Travels in the Riel World

What an election night! When was the last time that we saw spontaneous electoral celebrations breaking out in city streets, with horns honking and people dancing, hugging, and high-fiving strangers? Part of the celebration was due to the historic nature of yesterday’s election, but I also think part of it was a national release of pent up emotion. It was a catharsis.

A good many American voters are tired. Yes, tired of the constant sense of crisis of the past several years, from 9-11 to the Iraq war to the financial crisis. But tired, too, I think, of the decades-old cultural wars we’ve been fighting. Barack Obama, for many, represents an opportunity to put these cultural wars behind us, to put the 1960s and the Vietnam War in the rear view mirror, and most of all to bury the religious divide and the red state-blue state divide that have been at the center of our politics for too many elections.

So I think Obama won this year for a number of reasons. The low popularity of President Bush and our economic travails, for sure. But it was more than that. His sense of calmness and steadiness and his stated desire to get the country beyond its recent cultural divides were, to my mind, just as important. Americans are ready to turn the page. We are ready for the future, tired of the past, and tired of fighting, and that is why I think the hackneyed old negative attacks just didn’t stick this year. The pages of history are turning before our eyes and the country is thirsty for a fresh start, not only at home but in terms of our engagement with the rest of the world.

The fact that the president-elect is an African American with a name like Barack Hussein Obama just magnifies the symbolism of the moment. It is about the most dramatic symbol possible that the United States is reinventing itself. And don’t discount the power of symbolism. Can you imagine what it feels like today to be a young African American in Harlem or Atlanta or Birmingham, suddenly feeling that anything is indeed possible in this life? Or what it’s like for young Muslims in Cairo or Tehran or Islamabad, now re-evaluating their perceptions and beliefs about the United States? Or to be on the streets of Nairobi or Johannesburg or Jakarta, knowing that the new U.S. president cares about your corner of the world?

The euphoria can’t last and the reality of the challenges before us will soon settle in again. But for the moment, a wave of hope has swept across the planet.

For a sense of the historic nature of what we’ve witnessed, here is a small selection of newspaper front pages. From around the country…

Anniston, Alabama

Cedar Rapids, Iowa

Miami, Florida

Fayetteville, North Carolina

Orange County, California

And, from around the world…

Vancouver, Canada

Lisbon, Portugal

Medellin, Colombia

Kingston, Jamaica

Johannesburg, South Africa

Yes, the world is paying close attention to the upcoming presidential election in the U.S. Here is a fun example of that, as some Venetian gondoliers express their presidential preference.

Hat tip to Andrew Sullivan for first posting this link.

It’s no surprise that the French have a complicated relationship with the United States. One that is certainly reciprocated, as the Americans and the French seem to both love and detest what is most unique about the other’s country. This love-hate dynamic is uniquely examined through the prism of politics in a recent essayby Steven Erlanger in the International Herald Tribune.

An excerpt:

The French have always found American elections amusing, in a horror movie sort of way. They grumpily regard the American president as in some unfortunate sense also their own, but they see the campaign through their own cultural lens.

They value sophistication above almost anything, and so they regard their own hyperactive president, Nicolas Sarkozy, with his messy romantic life and model-singer wife, as “Sarko the American.”

But this year has been difficult for the French. Sarkozy has generally supported American foreign policy and has praised the United States’ openness and entrepreneurial verve. And the sudden emergence of Senator Barack Obama - black, and seen as elegant and engaged with the larger world - has sent many French into a swoon.

But the combination of two recent surprises - Governor Sarah Palin and America’s terrifying financial meltdown - has brought older, nearly instinctual anti-American responses back to the surface.

These two surprises, one after the other, have refreshed clichés retailed under President George W. Bush, confirming the deeply held belief of the French that the United States remains the frontier, led by impenetrably smug and incurious upstarts who have little history, experience or wisdom.

Even worse, from the French perspective, Americans are reckless optimists, incurably blind to the tragedy of life, to the weary convolutions of history and thus to the need for lengthy August vacations and financial regulations.

