Anti-Americanism Up Close
After our rather stressful trip back from Ireland (the specifics of which I will relate in a later blog entry) and a strenuous evening spent walking up and down Oxford Street looking in vain for the Eagle Bar Diner, DeLynn and I decided that it might be nice to sleep in and eat a late breakfast at the East End’s famed Brick Lane Biegel Bake.
Having learned our lesson the night before about going out without knowing precisely where we were going, we we were very careful to make sure we knew the Biegel Bake’s exact address and location on a map. All of this was to no avail, however, since we still ended up walking up and down Brick Lane trying to find the bloody place. It finally turned out that we simply hadn’t been walking far enough (having been confused by the disorganized addressing scheme), but during the time that we were walking, we were able to get a very good look around a part of London that few tourists ever see.
Throughought the trip, we have seen a fair amount of civil protest against the prospective war in Iraq (including a rally in front of the US Embassy in Dublin), but as we walked north along Brick Lane, the number, variety and vehemence of anti-US posters, stickers and graffiti really struck us. The fact that I say “anti-US” instead of “anti-war” is, I think an important distinction—most of these messages (from the graffiti calling President Bush a “fascist” to the posters calling Muslim leaders to unite against the West) seemed to go out of their way to advertise their disdain for the United States.
Later we decided to make a visit to the Barbican Art Gallery to view Sebastiao Salgado’s “Exodus” exhibition—a staggering retrospective of one of the world’s greatest documentary photographers. I was so taken with Salgado’s body of work that I decided to purchase his book, Migrations. When I walked into the gallery book store, however, I was surprised to see, alongside the expected photography monographs and postcards, a whole section devoted to left-wing, anti-American polemics.
I’m not exactly a stranger to foreign travel—this is my sixth trip to Europe and my fourth to the UK—but I can say with some certainty that this is the first time I have ever encountered a level anti-Americanism so high as to make me feel truly uneasy. It will be interesting to see what happens regarding Iraq in the coming weeks and months—it is entirely possible that this wave of anti-American sentiment will pass just as criticism of the first Gulf War did—but I can’t help but wonder if increased resentment against the United States is going to be a hallmark of the post-September 11th world.
Whatever the case, this trip has really piqued my interest in the
phenomenon, and I plan to learn more about it when I get back. I think
I’ll start by reading one of the books I saw in the Barbican book store:
Do People Hate America?.
October 14th, 2006 at 4:37 pm
I am American and I live on Brick Lane, and yes, there is anti-americanism. Most of the rhetoric is intellectually-bankrupt parroting- empty and knee-jerk. The 20/ 30 year olds who spout this are mental midgets. Ignore it.
If you are American, expect to get nasty treatment from many in London - Just make friends with the ones who don’t hate you for your nationality.