Let me tell you what Americans are. Americans are truly convinced that theirs is the greatest country which ever existed. They believe that everyone, from starving beggars on the streets of Mexico to the Queen of England would, if given the chance, murder a sack of puppies to get citizenship.To the vast majority of the population that lives between the two coasts, there are only two types of people in the world, Americans and those who want to be Americans. My God, these people even drink American beer!
Americans cannot understand why anyone wouldn’t want to be just like them. It is inconceivable to them that the Italians can love Italy, the Moroccans can love Morocco or that, God forbid, the French can love France.
Millions of Americans are functionally illiterate in a language that is spoken by a huge percentage of their population. On the rare occasions they venture out of their home county you can find them in the passport queues of all the airports in Europe, clutching their blue passports and talking loudly about how things are run so much better back home.
American students, wanting to “explore other cultures” set off for a summer abroad only to spend their time eating MacDonald’s hamburgers, drinking heavily and making fools of themselves on inner-city trains.
Don’t get me started about the culture of gun ownership. These guys pack almost as much heat as the average Iraqi street gang.
They tout the fact that they have a magnificently advanced health care system without being able to see its flaws and inadequacies.
I am, of course, damned by association. My accent is similar to theirs and therefore I must from there. How can I explain to an ill-treated waiter or berated hotel clerk that I am not one of them?
By narrow majorities they keep electing governments that swing to the right so almost half of their population lives in near permanent disenfranchisement.
Perhaps the best thing I can say about Americas is that their currency is so hopelessly devalued that those of us lucky enough to be living in Europe can treat their cities like giant after-Christmas sales and plunder their stores with impunity.
Not that they are all bad. They do play baseball and I’ve heard they have trained some of their French residents to play ice hockey. They also amuse themselves by participating in some sort of football that they play with their hands and which is totally unrecognizable and incomprehensible to the rest of the world.
Despite the fact that they long ago cast out their English overlords, they still sigh and fawn over Mother England and indiscriminately import leftover British TV shows to fill their gaping cultural void.
I for one am getting pretty tired of these funny-talking, holier than thou, tuque wearing, Molson Golden swilling, moose eating, gun toting rednecks and if it were up to me we’d move that boarder fence from Mexico up to where it is really needed- along the 49th parallel. It’s time to protect the decent, hardworking folk in the United States from those ugliest of all North Americans: Canadians.