I hadn’t planned on following up yesterday’s post with another one connected to politics, but I think it’s important to take a moment to reflect on how the U.S. presidential election is being viewed around the world, especially in light of the history that was made yesterday when Barack Obama became the presumptive presidential nominee of the Democratic Party.

An obvious place to begin is in Kenya, where Obama’s family roots have sparked an outpouring of interest and celebration. This is how The Standard newspaper of Kenya described events in an article published today:

Prime Minister Raila Odinga said Obama’s victory was a momentous occasion in history. “Barack Obama’s success will inspire us all to break the shackles of ethnic preoccupations in determining political leadership,” Raila said…

Obama’s grandmother, Mama Sarah, 86, led villagers of Alego Kogelo, Siaya, where the senator’s father — Barack Obama Senior — was born, in thanking American voters for nominating her grandchild. At the home of Obama’s father, relatives, neighbours and students celebrated the triumph…

Amid song and dance, Mama Sarah announced she was preparing for an epic journey to America to witness the swearing in ceremony of her grandson as the country’s first black president.

She said: “I will go there to witness the swearing in ceremony, and to pray for him, his family and the people of America for demonstrating unity and love beyond race and colour by picking a black person to lead them.” …

At the nearby Senator Barack Obama-Kogello Secondary School, which neighbours Mama Sarah’s home, students danced, sang and shouted: “Obama Juu! Obama Juu!” The school principal, Ms Yunita Obiero, said she announced the good news to the students at assembly in the morning after hearing of Obama’s victory.

Of course, you’d expect Kenyans to be interested in this historic event, but take a look at the front pages of these newspapers from around the globe.

The Globe and Mail from Toronto, Canada:

El Mundo from Madrid, Spain:

Peru 21 from Lima, Peru:

The United Evening News from Taipei, Taiwan:

Well, you get the idea. Needless to say, this is a story that is fascinating the rest of the world.

I’ve long believed that, if Barack Obama were to win this year’s presidential election, the most important outcome would be a sea change in America’s relations with and image in the rest of the world. I just came across two articles that look at how some foreign leaders see the prospect of an Obama presidency and, although there are never any guarantees for how events will unfold in reality, their responses seem to at least confirm a shared hope for change.

In the first story, Newsweek interviewed Juwono Sudarsono, the Indonesia minister of defense. Here is an excerpt from his interview:

How do you think an Obama presidency would affect U.S.-Indonesia relations?
Symbolically it would be very, very important for us, as it would be for the whole Asian [and] African continents. If Obama is elected as president, I think it would reignite the United States as the real light star of hope—that it symbolizes a multiethnic, multicultural, multireligious nation. That’s the most important aspect, the symbolism of it. Translating it into American foreign policy will be much more difficult…

So you want to be friends with America, then?
I would like to engage Indonesians, particularly poor Muslims, that under Obama, America will be a much better force for good for the world. That its size, reach, economic and political influence can provide hope … If he wins, it would create an optimism among Indonesians, particularly minorities, that perhaps in the next 10 to 15 years there can be a non-Javanese president in Indonesia. It’s doable.

In the second article, Scott MacLeod of Time recounts a fascinating discussion that he had with some Iranian leaders, who suggest that an Obama presidency could potentially transform relations between the countries. MacLeod’s whole piece is worth reading for its insights into the mind of Iranian strategists, but here is the relevant section about Obama:

Besides reflexively sympathizing with an African-American with Islamic family roots, they believe Obama’s personal experiences in that regard make him more understanding of the developing world and especially the Muslim world and hence more capable of approaching Iran with a better perspective and with more sincerity. They are also impressed with what they feel is Obama’s diplomatic, respectful language, which they see as being in utter contrast with insulting U.S. rhetoric dominant during the Bush administration.

