GIVE ME A BREAK:I'M GOING THROUGH an identity crisis. I'd become rather used to being an Ugly American. You know the type – neurotic and chronically frustrated, like self-absorbed Cristina and dull Connecticut wife-in-waiting Vicky in Vicky Cristina Barcelona, both determined to experience the Latin romance sex language in Europe by the age of 30, while their thick and rich male khaki and Lacoste compatriots treat Spain like an exotic golf course with great wine and tapas, writes KATE HOLMQUIST.
These Woody Allen clones are mild examples. Wikipedia says that Ugly American is an epithet used to refer to perceptions of loud, arrogant, demeaning, thoughtless and ethnocentric behaviour of US citizens mainly abroad but also at home, and that while the term is usually associated with or applied to travellers and tourists, it also applies to US corporate businesses in the international arena. The Bush presidency isn’t mentioned, rather diplomatically, but his reign is what made us Americans living in Europe truly ugly in the eyes of our European peers.
And yet suddenly, like Javier dazzled by uptight Victorian Vicky, all that has been swept away by the Obama presidency. Europeans love us. We’ve become beautiful Americans – saviours of the Western economy. When people hear my American accent (which I haven’t lost in 25 years of living here), they look at me hopefully and ask if I think Obama will be able to turn things around.
The hunger for leadership in Ireland has been so long neglected that the Irish are looking to Obama as if he’s not just America’s, but also our president.
Our Tánaiste lost what credibility she had left when she suggested over a month ago that Obama would turn the US economy around and that we only had to wait patiently to benefit. Last week, our Taoiseach handed a crystal vessel of the once-lucky Shamrock out to Obama like a supplicant with a begging bowl.
In the US, the Irish are now perceived as the ugly ones – digging themselves deeper into trouble because our so-called leaders seem incapable of making decisions in face of a powerful economic elite. Meanwhile, Obama has capped bankers’ salaries and also said that he’ll make decisions and take responsibility for the outcome. The AIG scandal in the US has dented his popularity slightly, but at least there they have a clear-cut scandal. Here we’re experiencing a chronic inability to take responsibility, with the result that the elite are dashing around making their own arrangements, seemingly immune from public judgment.
Where else have we to turn but the US? We’re not particularly interested in leadership from Europe. We don’t want “the Germans” making our decisions for us and we rejected Lisbon. In the Berlin vs Boston debate, we’re far more likely to identify with Boston, or Chicago since that’s where Obama’s loyalties lie.
So here’s my solution: a campaign to make Ireland the 51st US state. We’d have a leader we believe in, we’d have no more money wasted on too many public representatives, since as a US state with a tiny population we’d have a senator and a representative and a Governor and that would be about it. Think of the savings! And being Irish, we’d punch above our weight in Congress and the House of Representatives.
Best of all, we’d all be US citizens, so that the emigrants who have been unable to come home since the last recession, will be able to return here with their money and ingenuity, while those of us here will be able to work in the US without fear of losing our relationships with families and communities in Ireland. Think of all the Irish in the US close to retirement who might like to come home to live, to buy houses and frequent the dying pubs.
While they return here, we could send our young over there for education and jobs, since third level education here will soon be unaffordable for many and in the US at least they have a strong scholarship and student loan system.
The Irish diaspora, young and old, would become a truly powerful lobby – no longer a diaspora but a focused power. And we could use some old-fashioned American positivity right now, because it’s the Irish, not the Americans, who now appear neurotic and self-absorbed.
This crisis has been going on since September and still nothing effective has been done. There’s infighting amongst the political and economic elite and an attitude that the very rich have a right to protect their own turf. Fly over Ireland and you see fields separated by walls. Fly over the US or Scandinavia and you see large tracts of land where people don’t need walls. Our stone walls say a lot, I think.
The landlords who once took away our little cottages and stone walls, are ready to take our homes away now. The elite don’t seem to give a damn about the consequences.We all feel resentment about this and all we have at the moment to make us feel proud to be Irish is sport, when we need valid leadership, ideals and self-belief.
Meanwhile, I don’t know if the Obama factor will last the year, so I think I’ll just enjoy being a beautiful American for a little while longer.
kholmquist@irishtimes.com
