Still innocents
abroad

Who's afraid
of the Ugly
American?

by Todd Pitock

IT'S FRIDAY
night in Lyon, the city many consider France's gastronomic capital, and the bistros and brasseries lining medieval stone alleys are only moderately busy. At one classic-looking establishment, my wife, Toni, and I get a table outside. The waiter's English is just sufficient to translate the parts of the menu we can't make out in our insufficient French, and we apparently wear him out, because when another pair of American tourists presumes to sit near us, he barks, "Outside eez closed! You go inside."

The way he speaks, they ought to get up and huff off to the joint next door. God knows there are enough choices in the neighborhood. But instead, the woman gasps, "Oh," and the man apologizes, as if somehow they should have known, and they slink off meekly to the smoky indoors.

It's early by local norms, only about nine, so we're surprised to hear they're closing up. I almost expect the brusque waiter to come back and steal my half-eaten second course out from below my raised fork. If this happens, I resolve, I will skewer his palm. Some things are worth fighting over. But they're not closing. An hour later, a French couple appears, and the same waiter greets them with two menus and a hale "Bon soir!"

I want to find the other couple and tell them the outside is open again, to stir up an international incident, except I already know they'd never dare make a scene. The last thing they'd want is to be taken for Ugly Americans. They are a different type. They are Timid Americans.

Indeed, though the Ugly stereotype is better-known, hyper-timidity is far more characteristic of US citizens abroad. Instead of being loud, failing to appreciate or respect other cultures, and generally wandering about in search of confirmation for their own xenophobia, Timid Americans are indiscriminately respectful of anything foreign, especially if it is French or Italian. Told a dish comes from Provence or Tuscany, they would eat it with dirt sprinkled on top and coo at its savoriness.

They are not just self-consciously inoffensive, they are impossible to offend. Ordered indoors by a career bistro waiter, they gingerly hup to it.

They are, of course, a direct reaction to their boorish opposites. Whereas Ugly Americans regard the mere fact of being American as an unqualified virtue, Timid Americans regard it as a cultural misfortune and just try to make the best of it. They use whatever native words they pick up, dress native if they can, and wish more than anything that they could blend in and not be mistaken for tourists at all. In fact, they are not "tourists" but "travelers" or "visitors," and would sooner be killed in a firefight between government forces and terrorists than be caught on a hermetically sealed, air-conditioned tour bus filled with others who speak the language they do. Being brash and being timid are both responses to feeling insecure. Ugly fights, Timid takes flight. Except in this case he doesn't run away. He stays and tries to make the locals like him.

When he makes it overseas at all, that is. If there's any truth to the "Ugly" stereotype, it's that Americans are provincial -- on a national scale. Most Americans are so anxious away from home that few ever poke a toe over the border. (Canada, at least the English-speaking part of it, doesn't count, nor do most cruise destinations.) Fewer than one in six Americans hold a passport, according to the State Department.

It's not just the Ignorant Masses who are lacking in global perspective. Even as American businesspeople go overseas to serve multinational masters, American financial markets are confined to American borders. For all the rhetoric about globalization, we can't figure out foreign money. It must be because of all the colors.

Plus, we do not learn languages. Not fluently, anyway. At best, Americans speak pidgin-whatever well enough to impress friends and family. We have no pressing need to learn. It's not arrogance; it's just that we already speak the world's lingua franca. Go study a language and then throw yourself into the deep end in some remote village. Before you even have a chance to sink or swim, some soul who's eager to learn English will show up at your door with the buoy of translation services.

Don't get me wrong. I speak two foreign languages -- pidgin Hebrew and pidgin Spanish -- and I hope my kids will someday, too. But being monolingual never made anyone Ugly, and being from another country never saved anyone from being Ugly. Israelis actually have a slur, yoredim, to describe their compatriots abroad. And a Frankfurt publisher once told me, "When I see other Germans traveling, I run the other way. They're loud. They don't care about where they are; they just want to take Germany with them wherever they go."

That need to take your own country along for the trip, of course, is the attitude that makes an Ugly whatever. That's why you find the Holiday Inn in Paris -- or, more accurately, it's why you find the Holiday Inn full of Americans in Paris.

And that is why the Timid American exists. Tourists are the proverbial fish out of water, flopping around, spastically lost. We see in our fellows abroad mirrors of ourselves, and we are revolted by self-recognition. In contrast, people and sounds we don't know are romantic, exotic, full of mystique. When people say French is a beautiful language, they are focused on melodious sounds -- that is, on the tune -- because more often than not they don't understand the words, even if some of them pretend they do.

Sometimes aspects of the Timid American and the Ugly American are manifest in the same person. "I went to that man there at the counter and asked for the `powder room,' and he pretended not to understand," an elderly Philadelphia woman complains to us in the airport. "All of this trauma for a week."

"It's possible he didn't understand," I say. Americans lead the world in euphemisms for "toilet." "Try `toilet,' " I suggest.

"I did," she bristles. "He understood that. Boy, try to be delicate with these people, but they just won't let you."

I wish she'd been in Lyon. She'd have taken care of that waiter.

Todd Pitock lived overseas for five years until they threw him out. He can be reached at toddpitock@aol.com.