Some Iranian officials and analysts go so far as to say that Obama’s election could be a historical turning point. As one Iranian put it to me, “This could be a moment of truth for the U.S. and for Iran.” What he probably meant was that Obama’s possible willingness to make a significant outreach to Iran could be what is needed to convince Iran’s leadership that Washington is truly serious about ending the 30 years of hostile relations…

Iranians believe such a bold diplomatic initiative by Obama would be a moment of truth for Iran in the sense that Iran’s leadership would have to decide whether to continue its “controlled” hostility to the U.S., which it uses for domestic and international support, or bite the bullet and enter into a cooperative relationship entailing major compromises on issues like the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. Iranians realize that another Obama may not come on to the American scene for quite a while, and that rejection of his olive branch–if one is indeed extended– might inexorably push the region to the World War III that Bush has warned about.

 Interesting stuff. What do you think?

Consider the following two quotes. Does one strike you as more likely to be true than the other one?

First, these thoughts from U.S. Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa):

“When you think about the optics of a Barack Obama potentially getting elected President of the United States — I mean, what does this look like to the rest of the world? What does it look like to the world of Islam?” …

“I will tell you that, if he is elected president, then the radical Islamists, the al-Qaida, the radical Islamists and their supporters, will be dancing in the streets in greater numbers than they did on September 11 because they will declare victory in this War on Terror.” …

“Additionally, his middle name (Hussein) does matter,” King said. “It matters because they read a meaning into that in the rest of the world. That has a special meaning to them. They will be dancing in the streets because of his middle name.”

Then, from an article by Andrew Sullivan of The Atlantic Monthly:

Obama’s candidacy in this sense is a potentially transformational one…What does he offer? First and foremost: his face. Think of it as the most effective potential re-branding of the United States since Reagan…

Consider this hypothetical. It’s November 2008. A young Pakistani Muslim is watching television and sees that this man—Barack Hussein Obama—is the new face of America. In one simple image, America’s soft power has been ratcheted up not a notch, but a logarithm. A brown-skinned man whose father was an African, who grew up in Indonesia and Hawaii, who attended a majority-Muslim school as a boy, is now the alleged enemy. If you wanted the crudest but most effective weapon against the demonization of America that fuels Islamist ideology, Obama’s face gets close. It proves them wrong about what America is in ways no words can.

Personally, I think Sullivan is a lot closer to the truth. Obama’s election wouldn’t magically fix any national security or economic challenges, but it would almost instantly change the world’s image of America. In a positive way.

And in regards to Obama’s name, tell me, if the Senator were named, say, Stanley Armour Dunham, would people like King be so inclined to raise issues about his name? Doubtful. Which just shows the disingenuousness of these ploys. Obama was named after his father and his paternal grandfather, but if he had been named after his maternal grandfather, on the other hand, well - hello, Stanley Armour Dunham.

King’s statements are just another cynical attempt to scare people into voting against one candidate instead of for another one. Oooh, Obama seems like a foreigner (remember how French John Kerry was made out to be in 2004?). Oooh, terrorists are going to dance in the streets because they love Obama.  Oooh, maybe Obama is an Islamic Manchurian candidate. Or, even better, maybe he’s the Antichrist. Give me a break.

Today is Super Tuesday in the U.S. presidential race and 22 states across the country will cast ballots in the Democratic and Republican nomination battles. Although I’ve written about this already (and here), it bears repeating that this election is a big deal not only in the U.S., but also around the world. This recent article in the NY Times looked at the world’s fascination with this election.

To look at the reams of coverage in newspapers outside the United States or to follow the hours of television news broadcasts, you might conclude that foreigners had a vote in selecting an American presidential candidate — or, at least, deserved one, so great is America’s influence on their lives.

From Berlin to London to Jakarta, the destinies of Democratic and Republican contenders in Iowa or New Hampshire, or Nevada or South Carolina, have become news in a way that most political commentators cannot recall. It is as if outsiders are pining for change in America as much as some American presidential candidates are promising it.

The personalities of the Democratic contest in particular — the potential harbinger of America’s first African-American or female president — have fascinated outsiders as much as, if not more than, the candidates’ policies on Iraq, immigration or global finances.

And there is a palpable sense that, while democratic systems seem clunky and uninspiring to voters in many parts of the Western world, America offers a potential model for reinvigoration.

