I just spent a few days last week with some of the most amazingly competent and socially skilful people: Americans. I love them. This was at a business conference.
I just spent a few days last week with some of the loudest, talkiest, self-centred, oblivious-to-nature people: Americans. I hate them. This was on the trail in the great outdoors, in restaurants, in airports. Will you just shut up! Yes, you! Talk less! That’s an order!
It was comical. It was straight out of the Canadian-American book of cultural clichés. Yacking going up hill, yacking going downhill, talking about their shrinks, their wives, their divorces, their jobs, their religious conversions, their kids, as they huff and puff up the hill and down again, with the Colorado Rockies and cloudless blue sky above them, as if I wanted to know all this from thirty yards away, louder and louder, yacking off into the distance as we went the other direction. Absolute lack of discretion. Total unconcern for the privacy of others. I don’t want to know, thank you. Why are they remotely concerned for the NSA surveillance of the Internet and telephones, when they blab in public endlessly and loudly about everything?
It is a mystery.