Sad and undeserved entitlement of some Americans at home and abroad.
The Ugly American Syndrome
No, this isn’t about the 1958 political novel titled The Ugly American or the film of the same name from a few years later starring actor and icon Marlon Brando. By the time you conclude reading this post you may however think my thoughts and words are in fact political as they’re inspired from my travels rubbing shoulders with Americans in foreign countries – and now here at home.
According to Wikipedia, an “ugly American” is a stereotype depicting American citizens as exhibiting loud, arrogant, self-absorbed, demeaning, thoughtless, ignorant, and ethnocentric behavior mainly abroad, but also at home. Although the term is usually associated with or applied to travelers and tourists, it also applies to U.S. corporate businesses in the international arena.
The Collins English Dictionary defines an Ugly American as "a stereotypical representation of an American tourist as a brash and insensitive philistine or someone who deprecates art, beauty, spirituality and intellect. The Merriam-Webster dictionary’s definition is: "an American in a foreign country whose behavior is offensive to the people of that country.”
I’ve met many of these types of Americans on my journeys and they were also offensive to me and a source of embarrassment and shame. Sometimes I wouldn’t even tell people I was an American. I will say I once believed these people described above were in the minority but they seem to be more visible and in larger numbers in the last decade. We need not look any farther than the White House and the recent embarrassing episode between Trump, Vance and Volodymyr Zelensky, President of war-torn Ukraine, as well as a few moronic wannabe media stooges.
When asked why he wasn’t wearing a suit in the White House by amateur reporters, Zelensky commented he might at some point wear a “costume” in the future. I couldn’t help but think the President and VP were the ones already in “costume” with Trumps orange face and joke of a hair-do while Vance sported his usual eye-liner. Their behavior negated the need for either to wear a red nose. Both were already clowns and ugly Americans, though as is usually the case, they aren’t even aware of it. The sickening and offensive behavior goes right over their head. They don’t know what they don’t know. It’s the Dunning-Kruger Effect I write about a bit in my Normalizing Abuse book – when incompetent people think they’re amazing, better than others and over-rate themselves.
I’ve seen quite a lot of that outside the USA. The guy with his big cowboy hat sitting at the front of the bus giving the tour guide a hard time, never realizing how stupid his questions and comments are, while he thinks he’s being witty and superior. Or the inability to adjust to new surroundings and figure out the currency, the menu or energy saving protocols. All the while saying how much better things are done in the United States and acting as if he’s in a backward land because he doesn’t understand what he’s really looking at. And know that we stand out like a neon light in the darkness when we’re outside the US. Our tennis or athletic shoes are usually the giveaway - if it’s not the big hat, loud mouth and American drawl.
I remember when George Bush was the most hated President around the world for starting a war with a country that had nothing to do with 9-11 – though it did make his Vice President Dick Cheney of the Halliburton military industrial complex quite a lot of money. The French were not cutting American tourists a lot of slack in those days so I left nothing to chance that trip. Rather than the Parisians see me coming in my tennis shoes and think I supported the Republican war in Iraq, I wore a t-shirt that showed George Bush as a vampire taking a bite out of Lady Liberty’s neck. I got quite a lot of smiles and thumbs- up rather than looks of disgust. I wanted my fellow humans to know all Americans were not onboard with that Middle Eastern debacle. And the shirt got me a lot of goodwill if I was lost or needed a bit of courtesy as we made our way.
As a result of the years spent in foreign countries and on organized tours, when I began to organize my own, I was sure to have an orientation night before we began our journey. I talked about “ugly Americans” and suggested the tone appropriate for our sacred journeys was to act as goodwill ambassadors. Let the people whose country we visited have a good experience of polite, courteous and intellectually curious Americans. If we were on a spiritual journey, act like it, not just to those strangers we met everyday but to their fellow travelers they’d be in close quarters with for the next few days or weeks. Be open to the adventure. Embrace the differences. Afterall, if we expected everything to be in our comfort zone and as it was at home what was the point in coming on the journey? We were there to broaden our horizons, to learn, to expand our minds and stimulate our creativity and spiritual awareness. And the things that were different and unusual and perhaps challenged us, were the situations that would make the best travel stories. Perhaps the next piece I write I’ll detail some of those more challenging experiences far away from home.
New Word to Know: Kakistocracy…is a government run by the worst, least qualified or most unscrupulous citizens. The word was coined as early as the seventeenth century.
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