“It is in many ways an uplifting sight to see a great democracy functioning at that most basic of levels,” said Lord McNally, the leader of the small opposition Liberal Democrats in Britain’s House of Lords. “Even with all the money, the publicity, the power of television, the person who wants to be the most powerful man or woman in the world still has to get down and talk in small town halls and stop people on the street and stand on soapboxes.”

There are many reasons for this fervent interest. Part of it is simply the fact that the U.S. president is such an important global figure. Part of it is a yearning among many for a new direction in U.S. foreign policy. And part of it, of course, is also the fascination that the next president could be a woman or an African-American. Some examples of these sentiments:

“There is a desperate sense of need that there must be something better than Bush out there,” said Dean Godson, head of a conservative research group in London called Policy Exchange. Or, as Thomas Valasek, a spokesman for the Center for European Reform in London, put it: “The world at large has a massive stake in the outcome of the elections. Never before has the U.S. had such a terrible reputation, a terrible image.” …

Ramesh Thakur, a political science professor in India, wrote: “We foreigners can but pray that the new president, whoever he or she may be, will return America to its strengths, values and the tradition of exporting hope and other optimism. And so help to lift America and the world up, not tear one another down.”

In Japan, too, there are hopes for American renewal. “Already the fixed idea, ‘Only a white man can become president,’ has been broken,” the newspaper Mainichi Shimbun said Jan. 15. “We are witnessing the history, the process of grass-roots democracy turning into the U.S. strength.”

We may not know the nominees of the major parties at the end of the day, but we will certainly be a lot closer to those decisions. And the world will be watching.

Today in New Hampshire, Democrats and Republicans will take another step toward the process of nominating their presidential candidates. The election is a topic of interest not only in the U.S., of course, but around the world.

The Christian Science Monitor recently interviewed people in various countries about their hopes for the next U.S. president. There were differences of opinion over whether certain nations would prefer a Republican or Democrat in the White House.  The Chinese, for instance, were thought to prefer the Republicans’ “more liberal approach to trade disputes.” But according to the story, there was at least one issue that everyone seemed to agree on.

Everyone interviewed responded similarly: America needs to act less unilaterally, to build solutions via consensus rather than imposing them. They want the next president to respect that every country has its own culture and approaches, which may not adapt well to prescriptions cooked up in Washington.

“Democrat or Republican, I do not care,” says Fakhri Karim, a Baghdad newspaper owner and book publisher. “I just prefer a US president that would balance US interests with those of other nations…. The United States must construct its foreign policies based on local knowledge and not based on what advisers come up with at the Pentagon or in the State Department…”

Well, everyone knows now that Barack Obama and Mike Huckabee won their respective party caucuses in Iowa yesterday. The media coverage, in fact, has already moved on to speculation about next week’s New Hampshire primary and the evolving strategies of the top contenders.

There is obviously a long way to go in this race and no guarantee that either Obama or Huckabee will emerge as his party’s nominee. But such a result would be akin to a revolution in U.S. politics. What is also interesting to me, though, is how this is playing out around the world and, specifically, how a potential Obama presidency could perhaps change the world’s image of the U.S.

Andrew Sullivan wrote a very interesting piece for the December issue of The Atlantic that touches on this topic. Sullivan, who is a self-professed conservative and not a liberal Democrat, writes first about Obama’s potential to take America “past the debilitating, self-perpetuating family quarrel of the Baby Boom generation that has long engulfed all of us.” He then goes on to discuss Obama’s potential, as well, to transform the country’s relationship with the rest of the world.

