~a column by Colleen O’Brien
I traveled recently to foreign ports in the North Atlantic. Among a dozen or so of these exotic (to me) places, I visited Qaqortoq, Greenland; Reykjavik, Iceland; Eidfjord, Norway, so I was talking to many people who were not Americans in between practicing pronunciation of nearly unpronounceable names of towns.
It was summer, and all of the ports of the North Atlantic were full of college kids backpacking through maritime Canada, Greenland, Iceland and of course Europe. From all over the globe came families of tourists. There were bicycles everyplace, trains and trolleys in the cities and everyone outdoors sitting at sidewalk bars and cafes or walking along quays and boardwalks till late at night, for the sun barely set, so far north were we.
After my first interesting political conversation with a young fellow on a park bench in Sidney, Nova Scotia, I was eager to engage other strangers on the political wavelength. I visited with clerks in stores and bartenders in pubs as well as other tourists not from the States. I usually chose folks upwards of 25 or so, the college kids too involved with one another and the families too harried with their children. After the usual — “Where are you from?” — I asked, “Do you talk politics?” And to a person, they said, “Yes!” Usually with the exclamation point.
Folks abroad know all about us, often more than we know about ourselves. I was aware of this from prior travels, this Ruler-of-the-World syndrome — in the days of the far-flung Roman Empire, the conquered knew all about Rome, and Rome knew as little as they could get away with about the conquered. It hasn’t changed. The United States is the most powerful country on the planet; the world watches all we do; in general, we’re a tad provincial, interested more in ourselves than others.
The answer from the first guy I asked “Do you talk politics?” turned out to be my catalyst to continue asking the question, for after he said “Yes!” he said, “What are you Americans doing?”
“What do you mean?” I asked him, and he gave me the long answer. “I’m Serbian, and we’re still having problems because we were under the Soviet Union for decades. I was just out of college when you elected a black man, and everybody around me was happy about it. We didn’t think it would happen. Now here I am almost 30, and you want to elect someone who’s angry and who lies. We’ve had a lot of him, and we don’t think you know what you’re doing because it looks like you want him.”
This seemed a radical statement to me — “a lot of him“? “What do you mean you’ve had ‘a lot of him?” I didn’t think our one candidate had been to Europe, let alone to Serba.
My Serbian acquaintance instantly made me aware of my dimness with his stern look before he said, “We’ve had a lot of pissed-off people like him [he accentuated these two words] leading us.”
“Oh.”
Another fellow, mid-sixties-aged Londoner traveling in Iceland with his brother from Australia asked me, “Why doesn’t everybody want Hillary?”
I said something about the press not liking her and that she’s a woman, and he said, “But she’s smart and she knows what she’s doing and she’s got the most experience. Everybody gets bad press.” That made me laugh, but later, when I was reading my notes, I decided maybe Americans are just naïve; or uninformed despite the endless news.
The next encounter was on Isle of Man. A couple was walking slowly along the boardwalk gardens in Douglas, as was I. I asked them where they were from — Chester, England, the female; and Bermuda — the male — visiting the island for the weekend with friends. They knew I was from America . . . something to do with “big healthy teeth and smiling,” she said. He was a little noncommital at first, but she was eager to talk about politics because she likes her new prime minister, Theresa May. So off we galloped to the political discussion. “She’s interested in us, the bottom 90 percent of Brits. Do you like her?” she asked me. “So far, from what I’ve read, “I said. “Early days yet.” The guy didn’t know why May appointed Boris Johnson, also known as “BoJo,” as Foreign Secretary. Bojo’s bombast reminded him of one of our candidates, whom he politely scorned: “What are you going to do?” he asked with consternation.
“Vote,” I said. They both smiled, wished me well and walked on.
I got to talking to two young adults, maybe 25 or 30 years old, from Switzerland sitting beside me in a restaurant in Amsterdam, who jumped in before I had a chance to begin the political quiz. They asked me, “Are you a Trump fan?” I told them, “I’m one of the infamous far left radical feminists, so that would be unlikely.”
We spent half an hour trading Trump quotes. They were well-read. Or well TV’d. They hadn’t missed a thing the now famously mad media’s been writing for a year.
I talked to other people but neglected to write it all down, so most of it has leaked through the great sieve that is my brain. But just to add: On the ship, I quit asking the question soon into the trip because of too much vitriol, both against Hillary and against Trump, from people I thought that because of their vast travel experience, which never failed to get dropped into any conversation, would be worldly, aware of differences and of history. The word is that travel broadens. Mark Twain, a great traveler (he wrote Travels Abroad and A Tramp Abroad), said, “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness.”
Ain’t true, McGee.
