Nobody in this thread has mentioned Latin America. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with that, but I wonder if any Dopers can give us the skinny on what our Hispanic friends think of us. I’m just guessing, but I’ll bet that Mexicans, and South Americans are more tolerant of us good ol’ Americans, than Europeans are.
“Life is hard…but God is good”
True, ARG, but I think that’s because there’s a clear “rich customer/impoverished servant” relationship in most interactions between tourists and the natives. Say what you will about Americans, they are very generous when it comes to buying and tipping. Someone who makes five dollars a day is not going to have a problem with the behavior of someone whose tip can feed their family for a week.
Ironically, this is the very same reason people in more affluent countries often dislike Americans.
Ya think it could have anything to do with our habit of doing shit like trying to pull off what amounts to a kidnapping in front of the whole damn world and pretend it’s about the good of the kid, and not to grind our foot in the face of someone who’s defied us for decades? And behave as if we’re somehow entitled, because “we’re the freest, greatest nation that’s ever been!YAH!”
CERTIFIABLY NOT!
I really hate to burst your bubble but I’d like to present a few observations concerning us Americans and the rest of the world, gleaned from long months of international E-mail and the prowling of foreign websites.
Having been brought up on the News Media stating essentially how everyone else in the world hated us and reading many articles about ‘Ugly Americans’, once the Internet hooked me, I started asking around.
Here are my discoveries;
We ARE NOT the most hated nation in the world. Not even in the top 5.
We are the MOST copied nation in the world, politically, socially, legally, and form of average living.
Pepsi, Coke, Walmart, McDonalds, Burger King, Kmart are all over the globe! (In England correspondence I had to keep asking people to give me the names of their ‘native’ or local foods and drinks and KEPT getting the big P, big C and big McD!!)
Without exception, people in England, France, Germany, Russia, China, Japan, Africa, Egypt WANTED to move here. Many took every opportunity they could get to visit here and almost all hated going back home.
Several, upon my questioning them about our ‘media’ reputation seemed puzzled by it. The English seem to have more complaints about the French than Americans, the French seem generally pissed off at anyone not French, but less so with Americans, Russians and Chinese think it might be because we have it so good and would love to visit or move here, South Americans consider us fantastic and almost EVERYONE knows of DISNEY WORLD.
Most countries have Social Service systems that make ours look like a fantastic, magnificent program and those who have so called ‘better’ ones gripe and complain about their short comings and enormous tax cost.
Australians have stricter food laws but love Americans.
Our clothing is copied all over the world. Every nation uses English in one form or another. 90% of the average people consider us RICH! (MAN! Are they wrong!) American food is in every free nation of the world. In ‘closed’ nations, American products are in demand and are sold at a premium or on the black market.
Our Medical services are considered the best in the world. Our people are considered the most generous. (Hell, we ALWAYS rush in at any national disaster anywhere to provide food, medical assistance and help. How many other nations have rushed to us when hurricanes leveled cities or parts of California slid closer to the sea?)
We are considered the most well fed nation in the world – even though we have 40 million starving Americans which congress and the general public tend to ignore. (Though, in comparison, our poor are the richest of the world poor, as crude as that sounds.)
Our civil rights and legal rights are far better than in most countries.
Even the closed nation of Japan copies our styles, our forms of living, our music and our culture.
American cars are all over the place, along with American drugs and American jeans are in demand in most countries, even worn out, used ones. To my knowledge, Americans have the highest home PC rate of any nation in the world.
Our food laws are some of the strictest in the world, along with our product liability laws. Our farmers can produce more food than any other nation – even though the government restricts their production to keep the prices up to help the economy.
We have more refugees coming here than in any other nation of the world, even if many FIRST fled to another country.
America is looked on as both frighteningly powerful and wonderfully giving.
Now, unfortunately, most of the tourist horror stories are from tourists who are quite well off and used to getting their own way. Not to mention some movie people who, while doing pseudo-documentaries about under developed nations, have made ‘funny’ and disrespectful comments concerning the nations beliefs and religious acts in front of crowds of ‘natives’.
PLUS America is about the only nation in the world with a large representation of people from EVERY OTHER country. In Japan, no foreigner may buy or own Japanese property, nor may they obtain a citizenship. (The Japs don’t want their property being owned by anyone but Japs.)
Plus, America is the ‘enforcer’ the United Nations look to when they can’t handle problems themselves.