The whole story is well worth a read, but here are some key quotes:

The logic behind the candidacy of Barack Obama is not, in the end, about Barack Obama. It has little to do with his policy proposals, which are very close to his Democratic rivals’ and which, with a few exceptions, exist firmly within the conventions of our politics…(T)he fundamental point of his candidacy is that it is happening now. In politics, timing matters. And the most persuasive case for Obama has less to do with him than with the moment he is meeting…

Obama’s candidacy in this sense is a potentially transformational one…What does he offer? First and foremost: his face. Think of it as the most effective potential re-branding of the United States since Reagan…

Consider this hypothetical. It’s November 2008. A young Pakistani Muslim is watching television and sees that this man—Barack Hussein Obama—is the new face of America. In one simple image, America’s soft power has been ratcheted up not a notch, but a logarithm. A brown-skinned man whose father was an African, who grew up in Indonesia and Hawaii, who attended a majority-Muslim school as a boy, is now the alleged enemy. If you wanted the crudest but most effective weapon against the demonization of America that fuels Islamist ideology, Obama’s face gets close. It proves them wrong about what America is in ways no words can…

Close-up in this election campaign, Obama is unlikely. From a distance, he is necessary. At a time when America’s estrangement from the world risks tipping into dangerous imbalance, when a country at war with lethal enemies is also increasingly at war with itself, when humankind’s spiritual yearnings veer between an excess of certainty and an inability to believe anything at all, and when sectarian and racial divides seem as intractable as ever, a man who is a bridge between these worlds may be indispensable.

What do you think? Is anyone reading this from another country? Could a President Obama actually transform the world’s image of the U.S. simply by getting elected?

That’s the argument Fareed Zakaria makes in a recent Newsweek column, and he presents a strong case that government policies designed to deter unwelcome visitors are instead causing millions of legitimate businesspeople and tourists to stay away.

According to the Commerce Department, the United States is the only major country in the world to which travel has declined in the midst of a global tourism boom. And this is not about Arabs or Muslims. The number of Japanese visiting the United States declined from 5 million in 2000 to 3.6 million last year. The numbers have begun to increase, but by 2010 they’re still projected to be 19 percent below 2000 levels. During this same span (2000–2010), global tourism is expected to grow by 44 percent.

The most striking statistic involves tourists from Great Britain. These are people from America’s closest ally, the overwhelming majority of them white Anglos with names like Smith and Jones. For Brits, the United States these days is Filene’s Basement. The pound is worth $2, a 47 percent increase in six years. And yet, between 2000 and 2006, the number of Britons visiting America declined by 11 percent. In that same period British travel to India went up 102 percent, to New Zealand 106 percent, to Turkey 82 percent and to the Caribbean 31 percent. If you’re wondering why, read the polls or any travelogue on a British Web site. They are filled with horror stories about the inconvenience and indignity of traveling to America.

For many, the trials begin even before they arrive. In a world of expedited travel, getting a visa to enter the United States has become a laborious process. It takes, on average, 69 days in Mumbai, 65 days in São Paolo and 44 days in Shanghai  simply to process a request. It’s no wonder that quick business trips to America are a thing of the past. Business travel to the United States declined by 10 percent between 2004 and 2005 (the most recent data available), while similar travel to Europe increased by 8 percent.

Sad, but not very suprising news …

Global opinion of U.S. foreign policy has sharply deteriorated in the past two years, according to a BBC poll … In the 18 countries previously polled by the BBC, people who said the United States was having a generally positive influence in the world dropped to 29 percent, from 36 percent last year and 40 percent the year before.

“I thought it had bottomed out a year ago, but it’s gotten worse, and we really are at historic lows,” said Steven Kull, director of the Program on International Policy Attitudes. Kull attributed much of the problem to a growing perception of “hypocrisy” on the part of the United States in such areas as cooperation with the United Nations and other international bodies, especially involving the use of military force.

“The thing that comes up repeatedly is not just anger about Iraq,” Kull said, adding that the BBC poll is consistent with numerous other surveys around the world that have measured attitudes toward the United States. “The common theme is hypocrisy. The reaction tends to be: ‘You were a champion of a certain set of rules. Now you are breaking your own rules, so you are being hypocritical.’ “

Hard to believe that just a few years ago the entire world was standing alongside us.  The thing is, when I travel, it’s evident that many people still love the idea of the United States and want the country to be a force for good in the world.  People merely want us to show an interest in the rest of the planet and, as the article notes, to live by the same ideals we strive to export.  So there is always hope.

Today is, of course, the five-year anniversary of 9-11.  To mark the date, the Christian Science Monitor ran an interesting story - contemplating how the world has changed in the past five years.

