Starbucks and America, Inc.
WHY DOES EVERYBODY SUDDENLY HATE AMERICA?
America -- the markdown sales begin......
telegraph.co.uk
Why does everybody suddenly hate America?
By Alice Thompson
(Filed: 05/07/2002)
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It started at the Gap Kids' sale. The prices of dozens of pairs of dungarees and jumpers had been slashed from £25 to £8. At first, I was suspicious. Why had no other parent bought them? They weren't fluorescent orange. Then I saw it - they had the Stars and Stripes embroidered on them.
No problem, I decided: I'll just unpick the flags. But as I began to hack away at them yesterday morning, I started to wonder. Why are parents now happy to let their children's faces be painted with the St George's Cross, but shun anything that shouts "America"? It was Independence Day yesterday - the United States was on high alert after September 11. Yet in the 10 months since the terrible salami-slicing of the World Trade Centre, we have become increasingly anti-American.
A book published yesterday is called Why Do People Hate America?.
amazon.co.uk
Can you imagine a book called Why Do People Hate Arabs? or Why Do People Hate Jews? The author, Ziauddin Sardor, says we should be disgusted by this avaricious country, which spends enough on pet food alone to meet the health and nutrition requirements for the world's poor.
British tabloid newspapers can be equally anti-American. The Daily Mirror called on its readers to "Mourn on the 4th of July - for the victims of George W Bush and his bid to control the world".
Our cousins across the Atlantic are accused of biting into our literary prizes with their perfect teeth. We're terrified they'll win. They're blamed for giving us sex in the city by exporting lap-dancers. Even their cowboys are no longer worthy - look at the head of WorldCom with his jeans, John Wayne boots and £2.5 billion accounting hole. All the faults of the Western world are blamed on this breed suckled on Big Macs.
Martha Stewart, America's mummy, has been pilloried in Europe because she may have slipped a small pinch of insider trading into her recipes. At least Nigella Lawson's builders only defrosted a seminal piece of Britart, by unplugging a blood sculpture in her kitchen, we say smugly.
The American journalist Joe Klein has been touring Europe and writing his diary in the Guardian. He was shocked by the anti-Americanism of Gap-wearing children on the Continent. Yet most writers in the same newspaper have been crowing at the "demise of Anglo-Saxon capitalism". That something is rotten at the heart of corporate America has been discussed by five different writers in a week.
Americans can't win. They're hated by Jean-Marie Le Pen as well as bourgeois Parisian men who swing their handbags at them. Brussels technocrats, led by Chris Patten, sneer at them over their moules and superior frites. The only thing the European Union agrees on these days is its dislike of America.
A friend who owns 10 pairs of Nikes summed it up: "They're obese, their food is obese, their ideas are obese, they're suffocating us with their huge bottoms." Yesterday, a banking friend, ordering a Starbucks Frappuccino and blueberry muffin, agreed: "They're too dim and introverted even to understand football. I couldn't get the World Cup on any channel when I was over there."
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