Rethinking the ‘Ugly American’

Americans may not want to be so quick to sew those Canadian flags on their backpacks. Trying to avoid being the proverbial ugly American isn’t such an easy task. In fact, even attempting to do so can be “naïvely patronizing,” according to an interesting essay by Ann Hulbert in the New York Times magazine. “The pursuit of private diplomacy rests on the opposite innocent illusion: just tone down crass Americans’ noisy cultural differences from others, and political and economic harmony can follow,” she writes. “But what if Americans have no monopoly on brashness and don’t really rate any longer as the overweening cultural trendsetters our demonizers, and we, reflexively assume?”

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