National stereotypes are the meat and potatoes of comedy. (Not quite a nice piece of fish at any rate.) Combine that with the "Who do you support?" sensibility of English yobs and you end up with the 2 guys at the comedy club door the other night who gave me shit for being American when I turned them away.
"Thanks for that Iraq thing," one of them said, but it wasn't a political comment. It was team identity sloganeering, as if I were a fan of Manchester United and he "supported" Fulham. (Are those actual teams? Do they play each other? In what sport?)
A few moments later (or thereabouts), the MC -- someone I like -- said to an American in the audience something about making him or her feel at home by letting him (or her) invade something or somewhere (or some similar notion). How they all laughed. And I thought, this is what gives ammunition to those brainless competitors. Popular cliches that, in this case anyway, aren't even true.
Is it really an American tradition to "invade" places? Iraq, yes. Various locales during the Spanish-American War about a hundred years earlier. And, um . . . Grenada?
I do, however, know of a nation with a tradition of invading places. It is now better known for its drunken yobs.
I mean, at least get your stereotypes right.
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ReplyDeleteThat was a typo, but...
ReplyDeleteIraq, yes (twice); Afghanistan; as you say, Cuba-Puerto Rico-Virgins-Philippines (the latter the occasion for possibly the bloodiest campaign of colonial suppression in modern history); but also, off the top of my head (and many of these multiple times), Vietnam, Haiti, Kuwait, Nicauragua, Panama, Cambodia, Dominican Republic, North Korea and a century before that Korea, Hawaii, the Confederacy (in the interest of completeness), Russia, Mexico, and Canada; and this doesn't count assassinations (Guatemala, Iran); interventions in civil wars (Greece, Indonesia, China); exercises in gunboat diplomacy (Tripoli, Japan, Sudan), permanent occupations (Diego Garcia, Guam, the Bikinis, the Marshalls), proxie wars (Iraq vs Iran, Taliban vs Russians, South Vietnam vs Laos, the CIA's Cubans vs Cuba), and miscellaneous actions and random bombings (the Balkans, Pakistan). I don't where you'd put the series of wars against the Indians. We have over 1,000 bases around the world and we're expanding militarily in South America (Columbia) and trying to expand militarily in Africa. And most of this before we became permanently militarized in the wake of Vietnam. We've been at war pretty much our whole history. So, yeah, we invade a lot.
Yeah, but except for that . . .
ReplyDeleteMore to the point, even if we ignore the fact that some of the things you listed don't qualify as invasions within the context at hand and even if we further ignore your listing countries individually that should really be considered collectively as part of a single military operation, your list still isn't enough to give an English guy moral high ground when it comes to national military history and character.
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