When the American economy slips badly, shortly after so does the global economy.
We have our problems and our hang-ups, but, all in all, we are still the BEST! 
Regarding poor service in restaurants:
This is a clear-cut case of different, not worse, not better, just different.
In Germany, people don’t typically go to a restaurant with extensive other plans for the evening; they go to the restaurant for the evening. They expect a beer fairly quickly after arriving, but beyond that, getting menus, placing orders, getting food, clearing the table, paying the bill… all that is of secondary importance to a fun evening out socializing with good friends & neighbors.
Many Europeans coming to US are appalled at how American waitstaff hover, serve an appetizer, salad, & entree all within 5 minutes, whisk plates away within seconds of a fork being set down, and bring the bill immediately (which Europeans may construe as tantamount to being asked to leave).
Who has the poor service? No one - European servers provide the kind of service European diners expect; American servers provide the kind of service American diners expect.
If people can leave behind their narrow concepts of the American way = the best way, different becomes just that.
Sue from El Paso
Experience is what you get when you didn’t get what you wanted.
Yikes!
NightGirl, please try to restrain yourself.
Any tourist - American or not - anywhere caught saying “We’re the best”, complete with TWO smilies - or just thinking it real loud - fully deserves to be disliked, IMHO.
Why are Americans so disliked worldwide?
Read NightGirl44’s rant. That’s why.
Concerning Latin America, from my experience, the overall view held by its citizens is that they love the USA and anything American.
shema yisrael adonai eloheynu adonai echad
My best bud and I spent 5 weeks in Europe once. Here are a couple of “Ugly American” sightings:
There was an older American couple in Italy. The woman said, “Hey Murray! Stand by the statue, I want to take a picture of it!”
In Venice, we had been looking all over for the youth hostel. When we got there the proprietor asked if we were Americans. (We were too tired to deny it.) He said he didn’t want any more Americans in his hostel. “Their children run around like wild animals! They make love all night, howling!” (At this point he howled a couple of times.) “If an atomb bomb dropped on America, it would be a good thing!” (Okay, we didn’t actually see the Americans he was complaining about; but SOMEONE gave him this impression of us!)
In Munich, my friend went to an American Express office. A couple were there with their daughter complaining that there was gasp a TOWEL on the floor of their bathroom! (After spending nights in hostels, we couldn’t see what the big deal was.)
In Vienna, an American man was trying to get a first-class train ticket and wanted to travel with his dog (one of those little yapping things I generally don’t like… the dog, that is). The woman in the cage explained to him that animals could only be carried in second-class. That’s the rule. The man complained, “My dog is a prize winning (whatever it was). I ALWAYS go first-class, and my dog travels with me! I NEVER travel second class!” When approached to buy our tickets we told the poor woman, “We’re not all like that.”
But then there was Belgium. It’s almost the end of our journey. We have no money, we’re tired, I think we probably look a sight. An elderly man came up to us with an 8-year-old girl. He asked if we were American and we said we were. I practically cried, thanking “us” for liberating his country in WWII. He explained to his grand-daughter that Americans were good people.
And there we stood, bedraggled, looking like bums.
Well, anyway… We found that making an effort to speak the local language is usually rewarding. Even if you speak it poorly, you may get, “It’s okay. I speak English!” The important thing seems to be that you tried.
NightGirl, Where to begin?
To start with, let me make it clear that I generally like Americans: I read American books, watch American TV programmes and films and even post to American message boards. When I was at university, I had two or three American friends. Sadly, I think that one of the reasons that Americans are disliked is this dumb, parochial, narrow-minded, “we’re the best” attitude.
So who are the top five, and who’s keeping score?
Really? Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Sri Lanka, India, Pakistan, Japan, Malawi, Singapore, Malaysia, Mauritius, South Africa (until the new Constitution was introduced) and a number of other African countries, Trinidad and a number of other Carribean countries all have political systems based on the British model, and that is not an exhaustive list. Even the US Constitution is indirectly based on the British system—read the references to Montesquieu’s Spirit of Laws in the Federalist Papers (M. was French, but he was writing about the British Parliament).
Which country is the “Mother of Parliaments”? Which countries have based their political systems on the USA?
I won’t address the points about “socially … [and] … form of average living” as I think they’re pure speculation capable of neither verification nor falsification.
