American Arrogance - Part I - Good comments. This was the one that had all the hits, but I think the second part still goes with it well, and it just missed the cut for the Top 100 itself anyway.
American Arrogance - Part II. Good discussion here, also. December 2015
4 comments:
I'm now very curious about what the "payback from that Barnacle op-ed from the 90s" was that would net payback from NHers towards Massachusettsians (per bsking's comment).
At the rental car counter in Boston or Hartford (the other Massachusetts airport) I'm happy to get a car with MA or CT plates, less so with NY, but Florida plates mean that I'll have people cutting me off constantly because they assume I'm an elderly snowbird and slow. I'd be tempted to assert that non-local plates are always a target for aggressive drivers, but my experience of NH driving has mostly been with license plates from places that have at least 4 or 5 states as butter between them and NH, and never with MA plates.
I'll note in support of RichardJohnson's thesis that I regularly work in MA, and in spite of having lived in 8 disparate states and 2 eastern-Canadian provinces have only heard the term "Masshole" whilst physically present within the state.
I have a formerly close friend from Germany who is somewhat upset that he always visits us (as a side-trip when his family is visiting his wife's parents) and we never visit them in Germany; and who has twice called-off his visits to me at the last minute when I had gone to extensive (and perhaps career-limiting) trouble to arrange to be free from work at those times.
I do think that a mandated minimum 24 days and typical 30 days annual paid holiday, (even for hourly workers and rising as your time employed increases) as in Germany would be a good thing -- it would allow me time to visit Germany, for example -- but I've found that I dread his visits anyway because I spend the entire conversation hearing about this and other ways that the American way of doing things is wrong and the German way is much better.
I've felt quite guilty about not being enthusiastic about maintaining this friendship, but reading this pair of posts has helped me to be more comfortable with my choice to limit the effort I'll put into it.
Here is Mike Barnicle's article from the Boston Globe.
http://boulter.com/nh/barnicle.html
He was kicked off the Globe for multiple instances of plagiarism and now works for...wait for it...MSNBC.
Unknown on German criticism of us Amis:
I've found that I dread his visits anyway because I spend the entire conversation hearing about this and other ways that the American way of doing things is wrong and the German way is much better.
My late brother-in-law emigrated from Germany to the States when he was 12 years old. When his Army duty sent him to Germany for several years, he married a German. His wife spent a considerable part of their 25 years of marriage complaining about the United States.Things were done so much better in Germany,doncha' know?
After they divorced, she moved back to Germany. Within a year, she was back in the US.While absence may have made her heart fonder for the way things were done back in Germany, reacquainting herself with Germany ways showed her they weren't as great as she thought.
A local TX paper once had a letter to the editor from a Californian, apparently prompted by a visit from TX relatives, critcizing "gun culture" in TX. He wrote that on a recent visit to Germany, he was grilled about the number of executions in TX. Yes, the humanitarian Germans don't have the death penalty, which makes them morally superior to those barbarian Amis and Texans. Those Germans- and this Californian- were apparently not aware of the origins of Germany's abolition of the death penalty.The Paradoxes of a Death Penalty Stance
In the debate between Europe and the United States over the death penalty, no country is more vocal than Germany. German media regularly decry executions in Texas. ....
Contrasting their nation's policy with that of the Americans, Germans point proudly to Article 102 of their Basic Law, adopted in 1949. It reads, simply: "The death penalty is abolished." They often say that this 56-year-old provision shows how thoroughly the postwar Federal Republic has learned -- and applied -- the lessons of Nazi state-sponsored killing. (Communist East Germany kept the death penalty until 1987.)
But the actual history of the German death penalty ban casts this claim in a different light. Article 102 was in fact the brainchild of a right-wing politician who sympathized with convicted Nazi war criminals -- and sought to prevent their execution by British and American occupation authorities. Far from intending to repudiate the barbarism of Hitler, the author of Article 102 wanted to make a statement about the supposed excesses of Allied victors' justice.
More at the link.
For an example of shoddy German reporting on the US, consider this.German journalist fired for Fergus Falls fake story. The editors in Germany didn't catch these errors- Fergus Falls residents did.
Unknown, for more takedowns of German Ami-bashing, consider the following.
DAvid's Medienkritik:Markus Günther: Hypocritical Americans Suppressing Memories of Slavery - Other Injustices.
One of the most-remembered German anti-American utterances came from Herta Däubler-Gmelin, then Germany's Justice Minister, in 2002, when she compared George W. Bush to Hitler and characterized American justice as “lousy.”It turns out that Herta Däubler-Gmelin’s father was jurist-an attorney- in the SS who did his part to send Slovakian Jews to the camps. He spent 3 years in prison after the war. Do You Remember Herta Däubler-Gmelin?
I suspect that Herta Däubler-Gmelin’s condemnation of George W. Bush, and her “lousy” characterization of American justice, were attempts to show that her Daddy and Germany weren’t the only guilty parties. Herta Däubler-Gmelin is not responsible for her father’s actions during World War II, but from her criticisms of the US, it appears that she feels some responsibility for her father’s actions during WW2, or that she resents the punishment meted out to her father. As such, we should dismiss her criticisms of the US.
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