Something you may have missed

I know that I did until the wife recorded it on the DVR.

The show is called The Anti-Americans and it aired this last week on PBS.

Wow. Fascinating stuff. They go to France, the UK and Poland and talk to regular citizens there about their attitudes on America and Americans.

Eye-opening to say the least.

My impression, they love us. They’re always thinking of us and comparing themselves to us, and that is about the only impression I can glean from a person or persons who obsess upon you.

As one of the persons from Poland being interviewed stated, being anti-American is a safe attitude to have. America is not going to attack you because you say nasty things about them. He contrasts it to being in Poland in 1955 and speaking out with anti-Soviet rhetoric. That was not a safe attitude to have.

This same man, later in the show, states that while he does love America, he wishes that Poland weren’t treated like an abused wife by the US Government. This statement almost brought him to tears and it was at the end of a rant about how difficult it is to get a visa to come to the US.

I could go on and on relating the different people and their statements, from the French school children who were asked to draw the first things they thought of when they thought about America, and they drew Bush & Oil, McDonalds and guns (no, the French children didn’t get suspended from school for drawing a gun like American schoolchildren do), to the Polish Country Singer who looks more like a cowboy than half the C/W music superstars these days.

But I would much rather just send you to these links, where most of the segments of the show have been loaded into YouTube bits.

I’d start with this one, the Polish taxi drivers.

Then go watch this one, an upper-middle class British dinner party attended by intellectuals with an excellent rebuttal at the end by another Brit with the best analogy I’ve heard in a long time.

Then just hit this link and start watching the rest.