I’ve never seen a Kmart or a Walmart outside the USA. Any English person who told you that Pepsi, Coke and McDonald’s were native to England was an idiot. We do have them here, but everybody knows they’re American. McDonald’s, in particular, enjoys a relatively poor reputation and is a byword for bad food, as in “that restaurant was so bad, we might as well have eaten in McDonald’s”.
Many people in Europe (myself included) have enjoyed holidays in the USA and would like to return and I am sure that the converse is the case. I would put it no more strongly than that. It’s just nonsense to say that we all want to emigrate to the USA.
So am I. If you mean the suggestion that Americans are generally disliked, I think that is an exaggeration, as I have suggested earlier in this thread. The mutual antagonism between the English and French is a fine historical tradition. [TomH’s theory of international relations: Everybody hates the people next door]
The British National Health Service is free at the point of service to everybody irrespective of income. Illness, injury, pregnancy will cost you nothing. Education is free up to and including university. Don’t Americans complain about the cost of private health care? Don’t you complain about the cost of putting your children through college?
We also have a social security system which provides a basic level of income for the jobless, the chronically sick, etc.
Which they must have got from you, right? I mean, there aren’t any other countries where English is the official language, are there? It just developed in America after the Revolution.
You’ve answered your own (implied) question here. Western Europe doesn’t get much international aid, either.
Only since Brown v. Board of Education. They’re about the same as in any other liberal democracy, except you have the death penalty. And Rodney King. And O J Simpson. And the largest per capita prison population in the free world. And a politically-motivated campaign of harassment against your Head of State disguised as a legitimate legal process.
You don’t have anything like the restrictions on GM crops that most European countries do. And the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy does exactly what you describe. British farmers are going bankrupt because the market is flooded with cheap food.
That’s not entirely accurate, though Japan does have tough restrictions on foreign property ownership and citizenship and is unusual in that respect. No similar restrictions apply in any EU country.
I think this is a fair answer to the OP.
Sue, You’ve got a point, but most of the British people I know who have visited the US (including me) have been pleasantly surprised by the quality of service in shops, etc. We don’t like it any more than you do when staff are surly and unhelpful. We’re just too polite to complain 
Many, however, will claim that corn flakes are an English invention.
Ursa, You’re right. Many also think that Heinz and Ford are British brands.
McDonald’s is still fairly new here: the first branches outside London weren’t set up until the 1980s.
The TV adverts we get for Coke are, I believe, the American ones, and it trades on its American image.
But with older brands (I would guess that Kellogg’s has been trading here since the last war at least), there is a natural tendency to assume they’re native.
Spiny Norman: OK, turnaround is supposedly fair play: If I decided to visit US of A, which stupid european tourist attitudes should I try to stay clear of ?
Tough to say, since we have American tourists here too. They’re still more offensive.
Examples:
[ul][li]French tourists don’t come up to me, speak French, then when I indicate that I don’t understand, say it again slower and louder.[/li][li]I rarely see foreign tourists litter.[/li][li]If I’m trying to help them find an attraction, they have a handy map.[/ul][/li]
American tourists, OTOH:[list]
[li]Act like the rules don’t apply to them. Once I saw a high school group on the DC Metro. Their chaperone was standing up, feeding his face with some fast food. I came up to him and informed him there was no eating or drinking on Metro. Fortunately, he sheepishly put his food back in the bag. I’ve heard other stories where they keep on eating and/or get belligerent.[/li]
Also, wading through the decorative pools around The Mall. Geez, this isn’t Waterworld!
Or trying to climb Lincoln’s statue to sit in his lap.
[li]Litter, spit, put their gum on the underside of tables.[/li][li]Have geographic ignorance. Not just being lost; I still do that around here. But they presume things and/or perpetuate their ignorance on their children.[/li]
I remember hearing some high school girls’ disappointment that The Mall (in DC) was a large grassy, tree-lined area between the museums, US Capitol, and the Washington Monument. They were hoping for a shopping mall. sigh
[li]Historical info gets distorted like the geography too. E.g., George Washington built the White House; Arlington County, VA, was seized back from Washington, DC, during the Civil War (actually, it was give back 14 years earlier).[/li]------------------
Let the Truth of Love be lighted/ Let the Love of Truth shine clear. Sensibility/ Armed with sense and liberty
With the Heart and Mind united in a single/ Perfect/ Sphere. - Rush
Strange, many English pen pals I have also have mentioned Coke and Pepsi and American hamburger places in their correspondence and LIKE them, plus some have told me the differences between them and the ones in the States.
