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From: "Edward Welbourne"
http://www.chaos.org.uk/~eddy/
Date: Tue, 08 Apr 2003 23:35:22 +0200
http://www.watchingyou.com/stupidamericans.html
Interesting ... I'd always put
it down to the observer paradox:
We always notice the stupid, the obnoxious, the arrogant, the
unilingual; we never notice other USAish visitors -
or, if we do, we assume they're Canadians.
When I was a student, I found
the idiot American tourists were really
annoying, but I felt quite benignly towards the Japanese tourists;
finally, I realised that this was mostly due to understanding
the
stupid and ill-informed things American visitors say (e.g., to
tour-guide, who has just advocated behaviour considerate to the
residents: "aw gee, you mean people actually *live* *in*"
this ancient
monument - I forget how they phrased that last part, but it was
my
home, so the condescending tone of faint amusement, from someone
getting between me and my breakfast ... grated); a trilingual
German
friend informed me that the Japanese tourists said equally crass
things. After that I just ignored the remarks of tourists and
found
them much easier to tolerate, as long as they didn't obstruct
my
morning lurch from bed to breakfast - and that crucial first
coffee.
The observer paradox equally
explains Sod's Law (or whatever name is
currently fashionable for the universal law of natural cussedness):
we preferentially notice (hence remember) the things that go
wrong.
"You always find a thing
in the last place you look" - because you
always stop looking once you find it; though what folk *really*
mean
by the phrase is that you always find the thing in the last possible
place you could have looked - but even this is just because you
only
remember the searches that took you past the obvious and into
the
domain of wracking your brains for each next candidate, after
you
thought you'd eliminated all possibilities, so each new candidate
appears to be the last place you could possibly have *tried*
looking;
and you stop wracking your brains for where else it could have
been,
once you've found it.
Of your given reasons (why Americans
are [perceived to be] stupid):
1. Hollywood: interesting point; see below.
2. Lazy parents: Europe has those too.
3. Nonsense in our schools: that too.
4. Self-gratification / lack of discipline: yes, and that.
Besides every generation says this about the next.
5. (paraphrased:) not knowing about what doesn't affect you
is a
non-issue. Sadly, when your nation (both government and
the
businesses whose interests elsewhere it feels obliged to
foster)
affects everyone, and you are the alleged control that prevents
it from doing bad things, you have as much duty to attend
to the
rest of the world as a non-parent has to attend to how well
run
your schools are ... oh, and this applies to us in Europe,
too.
The second paragraph you give
on point 5 is sort of dissociated from
the first; it's almost back to continuing where the preamble
left off;
but it would actually make a sensible starting point for an item
6
expressing the `noticeability filter' effects.
In particular (see 2, 3, 4, particularly)
Europe has plenty of folk
who are stupid, often in combination with obnoxiously nation-insular,
it's just that you don't generally meet them - and, when they
go to
the states, the locals just assume they're recent immigrants,
rather
than knowing right off that they're bloody tourists.
At the same time (sort of linkable
to your Hollywood point), there's
lots more to know about Europe (the history goes way back), whereas
the U.S.A.'s citizenry have pretty minimal knowledge of their
*own*
country's past prior to about 1750 - and the early parts of that
are
fairly heavily freighted with mythology. Thus there's more for
an
American in Europe to be ignorant *about* than there is for a
European
in America. In like manner, Europeans don't tend to know where
the
individual states are within the American union - aside from
a handful
of the more obvious ones - which, partly thanks to the U.S.A.'s
cultural homogeneity (when compared to Europe), isn't regarded
as a
failing of geographical knowledge; contrast that with common
expectations in relation to knowledge of European geography.
Further to the Hollywood issue:
generally, similar remarks can be made
about much of the rest of the media. Closely allied to this:
Everyone in (at least mainland) Europe knows what propaganda
is -
hell, it's even a standard butt for jokes, with local flavours
depending on local recent forms of government - and we're all
entirely used to filtering it and being skeptical about what
we're
called on to believe, whether as `news', `manifesto' or as
the plot
of a `historical' movie.
It's quite obvious, in the
new world order, that Big Business has
taken over as the primary source of propaganda; and there's
a
widespread perception in Europe that Americans have been swallowing
pro-American propaganda (particularly of the Cold War era)
for fifty
years without understanding it as such. This is most acutely
felt
when Americans expect everyone else to believe myths plainly
derived
from such propaganda.
The perceived lack of a `propaganda-deconstruction'
thread in
American culture contributes to the perception of stupidity;
and
this is reinforced every time an American is seen to obviously
have
never questioned a piece of `news' or `history' that's blatantly
propaganda. Expecting Europeans to like American foreign policy
over the last 50 years frequently fits this last category.
This then feeds back through
the observer paradox in a dozen ways,
of course; and the perceived lack itself owes much to the fact
that
most of what we see of American opinion is filtered through
the same
propaganda streams; which, naturally, conceal any extent to
which
Americans *do* see through the propaganda ...
Equally, indigenous humour-forms
directed against propaganda blur, via
humour-forms targeting authority-figures, into humour-forms directed
against people with over-inflated egos; and tourists often present
prime candidates. Hence this endemic joke (I met it in Liverpool):
Tourist: this place is the ass-hole of the universe.
Local: I take it you'd be just passing through, then ?
which is typical for the genre. Note that the butt of the joke
is
presumed to not get it - the tourist above is implicitly going
to
reply "you bet, I'm catching the first flight out",
or similar,
oblivious to having just been called a piece of shit. Thus the
tourist has become the butt of part of the category of jokes
sometimes
called `ethnic' (though, until recent centuries, in Europe, the
butt
of these was the clergy). This, in turn, reinforces perceptions
of
stupidity among tourists (who are commonly, of course, Americans).
Another contribution to the perception
of stupidity (which applies
equally to myself - I'm painfully aware of it, as a resident
of
Norway, though the Norwegians are very nice about it) is the
linguistic failing common to most anglophones. As expressed
by the
Quebecois (albeit I have no delusions I spell it right):
Celui qui parle trois langues
s'appelle un trilangue,
Celui qui parle deux langues s'appelle un bilangue, mais
Celui qui parle seulement *un* langue s'appelle un anglophone.
This linguistic failing is to
some degree humoured - even regarded as
mildly endearing, if handled with good grace - but is universally
despised when combined with anything construed as arrogance,
most
notably a distressingly common utter blindness to the rudeness
of
imposing your language on your hosts (and, of course, *any* form
of
arrogance is perceived as stupidity). In any case, only in the
anglophone world is polylingual exceptional, at least among the
(even
mildly) educated; so anglophones appear stupid.
Eddy.