Right Commentary, September 16, 2008
I hate snotty Europeans. They show up in America’s major cities and bring with them not only their hatred of President George W. Bush, the Iraq war and U.S. foreign policy, but also their disdain for Americans and American culture in general.
More often than not, these snotty Europeans display their disdain toward America openly, with the ignorance of people who do not fully understand their subject matter and the ill manners of a guest telling his host at a cocktail party that his wife is ugly.
On a slightly humid summer night in Washington, DC, I attended a farewell party for a friend who worked for a prominent international organization. The crowd drew heavily from this international organization and hailed from all over the world, including from countries whose names I had previously never pronounced and whose geopolitical significance I did not care to remember. But I put on a smile and tried to be friendly.
Someone introduced me to a young man from Switzerland who had moved to the United States only some nine months ago. Doing what people do at parties, I made small talk. I inquired about how he was enjoying himself in this country. He said things were going pretty well but emphasized that he was lucky to be in Washington, DC. I assumed that like most young people, he merely enjoyed city life (which, by the way, DC offers only in pitiful fashion). As it turned out, the Swiss believed that the rest of America, the big swaths between the two coasts (i.e., the heartland), would not be a welcoming place for him.
“Why not?” I demanded. By now, my party smile had come unscrewed. This European was killing my buzz and worse yet, he was beginning to piss me off.
“Because the people in those places are not that open-minded and would not be very welcoming of foreigners,” he declared. The two or three other European guests who were part of this conversation nodded instinctively and knowingly.
“In what ways are they not open-minded?” I persisted, my voice slightly raised from clear annoyance. He paused. By now his party smile had come unscrewed as well.
“You cannot possibly tell me that people in Kansas City would be just as open-minded as the people in Washington, DC or New York?”
Yes, I am telling you exactly that, I informed him, restraining myself from including any profanity in my response. “They may be less cosmopolitan but they are certainly not less open-minded.”
The bystanders of this conversation had stopped nodding knowingly and were beginning to look a bit uncomfortable. Comments that berate Americans, often uttered by snotty Europeans, were not supposed to elicit a response, at least not from Americans who sip wine in the company of international types bent on saving the world.
The Swiss began to look rather annoyed. You can’t be serious, he said. All these people in places like Kansas City don’t know anything about the world; they dislike Europe and believe everything that the Fox News Channel tells them.
“No, Americans are warm and they are kind from all over the country,” I glared at him. “Just because they don’t know where you come from does not mean that they will refuse to get to know you.”
“Besides,” I added, for special effect, “95 percent of the nasty things that Fox News says about Europe are true and I’m already being quite charitable.”
The special effects worked. The conversation ended and the Swiss walked away to find more polite and enlightened company. I had obviously succeeded in killing his buzz too.
About a year later, I remembered this exchange when at a hip restaurant on New York’s Lower East Side, two effeminate Frenchmen loudly and proudly declared their contempt for Americans and American culture to me, an American they had just met.
It was rude, as it always is, and the two Frenchmen were disgusting, as snotty Europeans often are. One would expect such Europeans, often well paid and well educated, to behave more respectfully toward their host country. Unfortunately, many of them do not.
Perhaps when Barack Obama becomes President, Americans can all become citizens of the world and eagerly nod at European insults toward our fellow countrymen. Until then, those of us who are far less “open-minded” will continue watching the Fox News Channel and remain citizens of just the United States.
Ying Ma 
I find it strange that you would think the way you do, professing to be worldly wise. In city colleges and in universities, where my children have taken classes – they have told me how various professors make it clear that midwest usa is white backwards christian racist/ bigoted and so on – of course being in the most progressive of all cities – san francisco – i am not surprised at the vehemence of progressives – especially those of hispanic/latino backgrounds or gay white males.
But the teachers do not stop there – they continue on and state in a nuanced way that whites are and will always be a privileged until society understands that changes are necessary. The meaning is clear to my eldest son, that whites will or should be hired last if at all, especially if work can be done by any immigrant or minority.
As for those europeans – the french are voracious criticizers of own government. it is a requirement of being french – you have not been to that country – so you find it distasteful.
Why are a few supposed to represent the all – europe is to disappear eventually others move in and procreate.
Perhaps we chinese should have our children mix more with others rather then look down on all none chinese. We know full well how our group looks at others and then cry foul. Our businesses do well on the backs of others immigrants and pay poorly for work done.
I am mixed of straits chinese and malay ancestry. Growing up in malaysia I understand racism and bigotry yet have close friends/ties that are malay and chinese.