Pen pals in Germany have complained to me about their laws and services and have come to America and expressed a desire to move here and told me about a ‘lottery’ where America provides X number of free visas (?) internationally for people to get to move to the States with.
Friends of mine in Canada love the States because of the variety of the country, our way of life and standard of living.
Other friends of mine, Americans, having toured different countries, have pointed out that while we bitch about our laws and police, we are damn lucky we have them because in many places, things are much worse. (In Mexico the police are so corrupt that they solicit bribes on the street and forget about any civil rights. In France the police do NOT have to allow a person to know his rights before being arrested. In Turkey and several corresponding countries, our worst jails seem like luxury hotels. Plus in several countries, product liability does not exist.)
In South America, the drug cartels have such a tight control on the government that their illegal billions actually help the economy and not all that much is done to stop them. Plus, in several countries, you can get your ass beat by someone pissed off at you have little if any recourse.
I think it was Sentinel who pointed out, in some other post, how many countries consider human life cheaper than dirt and women as second class citizens with little if any rights. (Tell THAT to any chick here, then hurry up and guard your balls.)
From what I have read and seen, American aid has reached every corner of the globe in times of need, and several of those countries who willingly took our assistance have later turned on us with the hostility of mad dogs. (Several STILL get American food and emergency supplies and rant about us as being evil while they dine on our goods, use our medicines and spend our money.)
Few, if any countries have come to the aide of Americans when we have had national disasters.
Me, I’m an American. I was born here. No country is perfect but I consider us more perfect than all of the rest.
What? Me worry?’
There was a joke among parisiens while I was there: “how can you tell a couple is American?”
a: “You can hear them.”
People will always be less hostile when they are one on one. It is groups that people find easy to hate.
So why do they hate us as a group?
A: Jealousy.
My husband is Australian and he likes us! His view is that a lot of the overall “dislike” has more to do with “tall poppy syndrome” than anything else. He says in Australia, it’s a cultural thing that anyone who gets a little too big for their britches needs to be knocked down a few pegs. But, he says that all the Americans he’s met through his travels throughout the world have been genuinely nice people. He likes the overall “system” in the U.S., too, including our customer service!
It’s my personal opinion that some people genuinely don’t like us, some people really do like us (especially the ones who are appreciative of our tourist dollar), and a whole bunch of people like to play into the need of most Americans to be liked by everyone. It’s interesting that most Americans are very aware of the “fact” that nobody likes us and that we take the opportunity to either bash ourselves or try to justify why they should like us. Do the English/Japanese/German/etc. tourists who come to the U.S. care even a little, teeny bit if we “like” them? I doubt it. Why should they?
It’s not jealousy. I know that might be really hard to accept for some people, but it’s not jealousy.
I think part of it is the staggering ignorance of some Americans of anything outside the United States. One American asked me one time if there were any black people in Canada. One other was terrified when they found out there was a black family living a few doors down from me. Not that I’m saying that all Americans are racist, or that there are only racist in the States. We’re all pretty aware that no country has a monopoly on the assholes.
Your Levi’s aren’t ironed.
Uke
When I was in prison in Mexico they treated me REALLY bad! The guy said she was his sister, honest. I was acting in good faith and he was acting as a fiduciary for services rightly procured. Did the Mexicans buy it? No way!
They gave me refried beans to eat and water that made me poopy somthin’ awful!
I don’t hold it against them as a people but they keep saying, “Filthy Gringo, filthy Gringo” till I thought I was going mad!!!
I never travel anymore without Carl Maltin at my side. Don’t leave home without him!
please dont forget “over-weight”.
oh yeah…how did you figure that out? or are you just hoping?
yes, thats true. but more than that you copy yourselves more than anyone else. that is one reason so many hate america, but the stupid people that copy you just cant see that simply because they are stupid.
just thinking about it makes me want to puke! specially coke and mcd. its a nice idea, but the problem with it is that when making a mcd restaurant anywhere in the world it has got to be exacly like “this”, if you know what i mean. here in iceland they wanted to import the meat, cheese and bread…and possibly everything else too. truly a horrid thought.
did i mention stupid people before??
i will mention of course that there are exceptions, of course there are. if there were none there wouldnt be a problem. the world would have no problems if the case was like that. but america is the sickest nation in the world. just tell me why “god” should bless america?
bj0rn