It was midday just before Easter in Paris. My niece and I walked past the city’s famous opera house, where tourists were relaxing on the wide steps. French soldiers armed with assault rifles strolled around, a comforting sight given the warnings about Iran-backed sleeper cells and potential retaliatory attacks. A busker with a guitar and a microphone entertained the crowd with a Coldplay cover.
Between songs, he asked, “Anyone here speak English?” Unbelievably, not a single hand went up.
The busker shrugged, turned both thumbs down in the universal gesture of disapproval, and said, “America, eh?” I felt him.
A couple of days after I got home, I saw a social media post that reminded me of that moment. “Honestly,” wrote @_thatambitiousgirl, “I don’t know how anyone could even feel comfortable traveling as an American outside of the U.S. right now.”
Anti-American sentiment is on the rise, and it sucks being from a country whose presidents do things like threaten to end a “whole civilization,” invade Middle Eastern countries based on lies about weapons of mass destruction, or insert themselves into pointless conflicts in faraway lands. In college, I had friends who sewed Canadian flags onto their backpacks because they didn’t want to be associated with America’s misadventures in Southeast Asia.
Polls show that half of Europeans view President Trump, who has threatened to withdraw from NATO, as an enemy rather than an ally. He has managed the neat trick of telling our allies they are useless while castigating them for not rushing to help with his poorly planned war on Iran. “This is not our war,” the German defense minister said pointedly last month. “We have not started it.”
Quite simply, with the assent of the Republican Party, Trump is taking a wrecking ball to the world order as we’ve known it in our lifetimes, while also managing to make life harder for Americans at home.
“We’re worse off in every way, and officially a global pariah,” said the New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie on Facebook this week. “Awesome. Love that.”
Anyway, I was glad to see that someone I know, the novelist Erin Zhurkin, responded thoughtfully to @_that ambitiousgirl’s Instagram post.
“Been an American abroad for 20 years now,” wrote Zhurkin, whose Russian-born American husband is an executive with Renault. “Six countries so far. People are in general curious and grateful that I can see my country from all sides….I try to represent the heart of the US, which I believe is about being open to all people and finding commonalities rather than differences.”
This, truly, is the heart of the matter.
In the fall of 1967, my family moved from Northridge to France, where my father had a year-long Fulbright teaching scholarship at the University of Pau. Before we got on the airplane, my mother sat the four of her rambunctious kids down.
“It’s very important that you not be ‘Ugly Americans,’ ” she told us. We were too young to have read the classic 1958 novel she was referring to, but we understood that we were to be curious and respectful and maybe not yell, as we unfortunately did, “Yuck, this is NOT a hot dog,” during our first meal in Paris.
One winter evening in Pau, my parents took us to an anti-war demonstration, as they had done many times in Los Angeles. The locals we marched with were chanting something we couldn’t quite make out. It sounded to our American ears like “Yohn-kee go ohm.” We figured it out pretty quickly, and frankly, it was unsettling.
Zhurkin had a similar experience in Moscow, in the early 1990s, at a kiosk near Red Square. “An older Russian lady looked at me, and in a thick Russian accent said, ‘Yankee, go home,’ ” Zhurkin told me by phone from Ljubljana, Slovenia, where she and her family had moved in September from Seoul. “It opened up this whole feeling inside of me that there is something about my country that may not be as wonderful as it seems. It was a huge, perspective-breaking moment for me.”
Years later, Zhurkin was living in Paris. Trump had just been elected to his first term.
“I could not get into a taxi without someone asking me why I would let this happen, as if it was all me,” Zhurkin said. “They’d say, ‘I can’t believe you Americans are so stupide.’ I was like, ‘Look, I didn’t vote for him.’” Still, she said, “I feel like I am apologizing all the time.”
By the time Joe Biden was elected in 2020, Zhurkin said, her family had moved to Ireland, where the vibe was much more “Thank God you guys got your act together.”
Maybe in the not-too-distant future, we will again. And then we can start to put this long national nightmare behind us.
Bluesky: @rabcarian
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