I have experienced bigotry from mainland chinesr. May I say that my languages include beijing style mandarin as well as various dialects plus 2 european languages not including english.
Living in usa I think that there should be concern of violence tending from people coming from particular neighbourhoods.
Why not – it would be foolish to not be aware of ones surrounding.
You don’t seem to understand that most professors in the US are radicalized, out of touch propagandists with vehemently anti American, leftist views who want to indoctrinate, not educate.
Of course he doesn’t understand it, because it’s a stereotype generated by the right wing pundits who do your thinking for you. And since he doesn’t live in the Fantasy Land of Rush Limbaugh’s imagination (like you do), he clearly would be incapable of understanding that particular delusion.
Xen Pan, I couldn’t have said it better myself.
I have had two Swiss boyfriends, both of whom were ignorant, close-minded and racists. I am half-Jewish and they would always call me a dirty Jew. They were abusive and nasty. Next time you run into this Swiss idiot, you ask him why his people are a bunch of nasty, close-minded anti-Semites?
Hi Ying Ma,
I found your blog post while looking up on “shitty Europeans”. I can’t agree more with your observations! Every word of it. Right now, I’m in the unenviable position like you of having to deal with a big group of Europeans, from both Western and Eastern Europe who moved to the midwest for a short stint on a diplomacy program.
They are a bunch of rude, lazy, ignorant, snobbish and condescending fools, and they are all lazy socialists on welfare. They hold preconceived notions about not just Americans in certain regions of the country, but of Asian people as well! I’ll cut to the chase about their perceptions of Asians. They think they are better than Asians.
I’m of Chinese descent living in the midwest and I love it. It’s also a big myth that people in the midwest are not aware of Europe or Asia. Many white Americans here visited Europe, many did so by their late 20s, mostly by their 30s. I know so because they are my friends! What right do these foreigners and sometimes, Americans from other parts of the country have to form such a strong opinion about a region of Americans when they have not even visited the region, let alone live there?! I know this because when I speak to Americans from other parts of the country on my travels abroad, they professed that they had not visited the midwest. But in my experience, Americans who hold such repugnant prejudice against any region of the country are extremely rare. The rare ones who do only dare profess their prejudice online under anonymous nicknames. Americans have also gone through the schooling system enough to know the fundamentals about each region, and know of the key cities in the midwest. There’s a long list of Fortune 500 American companies based in the midwest cities, and were started here. Not too long ago, the heart of the American automobile behemoth is in the Midwest.
Frankly, I am surprised that dirty Swiss you met even heard of Kansas City. All the Europeans I’ve met in the midwest have never travelled to Asia, and this was their first time to the USA. Bunch of frogs in the well who do not know how laughable they are while they go on with their lives believing they are better than others. It’s no wonder their economies have all failed and the continent is a wasteland of the past, still living in delusions from the past.
I have also observed it’s almost always the non-Americans, FOREIGNERS, in this land who make derisive remarks about the South and the Midwest. I came across a Brazilian brown skinned bitch working in NYC, who used the words “the bible belt or some shit in the Midwest”. You foreigners who cannot show respect to your host country when you are there, best to go home and be sure to never step back on this land.
Xen Pan, you’re a FOREIGNER living in the USA. What right do you have to tell an American who knows other regions of her country better than you do, that she should not have defended her country? If you foreigners cannot restrain your mouths and show respect to your host, as Ying Ma eloquently put it, you should go back to Malaysia.
Your rant on Chinese mixing with non-Chinese is out of point. We (Ying Ma, you, I) are exactly of Chinese ancestry and on a daily basis, we are mixing with predominantly non-Chinese! We or our parents, or our parents’ parents’ have the decision to uproot themselves to a foreign land that is populated mainly by an ethnicity other than our own. So what are you going on about us Chinese needing to mix more with non Chinese? Are you high?
“Bunch of frogs in the well who do not know how laughable they are while they go on with their lives believing they are better than others.”
exactly, that’s just how it is.
And let me tell you Xen Pan similarly, as with the Europeans (who have hardly left Europe) come out from your west-coast well and visit the other regions of the United States before you make these snap judgments on hundreds of millions of people based on third-hand information from a “homosexual San Francisco progressive” professors, especially when you have the gall to make these statements as a foreigner.
The midwestern Americans are nicer, warmer, friendlier and more genuine than Americans I’ve met anywhere else. The Americans in the east coast are nice as well. I have had experience with Americans from all regions and can say I am assessing from a credible breadth. The Southern Americans are warm and effusive, as Americans like Ying Ma would have heard about, the famed Southern Hospitality, Midwestern Americans are nice in a more genuine, subdued and less obtrusive way. While Southerners are mainly evangelical protestants, midwestern Americans are mainly catholic, with a small portion of presbyterian and do not talk about their faith to outsiders.
