I’m in the process of moving my Japan blog over from Blogger to WordPress. Since I originally wrote it on the very old version of Blogger, WordPress’s magic import feature didn’t work, so I’m having to transfer things over one post at a time, cutting and pasting manually. This has given me a chance to reread all those old posts, and I found one that seems very relevant to the news this week about the US’s fifth anniversary in Iraq:
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Personally, I find it rather embarrassing to be an American abroad right now. I’m constantly being asked when the US will be attacking Iraq, why our president wants to attack so badly, do all Americans think it is a good idea, how many Americans think this is a good idea (please give percentages), and is it true that most Americans can’t find Japan on a map? Honestly, I do not have some sort of direct secret American connection to the White House, from which I receive my updates on exactly what the president’s latest thoughts are. I didn’t vote for him, I think he’s a moron, and honest to goodness, I’m not kidding, not all Americans are the same. Really. I know it’s hard to believe but it’s true. Also, the US is a very big country, with many, many people in it, and some of them can’t even find their own state on a map, let alone a country on the other side of the globe.
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-March, 2003
I still remember the one class where the teacher wanted to use “Which country will the US be attacking soon?” as a geography question for the mock Jeopardy game we were going to play as warm-up. I tried so hard to convince her that it wasn’t an appropriate question, hoping as hard as I could that it wouldn’t turn out that way.
