it comes in pints?

Bravo!!!

Hahaha. Thanks. I needed to get it off my chest after having to just stand there and grit my teeth while nodding in agreement. "Yes, yes. Aren't we all just total crap?"

Going back to one of the things we were talking about at your place. Here's this guy, lecturing me about how uncultured and rude we are when he's blantantly insulting me TO MY FACE. Heeeelllooooo!

And yeah, Americans are soooo uncultured.

"Mommy, why did you name me after a burrough in New York?"

"Because your daddy and I fucked there once."

Geez.

Marvellous, Emily.. and with a DNA reference too.. hahaha.

And, of course, that's the same special class of continental asshole who hero-worship the Cat-man.. and he just keeps digging..

DNA is everywhere. He is in all things.

Hahahaha. I know. Tell Sheila Americans are shallow and then tune in to watch Galloway on Celebrity BB. Brilliant. And they don't even see the irony at all.

Everywhere.. in all things.. always.

Hahaha. Bah.. they just don't get irony over here.

I especially loved Sheila's post where she mentions that most of the Eurosnobs that left the comments about her being shallow found her post by Googling for "Drew Barrymore's tits." Um...yeah.

The other flavor of this are American ex-pats who like to nod along to this "most Americans don't have passports" thing and say, "I mean I managed to escape, so I can't see why any of them haven't even visited. Sure, I did it right out of school or dropped out to go and didn't have much debt, or a job that I had to worry about taking vacation time from. And, yeah, I wasn't married or didn't have any kids to worry about. Oh, and I already knew a bunch of people where I was going so had a place to stay and a support system. Ok, and maybe my folks helped a little. But that really has nothing to do with it! I swear, if I could do it, everyone could spare a couple months a year to travel over here!"

They are often the ones, after a nice condescending rant, put in, "Oh, my dear sir, it is far worse than you think. It would be my honour to inform you."

Yeah, didn't Michael Moore, Friend of the Working Man, do something like that? Ex-squeeze me, Mr. Moore, but most of us don't have a few million dollars laying around to travel. He's calling the rest of us stupid for not having passports, and it's barely occured to him that the vast majority of us don't have the luxury of international travel.

Why bother traveling to Europe if they're just going to be snobbish to you in person for daring to set foot within their exalted borders?

Well, because that's not all of them. That'd be making the same mistake that all Americans are shorts wearin', gum-chompin', loud-talkin' yee-haws. Just because I am, doesn't mean all the rest of us are.

The point of traveling is to visit interesting places. If you're already living in an interesting place, why leave?

Actually, there are a lot of places I'd like to visit but as my uncle once said, there's a whole lot of this country I haven't had time to see yet.

That's why I made a point of stressing that I didn't mean all Europeans, just the Eurosnobs. I know a lot of people from Europe that are just great, open-minded, friendly folks. I don't want to put them down at all. However, I think the type of person most likely snicker up the "Americans are so stoopid because they don't have passports" are the ones that are also most likely to look down their noses and make gross assumptions about American visitors.

Bravo, Emily. It boggles the mind that some people can even think shit like that, let alone actually say it to someone's face, without detecting even the slightest trace of irony. I must not be "nuanced" enough to be able to appreciate how that's possible.

All I'd add to what you said that there are some Canadians who I think might actually take all this to yet another level, since they don't even have the excuse of distance and/or language.

"Oh, my dear sir, it is far worse than you think. It would be my honour to inform you."

The director of my semester in Brussels (almost ten years ago now) was and still is the unofficial head of the American expat community there. He said there are essentially two kinds of American expats: the normal people who just happen to be in some other country, and the ones who seem to think it's some kind of proof that they're "special," i.e., better than the rest of. The second kind are the walking definition of self-righteousness.

One time we had this European client visit us and he started going off about Americans and how Puritanical we were for the whole fuss over the Lewinski/Clinton deal. He said something like "In Europe, we get angry if our leaders don't have affairs."

Well, gee, aren't you just a morality free-zone of free-for all adulterous bonking. I guess that makes you better than us.

Never mind that most people didn't give a shit about the affair part, just the lying part. I suppose he couldn't be bothered with little details like that though.

sheila's thread has almost 200 comments and is choking; i wonder if the fucks are spamming her.

I would hope that they're over it by now!

I think a large part of the curious attitude the Eurosnobs (good term, btw) have towards America/Americans is formed by our media. A lot of people simply don't think for themselves until you teach them to. Case in point - in the summer, a girl I knew moved down the road to me. We would always see each other out in clubs and pubs, and we had the same friends, so it was natural that we'd buddy up, living so near by. The first time I went to her place, I was quietly horrified to see her bookshelf - lots of Michael Moore and stuff on Marxism! Eeeek!

I've been gradually encouraging her to examine the other side, the side that doesn't get presented in such glowing terms, and to question what she reads, whether it's from a left viewpoint, a right viewpoint, or the viewpoint of somebody perched on the fence. I've explained to her that I don't necessarily want her to agree with me, I just want her to look at all the information, and then come to a conclusion about a topic. She's still very much to the left of me on some issues (though there are quite a few on which I'm way more liberal than she is) but she is asking more questions rather than just swallowing everything she reads, which is a good thing.

