Re: OT Caution!! IRA funding (was: English word order and bumper stickers)

Roger Mills wrote:
> > The word "America", in this context, was almost universally taken
> > by Americans to mean "the American government", whereas it was
> > almost universally taken by non-Americans to mean "the American
> > populace".
>
> Well, as you see, I fall into the first category; I'm truly
> surprised at the second-- everything one hears, even from the Arab
> world nowadays, certainly suggests to me that non-Americans are
> quite capable of distinguishing the two, indeed eager to do so.
In my personal experience, I cannot agree with this second claim.
I mentioned recently my experience in Germany of being blamed for
the firebombings during WWII.  I was walking through central Frankfurt
with some people from the conference, and one German mentioned that
he thought downtown Frankfurt was rather ugly.  I responded that
that's because of the bombing (which is true, since extremely little
survived it). And he retorted (quoting): "Yes, *you* did that". Clearly,
he was not eager to distinguish between the American people and
government. This problem is so bad now in Europe (by which is
mostly meant the Continent) that American papers are filled with
reports of travellers being instantly cornered to be used as sounding
boards for everything the locals don't like about America and Americans.

It's simply not true for many people that they care about such subtleties,
or want to understand complex situations, and sometimes, this can be truly
obscene.  When some people were dancing and singing in the West Bank after
they heard about the Sept. 11 attacks, it didn't seem to matter to them too
much that most of the victims were civilians not taking part in any
government activities.

 =========================================================================
Thomas Wier	       "I find it useful to meet my subjects personally,
Dept. of Linguistics    because our secret police don't get it right
University of Chicago   half the time." -- octogenarian Sheikh Zayed of
1010 E. 59th Street     Abu Dhabi, to a French reporter.
Chicago, IL 60637

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