Cultural commentary

Drew and Tracy found out here that even when honest, maybe especially when honest, comments by a foreigner about a country can generate resentment.

Tracy, visiting from Texas and working on a travel blog for the San Antonio newspaper, repeated an opinion that Serbs are persona non grata in Sarajevo since the war and then quoted Drew talking about the "mood" of the country as cause in part because "everyone here has PTSD." CIN staffers were angered and insulted by these characterizations. They took them to mean that Serbs are not allowed or welcomed in the city and that all Bosnians are crazy.

That the statements were not meant in these ways and probably not understand that way by their intended audience didn't soothe at all. "Persona non grata" and "PTSD" are buzzwords around here still. Recently we've been discussing taking a group trip out to the country for a paintball fight, very popular but a little expensive here now. Staffers suggested we play the internationals against the locals, which would take the team name PTSD.

All this furor over outsiders presuming to make generalizations about another country got me interested in a 1995 book by an Italian, Beppe Severgnini, who spent a year living in Washington, then wrote Ciao America! The whole idea was to comment on American life and customs as an outsider.

I found his observations very funny rather than insulting. Like his fear of waiters toting pepper mills as big as bazookas in the restaurants he visited and his confusion shopping in sporting goods shops as big as the hangars at Heathrow Airport or Potomac Mills where he went to buy sheets and pillows but kept getting distracted because that boring stuff was camouflaged among more interesting items.

He wrote about how Americans turn anyone into an expert. Pronounce the word soccer with a European accent, for example, and you were an authority who could predict who'll win or criticize children kicking around a ball.

He also mocks American love for ACs set on deep-freeze levels, obsession with numbers (zip codes, Social Security Number license plate numbers...)and our fascination with drinking coffee "volcanic temperatures in those deadly polystyrene beakers or in mugs decorated with hobgoblins, caroon characters, superheros or snappy one-liners. In America, government ministers see nothing embarassing in sipping their coffee from a receptable with I BOSS. YOU NOT written on the outside. Captains of industry can flaunt a personal mug bearing the likenesses of the Three Little Piglets and still look their peers unswervingly in the eye."