A big difference between Europe and America, so far as I can see, is that American children tend to have instilled in them from an early age the idea that they should be independent and think for themselves. Over here, there is more of a collective mentality; people will subscribe to a popular viewpoint just because it is popular - and the most popular positions are those pushed by the media. And of course, those who run the media over here are often viciously anti-American, lambasting America for every little thing one of her citizens does wrong, while ignoring places like Burma and Iran.

I'm not sure what we can do to change this.

I hate to say it, but I almost fell into that Americans are soooo uncultured trap when I was young. I blogged about it here:

http://tpwithpagenumbers.blog-city.com/the_more_things_change.htm

In my defense I was living through things like this:

http://tpwithpagenumbers.blog-city.com/it_was_fifteen_years_ago_today.htm

and most Americans at the time held pretty stupid ideas (both pro and con) about the USSR without ever having been there.

There is the idea that learning a foreign language takes effort, and it doesn’t show us Americans in a very good light that so many of us avoid it. However, being lazy is a universal trait, and I think that if another language weren’t as close to most Euros as the state line liquor store is to me, a lot fewer Euros would learn them. As it is, I don’t see many Western Euros (and I work with a lot of them) learning Slavic or non-Indo European languages, where cognates and Latin leftovers (not to mention the Latin alphabet) don’t help you much. When a Euro Tard gets uppity on me, I usually throw that at them.

I’d also like to say in my defense that I never got very far along that path, because I have family who are have never ventured more than 50 miles from their home towns down South, and I love them dearly. That’s the best of what family can do for you – keep you from being too big of a prick when you are young and stupid.

And Dave J – the expats who think they are something special because of the experience are even worse in Asia. A lot of them have the “spiritual quest” thing going on, too, which makes them even more annoying (if you can imagine that). Don’t get my Chinese wife started on “dumb Americans” who think they know all about Asia because they spent two years in Japan teaching English in an Eikaiwa and banging stupid Japanese chicks with a thing for geeky foreigners.

Hi, my name is John, and I’m a recovering Peckerwood. There, glad I got that off of my chest.

"Third, just about the cheapest individual airline ticket you will be able to get overseas is around $800.00."

Better than that... DFW to London is about $600, a little less during the off-season (which is now).

Emily if and when you get yourself over here you know you won't have to pay for anything. The whole Britblog community will roll out the red carpet I'm sure.

[Group]: "Hello, John"

It also needs to be pointed out that the "Europeans" they are talking about are nearly always the ones in their "circle of friends", for lack of a better term. In the small amount of time I spent in Europe I ran into plenty of people who did not speak English, which is by far the most common second language in the world. For the snobbish class, those people simply don't exist because it wouldn't do to admit that there are Europeans just as untravelled as the ignorant Americans.

Err, Mark, if Emily came to Britain she’d hardly have to worry about Eurosnobs now would she? Do keep up lad, there’s the British and the Europeans, quite different things. They have better dentistry and we wash more often.

Haha. Great rant! They pick on us Brits too you know, these eurosnobs. I don't know, perhaps they just have a problem with success. Or perhaps they really believe it. Either way, they're entertaining in a schoolyard hissy fit kind of a way.

Tim,

Of course, I realise that. It's just that as Emily was rightly saying about the cost of getting over here from there I thought I ought to point out that lodging and food wouldn't be a factor for our blogging buds. Any of them. (Besides I owe Emily some hospitality as she treated me and my wife to some over there.)

Actually, couldn't you just write up a docket for yourself at work Emily and we'll collect you from the dock at Southampton!

Re Brooklyn Beckham. The parents of Robert Andrew Scarborough Ferris got there first.

Hahaha, Mark. I don't think I'd enjoy the accomodations in one of those ocean containers for three to four weeks. And I'd probably be so smelly when I arrived you wouldn't let your dog near me.

there are some Americans who have the eurosnob ideal, too.

I sat at dinner with one on the train coming home after my Christmas travels. (Now, don't judge me as a protoeuroweenie because I ride the train: it is mainly because (a) I fear and loathe flying and (b) the train station is closer and more readily accessible to me than the airport).

Anyway, this guy immediately launched into a tirade about all the things wrong with America as soon as I sat down. When I tried - v. politely- to observe that not everyone felt that way, he brushed me off. When he found out what state I lived in (one of the "flyover" red states) his eyes goggled and he demanded to know why on earth anyone would want to live there. Oh, and he openly insulted Christians and Christianity - after finding out that the other person sitting with us was Catholic and that I was (unspecified) Protestant. (Again, I tried to observe that we weren't all "jerks," that we didn't all think the whole "Jesus thing" was "actually a load of crap no one really believes," and most of us wished Pat Robertson would stop acting as a commentator on current events, but again I was rebuffed).

