| I
have this long-standing belief--a conviction even--that has
slowly gone to rot. It is that simply because they are European,
Europeans are interesting individuals. And we Americans are
usually not. Well, we just have to try a lot harder to be
interesting, and most people don’t bother. And if you’re
not interesting, what is there? This belief was reinforced
during my time working at a hostel in San Francisco and during
my European travels.
I was amazed to hear, while enjoying a nice cup of coffee
in the Kazimierez district of Krakow, a group of Polish friends
switch back and forth between languages to tell anecdotes
with everyone at the table seemingly understanding as they
went along.
While conversing with an eighteen-year-old Austrian, I couldn’t
help comparing him to the obnoxious high school kids I’d
been a substitute teacher for the year previous. How come
he was able to have an intelligent, grown-up conversation?
Was he especially mature, or was, as I later discovered to
be the case, this typical of his countrymen? I loved the German
boy seated next to me on my flight over: five years old and
speaking fluent English before he could read. He taught me
how to say “my name is” on the way to Germany,
but I’m ashamed to admit I forgot it before touchdown.
And I still talk about the woman with her well-behaved little
boy in a Paris café--a boy so unlike the American equivalent,
who would have been running and screaming around the place,
knocking things over and not sitting calmly in an adorable
mini-suit jacket. And then there were all the hot hipster
dads I sighted in Helsinki--they’ve managed to have
kids and stay in style.
Speaking of hipsters, I can’t praise enough the European
equivalents. First off were the über-cool Germans I encountered
on a plane ride from Budapest. The guy took the “bed
head” look to the extreme, and one of the girls managed
to look like a hot Dutch milkmaid with her long blonde braids
and adorable red ski sweater with snowflakes setting off her
more wildly artsy attire. Then there were the Swedes at the
café in the Sodermalm district of Stockholm that my
Swedophile friend suggested I try out--one girl should teach
classes in the application and process of post-coital hair
and makeup while another managed to look like a girl version
of Dennis the Menace, with boy-cut hair emphasizing the huge
cowlick intentionally gelled or moussed or hairsprayed (who
knows how these kids do it?) up in the front.
And there were the great European quirks, like the strollers
with babies sleeping in them left outside of stores all throughout
Scandinavia. Take a moment to imagine anyone even considering
such an action in New York City. You’d think they were
either insane or an unfit parent, right? But in Stockholm,
Sweden’s biggest city, such things are custom and even
safe (the closest American equivalent would be how things
were back in the fifties, or so I’ve been told by people
alive long enough to know--though of course without the racial
prejudice and women-relegated-to-the-kitchen themes that most
envision when considering that decade). Then there were the
French men coming home from work dressed in suits, with baguettes
carried under their arms. I love to picture one of them stopping
into the same cute patisserie on the way home every day, inquiring
after the madame’s family or the monsieur’s dog
and telling them about the exotic weekend trip his wife and
he would be taking, leaving the kids in some childcare facility
that’s equivalent to our dog kennels--individual rooms
for each kid with specialty foods and designated walks so
that they are well taken care of while their parents enjoy
sophisticated conversations and good wine.
So the idea of working with a handful of Europeans at a travel
job in my boring suburb seemed like the ideal environment
for me. That is, until I met the crew. Older, married with
kids, they spend hours talking about their bella grandchildren,
working industriously in a way I can only describe as completely
over the top and surely un-American, and whining over the
death of the pope.
An excerpt of a conversation I had with the only single and
young girl in the office:
Her: “How was your weekend, Kristin?”
Me: “As best as can be expected, living in this hellhole.
You?”
Her: “I saw a great film that I really enjoyed.”
Me: “Oh, which one? By the way, you speak French, right?
There’s a French film festival you should check out
this week. Here’s the website.”
Her: “Thanks. I have plans for the weekend, so probably
not, but thanks. Back to the movie I so enjoyed. It’s
called Sahara.” (A really bad romantic action-adventure
flick with Penelope Cruz and Matthew McConaughey and, no,
I haven’t seen it.)
Me: “Oh.”
Awkward pause while I strengthened myself to keep from asking,
“What the fuck are you talking about? How can you even
utter that name in the same conversation as a French film
festival? What is wrong with you? Why aren’t you a cool
European? Why?”
Instead I said, “Did you know the actors are dating
now in real life? They met while shooting.”
Her: “Oh, how neat. They make a cute couple.”
As the above dialogue illustrates, I have made real strides
to keep it friendly, but look at what I’m dealing with--it’s
evil, really. I was expecting long smoke breaks, constant
complaining in soft and beautiful accents over the hell it
is to live in such a place when their native Paris is calling
to them in their dreams, accounts of adventure and intrigue
in far-off lands… instead I’ve been experiencing
recent pangs of patriotism.
Such feelings of love for America have been virtually non-existent
for me for the past few years. In fact, I often make an embarrassing
spectacle of myself by telling more comfortable-with-the-way-the-world-is-and-how-our-government’s-handling-it
Americans how I’m ashamed of being one of them. So the
fact that an action figure could make me happy to be one is
unlikely, but true. It all started when talking to one of
my dull European coworkers about a customer named Thor. I
immediately started laughing at the prospect and then filled
her in on the cultural relevance. Was Thor a cartoon, comic
book character, or action figure first? Who knows or cares.
What matters is that he’s a super muscular long-haired
blonde with a hammer and Viking helmet that is, I realized
a bit late, based on Norse mythology. So here I was explaining
to a Scandinavian woman how we in America have created an
amateurish, stereotypical, but somehow touching and innocent
figure based on her country’s folklore. We’ve
made him blonde and bronzed and muscular as we assume all
Scandinavians must be, throwing in the hammer and helmet for
good measure after reading about them in some storybook, surely.
And that’s when I realized how Thor encapsulates America
by showing how the average citizen views the world in such
childishly simplistic ways. There is only good (us) and evil
(Iraq, the communists, too much sex, mean-spiritedness), countries
are seen as symbols (Germany is lederhosen and Hitler, while
Japan is sushi and Pearl Harbor), and who’d ever want
to live anywhere else? People are nice to their neighbors
and often genuinely happy to meet foreigners, though they
have no conception of what their countries are beyond their
symbols. Americans don’t understand why anyone would
hate us because they truly want good (or their conception
of it) for all. They feel privileged to be American, because
who wants to live in colorful but communist Cuba or elegant
yet snobby Paris? But they love to visit. They go to Paris
and stare at the Eiffel Tower in wonder, they marvel over
the adorable accents everyone has in London, and they smile
and say "hi" to everyone they meet along the way.
Somehow, explaining this concept I saw our country through
non-critical foreign eyes and, if only for a few minutes,
I was proud to be an American. |
