Reply To: JoCoLoCo 2
It’s also interesting to figure out where and/or when the prejudices originated. In many ways, the US really IS Europe, translated out of some of its original contexts, but really pretty similar. The majority of European emigrants before and during the Revolutionary war period were relatively poor, working class people who resented the landholding aristocrats of their own era. So a lot of the scathing humor of that period (which you only see in cartoons in museums and so on) was directed at the privileged upper classes, of England and elsewhere, as if all English people were members of the gentry.
Several generations later, when Mark Twain was writing, he drew on the same stuff — the Duke and the Dauphin, who were American scoundrels and con men, were pretending to be Euro-aristocrats.
And we still do it when it comes the French. The Europhobes (the ones who mocked John Kerry for simply knowing how to speak French) puff up like blimps at the slightest hint of European sophistication and go all scornful, as if Europe were a synonym for upper-class pretense and phonyism, looking down on America from a false height.
The fact that most of the same people are full of upper-class pretense & scorn for poor people themselves — at least when it comes to “illegal immigrants” and “welfare queens” — is lost on them. Everything boils down to the common human failing — that only People Just Like Me are the good, right, proper kind of people to be.