The guy was also loud, boorish - hardly let us get a word in edgeways. About midway through the meal-of-misery, I decided that his goal in life was to pontificate, not to converse, so I tuned him out by thinking again and again "I'm rubber and you're glue, what you say bounces off me and sticks to you"

Seriously - all of the things I was taught as a youngster not to bring up or discuss in conversation when you're with other people whose beliefs and backgrounds you don't know, he brought up and discussed freely. (I really wondered what would have ensued if he'd been seated with either nuns, or with Amish people, both of whom I've seen traveling on the train)

So, just as some people question the reasons for visiting Europe given the experiences they've had with Europeans, this chap (who hailed from New England) gave me serious doubts about wanting to spend an extended amount of time in that part of the country.

It was a seriously unpleasant experience; I almost didn't go and get breakfast for fear of running into the man again and once more being subjected to his windiness.

How awful for you, Ricki. I hate that. Um, I just want to eat my meal in peace, guy. Do you mind shutting the fuck up for a minute so I can digest my food without being offended by every other sentence that leaves your mouth?

We are certainly not without our own snobs. The thing I've noticed about snobs in general is that they, like your dinner companion, have no bloody reason to be snobbish in the first place. They're not particularly bright, well mannered, or interesting. When I lived up north in Arcata, there were A LOT of people in that town that were snobs. It was a very beautiful area in terms of the redwood forests and beaches, but otherwise was just a dinky shithole. These people would come into the restaurant where I worked and talk down to me like I was some daft hillbilly. We had names for them - the Duchess of Heroin Heights (which was a particularly drugged up part of town), Queen of the Bird Swamp, etc. Because of the huge marijuana industry of Humboldt County and really lax residency requirements to qualify for welfare, the place just attracted large numbers of white trash, so the only thing that made the town liveable was the university crowd. I was really tempted to make snide remarks to some of these people - like "gee, what makes you act so regal? Was it the homeless man passed out in his own vomit with the newspaper sleeping bag you had to step over to get here? Or is it that this town is about two check marks away from meeting the criteria for being classified as a Third World country?"

Been there, lived there, hitchhiked from Vienna to Amsterdam and back, and from Barcelona to England and then back down to Vienna as a student at the Hochschulefurangewantekunst - twice across the middle of Germany and up to Scandahoovia, later rode motorcycles through the Alps. The Hungarian guy's missing his ancien Holy-Roman Austro-Empire, but Bohunks are like that - notoriously obnoxious even in Europe - at least in Vienna anyhow where they crop up a lot. About the only way to shut 'em up is to roll them a big spliff to get their mind off things...
I spent more time waiting for a ride in France than I ever did at any time on my Washington DC-to-Palo Alto hitch, which only took about five days and $20 compared to just trying to get some freakin' dinner in the south of France. Spain was the best place if you don't mind hanging out with cheap-ass German potheads on vacation...

Here via Mark at Bognor.... Haven't commented since the "English, gosh yes!" post.
I'm a Eurosnob! I'm a Briton (first doubts start to creep in about being a Eurosnob), but I do live in Germany, where I am compelled to carry my passport at all times as a form of ID and state officials can (and have) demand to see it for no reason (the Eurosnob ideal, if ever it was there, starts to fade away rapidly and considers tipping tea into a convenient harbour).
We're not all snobs you know, but that mayor of New Orleans is ghastly, get him replaced - and none of this popular mandate malarky.

We know you're not all snobs, Neil. We've said that more than once. I lived in Europe as a kid and my step-mother's from Berlin.

I agree with you about the NO mayor, but as I'm not a resident of the city, I can't do a thing about him. I think voters will remember his stupid remarks come the next election though.

Cracking post, Emily. Two things come to mind which pisses me off:

1) Those Europeans who accuse Americans of knowing nothing about the outside world usually are completely ignorant of the US. I don't just mean geographically, I mean ignorant of everything in the US.

2) Brits who have travelled to Magaluf once on a "girls" holiday and spent their time getting shagged by drunken rough-arse Scouse or Manc lads, followed by a 6 month trip to Thailand at Daddy's expense where they followed the recommendations of the Rough Guide to the letter, then claiming they have travelled the world and seen different cultures.

If you want to see snobby, or downright condescending, you should see me when I encounter one of these people, especially if they have incurred my wrath by slagging of the Yanks.

I live in a city that has the largest German club outside of Germany. Down the road there is a Dutch club. Up the street we have "The Sons of Italy". I live near Los Angeles, the largest Mexican city on earth. My girlfriends' family is from Brazil and at her New Years eve party I met people from Armenia and Argentina. We have plenty of people right here to meet and get to know. I have been to Canada and Mexico without getting a passport. I hope to have one someday, and when I travel I will try to avoid countires filled with people who will look down at me.

I just came here via Big Arm Woman. I love it. I may plagiarize you. Fabulous.

Hi Kim. Nice to meet you. Thanks for your kind words. Quote me freely by all means, but plagiarize me and I might get angry. Cheers.