Wednesday, April 07, 2004

T&T: It's all about presentation

George Alleyne is dead on, as usual. Read the entire piece.

All too many persons tend to view Americans as good, arrogant or indifferent depending on their or their relatives’ and friends’ interaction with them, the policies of the man in the Oval Office, particularly if he is Republican, or the published examples of insensitivity to minorities in the urban ghetto. For the record, even members of minorities can all too often be ugly Americans. To the above should be added never see come see American tourists, overbearing managers of US companies operating here or perceived treatment from an Embassy official received on applying for a US visa. From these three, but not necessarily limited to, you will find your ugly American. Perhaps, if only for the benefit of the young reader, I should carry the definition of the term “ugly American” as published in the Random House Word Menu by Stephen Glazier: “American visitor or diplomat abroad who behaves in an offensive manner and is insensitive to foreign customs.”

But not all offensive and/or insensitive people are Americans. I discovered to my surprise, when on my second visit to Antigua in October of 1983 that there were Antiguans who believed that there was such a thing as an ugly Trinidadian. The year, 1983, the reader would perhaps recall, followed immediately on the end of the oil boom, when oil was King, and many Trinidadians conveyed the impression, however unwittingly, that they were monarchs in their own right. At the hotel where I stayed in Antigua it was pointed out to me at the desk that Trinidadians, should they come to the lobby and no desk clerk was available or in sight, had the annoying habit of pounding incessantly on the bell until help came.
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Several years ago there had been a United States ambassador, who did not only do this country but the US a disservice by making adverse and/or patronising comments about almost everything under the sun about TT, ranging from industrial relations matters to the work ethic to Government policy. The ambassador was a favourite on the talk circuit, the darling of business/employer groups. Personally, I thought the ambassador’s criticisms of trade unions, selected areas of Government policy and the people’s attitude to work needlessly interfering.

On the other hand there have been US ambassadors, who have identified with the social problems of lower income families, access of Trinidad and Tobago companies to the United States market. And while these may have been directly related to prevailing US policy at the time, what struck was the marked absence of patronising contempt. It was not the US policy that made the essential difference, but the manner in which it had been put across.

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