In his testimony yesterday before the Capitol riot committee, DC police officer Daniel Hodges said that if the people who stormed the building on Jan. 6 were “tourists,” he could understand why foreign countries weren't eager for visitors from the U.S.
It was a good line, but a little outdated. The global image of the ugly American has faded over the last few decades and been replaced by that of the ugly Englishman.
Is it just me, or were this year's Independence Day celebrations not only more exuberant - not surprising, considering last year's 4th - but more heartfelt? Even the dour New York Times seemed uncharacteristically celebratory, running in its Book Review a glowing appreciation by Robert Gottlieb of John Gunther's Inside U.S.A.
Now that our country is opening up it seems that half the population is taking planes and the other half is taking aim.
The gazebo where the wedding took place was a good distance from the clubhouse where the reception was to be, and on the walk there I asked a man if he was a friend of the bride or the groom.
“The groom,” he told me, explaining that the two worked together. He gave me the name of the company and told me about the specialized work it did.
I asked him where he was from originally.
“New Jersey,” he said.
“Me too,” I said. “What part?”
He gave a detailed explanation of his hometown and its environs, which was followed by silence. We still had a distance to go before we reached the clubhouse but he had no desire to fill it, no apparent curiosity about what I did or where I was from in his home state. I concluded that either I looked like a man of no interest whatsoever or a man so fascinating that any information about my life would reveal to him the blandness of his own.
In The Spectator this week, a review of a new biography of D.H. Lawrence quotes the great writer from his Studies in Classic American Literature:
“America is the land of the free! Why, if I say anything that displeases them, the free mob will lynch me, and that’s my freedom. Free? Why, I have never been in a country where the individual has such an abject fear of his fellow countrymen.”