单选题
Quick quiz: Who has a more vitriolic relationship
with the U.S.? The French or the British. If you guessed the French, consider
this: Paris newspaper polls show that 72 percent of the French hold a favorable
impression of the United States. Yet U.K. polls over the past decade show a
lower percentage of the British have a favorable impression of the United
States. Britain's highbrow newspaper, The Guardian,
sets the U.K.'s intellectual tone. On any given day you can easily read a
handful of stories sniping at the U.S. and things American. The BBC's Radio 4,
which is a domestic news and talk radio station, regularly laments Britain's
social warts and follows them up with something that has become the national
mantra, "Well, at least we're not as bad as the Americans."
This isn't a new trend: British abhorrence of America antedates George W. Bush
and the invasion of Iraq. On 9/11 as the second plane was slamming into the
World Trade Center towers my wife was on the phone with an English friend of
many years. In the background she heard her friend's teenage son shout in front
of the TV, "Yeah! The Americans are finally getting theirs." The animosity may
be unfathomable to those raised to think of Britain as "the mother country" for
whom we fought two world wars and with whom we won the cold war.
So what's it all about? I often asked that during the
years I lived in London. One of the best answers came from an Englishwoman with
whom I shared a table for coffee. She said, "It's because we used to be big and
important and we aren't any more. Now it's America that's big and important and
we can never forgive you for that." A detestation of things American has become
as dependable as the tides on the Thames rising and falling four times a day. It
feeds a flagging British sense of national self-importance. A
new book documenting the virulence of more than 30 years of corrosive British
animosity reveals how deeply rooted it has become in the U.K.'s national psyche.
"[T] here is no reasoning with people who have come to believe America is now a
'police state' and the USA is a 'disgrace across most of the world'," writes
Carol Gould, an American expatriate novelist and journalist, in her book
Don't Tread on Me. A brief experience shortly after
George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq illustrates that. An American I know was
speaking on the street in London one morning. Upon hearing his accent, a British
man yelled, "Take your tanks and bombers and go back to America." Then the
British thug punched him repeatedly. No wonder other American friends of mine
took to telling locals they were from Canada. The local police recommended
prosecution. But upon learning the victim was an American, crown prosecutors
dropped the case even though the perpetrator had a history of assaulting
foreigners. The examples of this bitterness continue:
I recall my wife and I having coffee with a member of our church. The
woman, who worked at Buckingham Palace, launched a conversation with, "Have you
heard the latest dumb American joke?" which incidentally turned out to be a
racial slur against blacks. It's common to hear Brits routinely dismiss
Americans as racists (even with an African-American president), religious nuts,
global polluters, warmongers, cultural philistines, and as intellectual
Untermenschen. The United Kingdom's counterintelligence and
security agency has identified some 5,000 Muslim extremists in the U.K. but not
even they are denounced with the venom directed at Americans. A British office
manager at CNN once informed me that any English high school diploma was equal
to an American university degree. This predilection for seeing evil in all
things American defies intellect and reason. By themselves, these instances
might be able to be brushed off, but combined they amount to British
bigotry. Oscar Wilde once wrote, "The English mind is always in
a rage." But the energy required to maintain that British rage might be better
channeled into paring back what The Economist (a British news magazine)
calls "an overreaching, and inefficient state with unaffordable aspirations
around the world." The biggest problem is that, as with all hatred, it tends to
be self-destructive. The danger is that as such, it perverts future
generations. The U.K. public's animosity doesn't hurt the
United States if Americans don't react in kind. This bigotry does hurt the
United Kingdom, however, because there is something sad about a society that
must denigrate and malign others to feed its own self-esteem. What Britain needs
to understand is that this ill will has poisoned the enormous reservoir of good
will Britain used to enjoy in America. And unless the British tweak their
attitude, they stand to become increasingly irrelevant to the American
people.
单选题
Which of the following is NOT the example given by the author to show
the British abhorrence of America?
A. A boy shouted "The Americans are finally getting theirs" when watching TV
on 9/11.
B. A woman working at Buckingham Palace told an American joke against
blacks.
C. An American speaking on a London street was punched and no prosecution
followed.
D. An English author once wrote, "The English mind is always in a
rage."