The Americans now see us, apparently, as 'introverted, arrogant bores who whip children and live in perpetual rain'
Euan Ferguson
All generalisations are dangerous, even this one. But the worst kind, it's often seemed, are those about nationalities. The French as dogbreathy bed-hoppers; the Italians as pretty cowards; the Aussies as irritatingly upbeat simpletons whose definition of 'cultured' is someone who gets out the bath to have a pee; the Bulgarians as torn-faced miserly cut-throat scum who would sooner slice open their neighbour's first-born than pick up a bar of soap; the Swedes as a kindlier, sexier yet strangely more suicidal version of the Germans... lazy generalisations, pat and trite and unhelpful, unless of course you're ever planning to go, quite unaccountably, to Bulgaria.
(snip)
This, then, is the special relationship. US ambassador William S Farish was going on about it again yesterday, in a valedictory piece after three short years in Britain. His impressions, he told us, were that normal Britons see George W Bush not as a caricature but 'as a plain-spoken man of principle who says what he believes', which shows Farish as a man not above actionably deluded poppycock in the same way the ocean is not above the sky.
He went on again, fairly cynically, about the special relationship. They throw this phrase at us so cheaply, like dropped popcorn; it means as much as an empty promise to a mistress. No, not a mistress, a 'stalker'; we are the ones who know, obsessively, their tastes, their plans, their favourite films, and they are the ones with a dim recollection of poking us once in a cabbagey attic and an even hazier recollection of our name.
(snip)
Every couple on every cloistered flatulent coach trip, every vapid trotted tourist cliche, every dismal teacake in the rain, has been, we can now see, a proud and determined little blow against ignorance: and this summer we must talk to them, or at least stop sneering quite so openly; and see them as one last hope for a better American future, and bless their little polyester socks.
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1243364,00.html