From in front, be clear: I love a lot of things about America. I’ve mentioned some of them before, no need to make out the list again. But it peeves me no end to encounter Americans who while being rather myopic about other cultures are nonetheless quick to criticize how other people behave, or bring up their children, or, for heaven’s sake, even speak. That last one is especially irritating, perhaps because it’s so fundamental. In my time in playing for audiences in their homeland, and in interacting with them when they came as tourists to the Cayman Islands, I have frequently run into this attitude from Americans which often takes the form of a putdown of the native.
Their position is that people who don’t speak as Americans do are basically comedy material, need to be straightened out, and the Yanks are more than happy to do it. Just recently again one of them was laughing at my pronunciation of the famous Heineken brew, chortling. “Bear? You get those in a zoo; the thing you drink
