Having said that, there are two reasons we can’t just lay all this on Bush or even the republican party.

Look at the headline of that Brit (or was it French) paper after the last election — when it had a headline something like, “Are Americans that stupid?”

President Bush didn’t get elected by a small minority of right wing nuts that Europe and Canada and the rest of the world can safely hate with a passion — that we dismiss as limited anti-Americanism.

Think back to the movie French Kiss. It played beautifully on the basic stereotypes of Canada, the US and France. But think in particular of the confrontation with the bellman in the hotel when the American female was angry because the French bellhop wouldn’t give her the room number of her cheating Canadian fiance. The bellman said something about “Well, maybe if France were a nation full of puritanical hypocrits…..”

There is a good bit of that kind of general thought going around that I’ve run across with non-Americans. It isn’t just the politics of a few nutcase republicans that gets firmly criticized.

Next, as I said before, there are steady streams in post-modern higher education that lay much of the world’s ills at the foot steps of not just the American government but American society too.

I got to where I looked at it like this —- I really got to marvelling at how well European dominated social theory, well, French dominated discourses,

This post reminds me of the show they have in Canada where they tour around the U.S., asking the man in the street questions to expose the ignorance of Americans about all things Canadian (they even got Bush to incorrectly name the prime minister). If that passes for humor in Canada, then the joke’s on them.

Somewhere back in the 1990s, shortly before (?) the time that Yun K?­mi was brutally killed, a US soldier in ??ij??ngbu was killed when he was smashed over the head with a dumbbell by a mentally ill man near ??ij??ngbu Station who was upset that he was “walking and laughing with a Korean girl on a hot day.” While it didn’t get the day-by-day press that Yun K?­mi’s murder did later on, it did get reported. So did the murder of Jamie Penich in 2001. They don’t happen a lot (and the same is true the oher way around), but they do generally get reported, even in an obscure part of Page 2 or 3.

I should also mention that there is the occasional apocrypha, like the story of Salvador Smith, who was supposedly killed by his hagwon owner after pleas for help to the US embassy for assistance.

I don’t know why I feel compelled to respond to this, but a friend of mine was in the navy, stationed in Korea for 4 years, and had made friends with another Navy guy during his service… after my friend finished his serivice and “rotated back to the world”, they e-mailed each other back and forth about eventually teaching English there, until the guy suddenly stopped e-mailing him and fell out of touch.

A year and a half later my friend found an article about him being murdered by his Korean girlfriend he was living with at the time…had something to do with him wanting to move out and leave her, until she killed him. I don’t think the article was a Korean news source, and he explained it as an example of how Korean media reports of USFK/foreigner homicides or accidents etc. all the time but usually would not report something like this.

Just food for thought, I guess…

Maybe I should have put a link to the quote, but I thought it was sufficiently well known that the average reader would not think I had made it up myself.

I guess I should have written, to make things more clear,

This was in the hinterlands of the Old Dominion (Virginia) where, as Garrison Keillor would say of the residents of Lake Wobegon, all the women are strong, all the men handsome and all the children above average.

Shelton, was that a witty reference or a copyright violation?

It’s always kind of wierd to be foreign policy hawk–as I’m Canadian. As for Canadians, there’s no question that they’re a self-righteous bunch. We (not I, but my countrymen), constantly complain about American ignorance of us, about how loud and rude Americans are, etc. And if the Americans are for something, chances are, we’ll be against it, and vice versa. It’s incredibly immature on our part. Of course, it’s convenient to forget that we eat American style and consume American pop culture like anyone else (now THAT’S a personal beef, but never mind).

In my opinion, most Americans don’t understand the reason for this Canadian angst (although Shelton does). They usually put it down to jealousy, but Canadians really aren’t jealous of Americans. It does seem true that Americans are louder overseas, and less polite, on average. That’s a personal observation based only on anecdotal evidence, of course. But that’s not such a big deal.

There are a few, and only a few, substantial reasons for Canadians to be angry with the American government, like the illegal softwood tarrifs the US has been imposing, in defiance of multiple WTO rulings, on BC softwood exports for some years. Because of these tarrifs, whole towns in BC have shut down, and thousands of people have been laid off. The US lumber lobby contends that the government of Canada is subsidizing the forest industry because most land in Canada is Crown land, whereas in the US logging companies have to pay higher stumpage fees charged by private landowners. But this is tantamount to saying that the Canadian government should mimic private US practices–which is certainly narcissistic and imperialist. Canadians should wake up and stop using tired cliches about oil and look where a lot of the real economic damage is coming from. Anyway, that’s my two bits.

I don’t hate Americans, but let me ask the lefties: do you hate me?