Smells like lemon juice and furniture cleaner.

 justinlam replied to your quote: And I think it’s telling that these days it…

damn you really like americans! do most australians feel like that about america?

Short answer: no. I’m a bit odd. However, Jake Cleland, who is also Australian, did agree with that particular post I made:

 jakec replied to your quote: And I think it’s telling that these days it…

Yeah, that’s a strange, even ignorant, thing to say. My only suggestion (hope?) is that Yglesias is (mis)using “BBC” as an umbrella term to refer to British television. But even then I can’t think of any British counterparts to the shows you listed.

To answer Justin’s question a bit more extensively: Australians like Americans just fine, in that Americans who visit Australia will find themselves welcomed, and hopefully treated very hospitably. Some may even find that their exoticness garners them the same heightened interest from members of their preferred sex experienced by many travelers to foreign countries.

That said, however, I do think Australians have a residual hostility to America. It’s not as bad as it was during the Bush years, and a lot of us got very excited when Barack Obama was elected, though the positivity Australians felt about the U.S. during 2008 has receded somewhat.

What we do like about America is that we have a treaty guaranteeing we’ll come to each other’s defense if either of us is under attack. (It’s been invoked once, by Australia, after 9/11. That’s why we’re in Afghanistan.) We’re less enthusiastic about the way we seem to always be following America into war (Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Iraq again) but believing that the United States has our back if anyone tries to invade us is a security blanket that any politician would be foolish to try to yank away.

Beyond that, we’re a little more ambivalent. We tend to repeat the same stereotypes that have characterized anti-Americanism since the early 19th century: Americans are supposed to be crude, uncultured, brash, not particularly intelligent, etc. I sometimes tell Americans that the rest of the world sees them the way they see Texans, which isn’t precisely correct but gets a lot of the point across.

That’s why I made the point I did in that post; people do need reminding that Americans are as capable as anyone else of producing sophisticated and highly developed art. Sadly, people will watch “Mad Men” but insist with no irony that American TV means Jerry Springer and Kim Kardashian. Even worse, many Americans — usually the ones who consider themselves more cultured or intelligent — believe the same thing.

But, to the point, yes, I do like Americans. There are a lot of great people over here, and though there are some jerks, you can find jerks everywhere. I like America, too; its ideals of freedom and equality and its belief that those ideals are important and should be pursued. And even when it fails to uphold those ideals, which it has from the moment it wrote slavery into its constitution, it never wavers from its insistence on their importance. That’s a great thing.

And I like the special alchemy here in America that comes from the combination of its idealism, its diversity, its vastness, and its restlessness. If things are going to happen, more often than not, this is where they’re going to happen.

So I’m sure that even though when I talk about Americans I might sometimes sound like Uncle Ruckus talking about the white man, I hope everything that I say is grounded in lucid consideration. I have, after all, both an academic and professional interest in the nature of the country. And that’s the point, I hope: more than any liking I have of this place, I find it unfailingly interesting. Sometimes I’m critical, often I’m positive, but I’m never bored by it.