Americans living in Europe must feel so grateful after each presidential election that another four years have to pass before the next one; another four years before the festival of banality, ignorance, arrogance and presumptuousness resumes; another four years before they once again swallow their pride, and their tongues, and pretend to be Canadian.
Yes indeed, it must be intolerable for Americans to have to endure the banality, ignorance, arrogance and presumptuousness of Europeans discussing the US. Take the most intellectually challenged, thoroughly unlettered cis-Caucasian cretin with no opinion about the next village, never mind the next province; yet this dolt, who has to think hard to remember his middle name, is unshakeably sure of his knowledge of America, its many failings, and how to solve them.
Glaze over
US diplomats are probably trained to let their eyes glaze over, arranging their features in a general facsimile of a smile, while some European to whom they have just been introduced asks them why the US is so racist, its health service is so backward, the gulf between the poor and the rich so large, and why US presidential candidates always sound as they're competing for the votes of a Montessori class with hearing difficulties.
The truths about the US are irrelevant. Much more important are the truths about ourselves. Do we accost other foreigners about their nations' delinquencies? Quite the reverse. We tell the French, for example, how much we love their country, without succumbing to the mischievous urge to ask them about their heartfelt collaboration with the Nazis during the war. We normally quell our urge to question Spaniards about the virtual extermination of the sub-isthmian Indians. Who would be rude enough to ask the British about the opium wars? And surely nobody would be rude enough to ask the Germans about whatever it is in their history which might be embarrassing - though fortunately, nothing immediately comes to mind.
Americans are spared these courtesies. You're American? How interesting. Tell me, how can you Americans defend the genocide of your indigenous peoples, with their marvellous culture - so peaceful, so atone with the environment? And how come your supposedly civilised founding fathers could have justified slavery? And how is it that the US police are so racist? And as for your politicians, words fail me. Have I what? Have I ever been in the US? Of course I have. I was on a sun holiday in Florida once, and I've seen a lot of American films and television. I know all about the US and its problems - and boy, have you got some problems. . .
Go to the US, and people there won't insolently ask you about what we did to the firbolgs, or demand to know whether it was true that by Irish law you could be imprisoned for buying and selling condoms, and was it really possible that Playboy had been banned for all time in the Republic? Such impertinences simply won't happen. Americans might, however, just compliment you on the elegance of our capital: yes indeedy, Edinborrow is a real purty city. . .
German and English
Look! That's it precisely! Would I make fun of German knowledge of Ireland - ve know vere Galvay is: ze first parachute army vos going to land zere in nineteen hunderd und forty vun - or of English ignorance - is the Falls Road in north Cork or south? Never! Yet there I go, suggesting that the Americans know nothing about that place they call abroad, and doing so in that execrable imitation of an American accent which so many non-Americans think sounds like the real thing.
That's what life's like for an American at any time; yet that ordeal must pale into a very wan insignificance indeed when the US presidential election heaves into view. Every pot-boy in every public bar, every drunk swaying at every urinal, will have an expert opinion on US politics. That usually consists of caricaturing US Republicans as belonging to a species of particularly stupid reptile which miraculously managed to escape the extermination of the dinosaurs, and which is never happier than when napalming Asian hamlets or slowly electrocuting a few blacks for shoplifting.
To be sure, I truly don't understand the American enthusiasm for execution; they don't even seem to get it right, with their injections - hold that arm still, will you, I haven't got all day - and their faulty electricity - darn, there goes the power again, and the bastard still ain't dead, look, his eyes are rolling. Son of a bitch.
Republicans
The Chinese, now, go for a bullet in the back of the brain, and that seems to do the trick nicely, in huge numbers. But the Chinese in Europe aren't accosted with queries about why they bump off so many of their people. Instead we murmur inwardly about not wanting to let the other fellow lose face, and compliment him on chopsticks, fireworks and other great Chinese contributions to world civilisation. Yet we have no such sensitivity towards Americans, Republicans in particular - though, executions notwithstanding, there is an intellectual rigour in much Republican thinking one seldom finds in European politics.
And now the quadrennial ordeal of Americans in Europe is being turned into a permanent torment, a Groundhog Day in which they awake each morning to find Florida unresolved as Europeans repeatedly scold them about their country's imperfections. Of course, Europeans are free to do that. Tormented Americans in their anguish might gently ask their tormenters to remind themselves where that freedom came from.