September 9, 2006
Good article on the "not-so-ugly American"
From the New York Times magazine, check out The I’m-Not-Ugly American by Ann Hulbert.
Ann and her family followed the hypersensitive advice found in the World Citizens Guide to modulate their behavior on a trip to Turkey.
Lo and behold, Turks dress any old way they want too, from traditional to sluttish, and are loud and argumentative. Hulbert writes:
What may be most confusing of all is the warm welcome U.S. visitors actually receive in a country that is as culturally cacophonous as America and labors under no inhibitions when it comes to boasting and bullying. The demurely dressed American tourist (shoulders and knees covered, often in khaki) can’t walk a block in Istanbul without seeing Turks wearing hijabs and jilbabs (those modest coatdress coverings) side by side with tank tops and tight jeans — and without getting lectured about where the true cradle of cultural diversity lies. Here’s a collision of secularism and Islamism, the Turks are right, that owes more to Ataturk and centuries of entanglement with Europe than to the corrosive allure of New World exports.Busily monitoring our well-known tendency to strident self-importance, earnest American practitioners of personal diplomacy can risk missing the genuinely humbling lesson of being abroad: an awareness of how bewildering another country’s own blend of boorishness and fervent belief, of openness and defiance, of backwardness and progress and of internal dissensions can be. In the end, it’s as narcissistic to assume we’re the overbearing cause of everybody else’s national identity crises in a dizzying world as it is to imagine that we can orchestrate the solutions to them. The sobering, and liberating, truth is that our britches are not that big.
I make a related point in the Brazil chapter of my first book, 
An Amateur's Guide to the Planet. At a candomble ceremony in Salvador, the American tourists were respectful as they could possibly be while the Euros misbehaved:
The American tourists — two others had arrived — displayed respect for the ceremony. The Euros spanned the spectrum from intrigued to bored to rude. A blond woman resembling Madonna chattered away in French or Italian at my immediate left. I shushed her. She kept right on talking to a boyfriend who stood outside the window.As at the Indian camp in the Amazon, with its overbearing young Germans, it seemed the torch of the “Ugly American” had been passed on to other nationalities.
- posted by jbelliveau at 11:12 AM in Love, Sex, Romance and Travel
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