking point. His broad, featureless face exploded in fury as he jumped to his feet. "Talk, talk, talk... all we do is talk. Me want to clobber the enemy, not talk!" As he worked his massive mandibles the others rolled their eyes.

"Reminds me a little of Benjy, the simple-minded Christ figure in Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury," muttered Stir-Fry, the platoon chef.

"Philistine!" said Germ-Jockey, the seasoned medic.

"Leave 'im alone" ordered the Sergeant. There was a long, embarrassed silence as the rage melted from Bull's boulder-like head. "Hey, like... like me sorry me got mad" he grumbled, like a friendly grizzly bear endowed with the miracle of human speech. "It's just data I didn't do the readin' this week."

The platoon burst into gentle laughter as the Sergeant gave Bull a manly but affectionate kick in the head. "Hell, that all? Jesus, Bull, you can catch up. It's only 80 pages of Flaubert and we'll help you with the French." The Sargeant's [sic] words stretched a broad, moronic smile across Bull's acre-wide face and helped the platoon temporarily forget the horrors o jungle war.

"Alright...alright!" shouted the Sargeant [sic], shoulder his book bag, "load up and remember...no shooting. We have a moral obligation to preserve all life, regardless of the demands placed on us by an arbitrary government."

"Even if they shoot at us first, Sarge?" asked Slim-Jim, the munitions expert and beef jerky magnate, as he unloaded his rifle. "I mean, some interpret Ghandi's [sic] later writings as..." The Sergeant interrupted his discourse with a powerful right to the solar plexus. "Im [sic] not takin' any revisionist up the hill with me" he added, turning his back on Slim-Jim's wheezing form," so you can sit here and stew while we're gone."

At the call to "fall out," the small platoon lined up and began its rigorous but sensitive trek through the dense jungle. CO'B

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And these minds are defending our country.

I feel safer already.

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