Sqrl said:
Again anecdotes are not facts - and even then this joke of claiming to be canadian has been in the standup routine of several lefty comedians for a while now (as I remember hearing it with Bush Sr. and Clinton). The entire point is baseless because we have no idea how prevalent this is, if it even occurs at a level worth mentioning at all. You've taken this anecdote/joke and spun it into a weak argument by simply stating that "some people do this". Well sorry but people do a lot of things, it doesn't mean it applies universally. Either way, you're essentially saying that a country should account for the lack of graciousness and hospitality of other countries and adjust their foreign policy to agree with the views of those foriegn countries in order to avoid their ire while on vacation. A concept that is plainly ridiculous. You let your citizenry figure out that those people are rude and they eventually stop going to a place that clearly doesn't want their tourist dollars. The bottom line is that the United States is a soveriegn country, you don't have to like that it acts in its own interests, but you're naive if you're surprised that it does. Europeans and anyone else can react to that however they want but treating tourist "like shit" seems to me a pretty tasteless way to respond. If your assertion that this is prevalent is in fact true, I would take away that Europeans have a lot to learn about how to treat people. In all honesty though I doubt very much that Europeans are as rude as you suggest. Of course I've only met a few dozen or so and I won't be so absurd to think I can extrapolate a few examples to account for the entire population. |
Just as an aside to your point ...
Even the few people you meet who seem to be pretending to be Canadian do so to distance themselves from the "Ignorant Americans" who get noticed the most in other countries. The media always tries to present these "Ignorant Americans" as being small town hicks, but the patronizing elite from large (often liberal) cities is equally as bad. It wasn't that long ago that I had a couple from New York try to explain to me what a Mortgage was because they assumed that Canadians didn't have mortgages; and there are countless stories of other American's patronizing people from other countries because they had such a poor understanding of the world outside of their borders.
Very rarely will anyone hold a tourists politics against them, and I have never heard of a state's politics being held against a tourist when they entered into a country.