I look undoubtedly 100% Chinese, and more than once, when I stopped my car by the side of the road in suburbs, midwestern white Americans not only stopped to ask me if I need help, one even came out of his car, got into mine and helped me inspect it. Another time the battery of my car drained because I left a headlight on. A white worker in a gas station walked over 400 feet with his jumper cables to assist me. He is your regular blue-collar hardworking white midwestern American in his 50s.
After my car started successfully, he left and I ran up to him and insisted on buying him lunch because I was so thankful. He replied: “What? No need. I just want to help you. I don’t need a lunch to help people!”
The man who helped me has the exact racial, geographical, social, religious demographic that gets derided for no good reason at all on a daily basis by people like your son’s professors and yourself. People who have never even been to the midwest or the south.
You clearly have not lived in the US for a long time. I can tell easily, from your views and the way they were formed – hearsay from third-hand sources, your scope of exposure regionally, your talk about your past in Asia.
I have lived in Southeast Asia, have traveled to extensively to key East Asian cities populated by the oriental race, South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, China, HK, southeast asian countries from Vietnam, Cambodia, all the ASEAN countries including Malaysia, Thailand, Singapore. I have traveled to 10 European countries and lived in two regions in the US, and traveled to all four regions of the United States. Yes we have four geographical regions in the USA, which are further sub-divided into eight. I am certain of the breadth of the sample of my exposure on which I am assessing my experience of Midwestern Americans.
As a resident alien of Chinese descent living in the US, you should be ashamed of yourself. You are also embarrassing all Chinese people in the US.
awesome…100 percent agree I wish I had you with me at parties here in Germany…d
Oh build a bridge and don’t make conversation with Europeans you fickle idiot . All that ranting from the view of a stranger and you care why ? . You cant expect everyone to like your country . I don’t care who likes or dislikes where come from . but then again I have a life and base my thoughts on bettering my life instead of worrying what outsiders think of my country . Some people like America some people don’t same with every country . We just don’t carry the view that it is some sort of dreamland utopia like Americans do . Most rational people don’t think of there country that way . They see it as something that representing them . And your anti European rant says a lot about you ..
As does your bad English. Thank you for the entertainment.
Ur reply …. Rocks!!!!
U fucking asshole why don’t u take ur godly europe and shove it up ur ass I’m a Pakistani and honestly Americans are way more hospitable and kind as compared to anal Euros boy id like to pound that your mamas ass
As a European I entirely agree with you! Every word of your text is true! Europeans often are lazy, entitled, racist and xenophobic. I have never been treated worse than in Europe, despite the fact this is my motherland. Very different from the way I was treated in America, where the only rude person I encountered was a customs officer at one of the major airports. Let’s not even go into the issue of how western Europeans treat eastern Europeans, OMG, you have never ever seen such snottiness.
I gather you’re asian? I guess you like all kinds of insults, like being called s**-e**d c***? Because out there in Midwest, South and some parts of the West you could experience than, plus stones being thrown at you and people pointing fingers at you (literally). I had known people to experience that. You’re a little naive thing that haven’t been around much, ain’t you?
PS: by the way, for those little kids who haven’t been around much and base their opinions on one ride through the US…I’m sorry for you, as your minds are products of carefully crafted propaganda. I had known of several people of East Indian descent being shot to death at their place of work in US South a few years ago, only because they looked like “arabs”. I wish for all of you, clueless, brainwashed city slickers to end up living in the South–this would teach you a little lesson. For those who have blank spaces instead of brains: certain states have interracial marriage legalized only recently. And god help you if you’re a part of interracial couple out in some of these place–the things you’ll get to hear… 🙂
Europeans are immensely insecure about not having a realistic voice in the modern world,antiquity is “their cup of tea”(wooden ships,and poor hygiene). perceived style,and a good dining options are definitely not good enough.
You’re absolutely right. I’m Indian (south asia) and I’ve found mid-western Americans and people from the “heartland”, (Colorado, Ohio, Kansas) to be some of the nicest people I’ve ever met. Can’t say the same for most Europeans, who generally have a superiority complex, although I have met some enlightened Europeans too. If I had to live in the middle of America or the middle of Europe, I’d pick America in an instant.
Fox news is also much more true and freedom loving compared to BBC, CNN and other leftist propaganda outlets.