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Originally Posted by Dewey Benson
A delightful country that actually seemed to like Americans! I hope it has retained that feature.
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A lot of people
like Americans, DB. Hell, even
I like Americans. Generally, they are a hospitable and helpful people who can be very generous with their time. They are certainly more charitable than most, but maybe they have to be.
Unfortunately, a lot of people disagree with certain aspects of American culture (or its projection into their own) and even more don't like some aspects of American politics. Combine that with the fact that foreigners frequently have, shall we say, a more comprehensive and balanced knowledge of American affairs than do many Americans, and it tends to make you poor buggers easy targets of frustration or dissent.
I've travelled a fair bit, and I've had to argue (in French, yet) when some typically sneering French barstool philosophers were ragging on an American student with pretty poor French comprehension about "how racist America was".
Once I pointed out how depised the Arabic former colonials of France seemed to me to be, and certain other sordid aspects of France's tendency to offer up its national buttocks to invaders, they shut up. But I do recall that the American student was deeply shocked to discover that Americans weren't universally loved as the avatars of democracy, freer of nations, etc. etc. She didn't see that the gap between the story Americans tell themselves and how actions taken under the American aegis were at best only loosely connected.
The British Empire at its greatest extent was capable of a similar selective blindness. Rhetoric about "the white man's burden" and "how it was the duty of England to civilize its far-flung possessions" didn't really address the political impotence of the inhabitants of said colonies, nor the very lucrative extraction of goods that enriched England and provided captive markets for her own manufactures.
Luckily, the pursuit of sailing brings people of many nations in close contact with each other, and the customs of the sea encourage courtesy and patience to avoid accidental "incidents" on the seas, which, after all, are free to all. This makes us ambassadors of a sort, and I find talking to sailors from other lands a huge privilege.