In many ways, not a great deal is different.  After all, globalization ”continues unabated,” Middle East conflicts dominated the headlines even before 2001, and the balance of power remains much the same.  What has changed, however, is our view of the world and our approach to it.  In that respect, notes the article, the events of 9-11 ”have helped move the metaphorical tectonic plates of the globe” and may have created ”a new general organizing principle for international affairs.”

The cold war was about the Western and communist blocs, and their values, conflicts, and internal cracks. The current period is about the US and the Islamic world - their mutual suspicions and occasional cooperation, and the wedge Al Qaeda has tried to drive between them.

“Five years in, it is now clear that the 9/11 attacks created a new dynamic for global politics, and thus American foreign policy, centering around the changed relationship between a state and a religion,” argues Peter Singer, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a think tank in Washington.

Another change is the very presence of American troops in more Muslim countries and the consequences that has wrought:

… it is the presence of large numbers of US troops which has helped spur anti-Americanism in the (Middle East). Those troops may have given disaffected Muslims, unhappy with the shortcomings of their own economic and political structures, something else on which to focus their ire.

Much of the hostility that some Islamists bear toward the US “is driven by one of the most powerful of human emotions, a sense of indignity and humiliation,” says Lawrence Harrison, an adjunct lecturer in international relations at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University in Medford, Mass. “That’s a quite new foreign- policy problem.”

Along with this, of course, has been somewhat of a rise in anti-Americanism in general, or at least a decline in trust of the U.S. government:

Trust in the US has also eroded substantially since 9/11, according to Daalder, among friends as well as adversaries. International cooperation on a wide range of problems, from counter-proliferation to global warming, is thus “increasingly absent,” he claims.

The article, I thought, was an interesting to way to mark this five-year anniversary.  Not many would have predicted exactly these scenarios five years ago, when the entire globe seemed to rise up in support of the U.S. in the aftermath of that tragic day.  How, I wonder, will we see our world five years from now?

Happy July 4th, Americans!  Today seems like a good day to contemplate some of the many facets of American culture.

First, an article from the Journal Star of Lincoln, Nebraska, that examines some of what it means to be an American:

Unlike many other countries where blood and birth define citizenship, America is a nation of immigrants — a nation of people from different cultures, different countries, speaking different languages, praying to different gods. … Said Straughn, “The United States is one of the few countries where you can be an American — a genuine American — just by accepting the ideals the country is founded on and by being a citizen.”

The article also notes:

Americans tend to see themselves and their country as exceptionally good, divinely inspired to bring freedom to the rest of the world, said David Forsythe, professor of political science at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. … Because this value is so deeply rooted, Americans often are genuinely shocked when others in the world see us in a negative light, Forsythe said.

That is exactly the case all too often these days, however, reports a story in the LA Times, which examines the love-hate feelings that many Europeans have for the U.S.:

… in much of Europe, enthusiasm for America’s culture goes hand in hand with an abhorrence of its politics and underlines the increasingly complex and ambivalent relationship that Europeans have with the United States.

This is related to an entry I posted a few weeks ago, noting that the image of the U.S. continues to drop around the world, although many people do distinquish between the U.S. government and the American people.

Of course, it’s not possible to discuss American culture without considering its ethnic diversity, immigrant roots and ever-changing face.  Hence, an interesting piece of news this week was that the U.S. expects its population to reach 300 million by this fall and that a significant percentage of the annual population increase is attributed to the Hispanic community.

Finally, another undeniable attribute of American culture is its religious diversity.  So, some food for thought can be found in two other articles, which look at how both Muslims and evangelical Christians have struggled to reconcile their faiths with the predominant U.S. culture.

The image of the United States continues to slip in the eyes of the world, according to a new global poll of people in 15 countries.  Positive views of the U.S. are fading even in such allied countries as Spain and Britain.  This is sad but not totally unexpected, given the drumbeat of news about Iraq, Guantanamo and secret prisons.

And, I don’t know what this says about how much people in the U.S. follow the news, but:

Americans appeared to be paying less attention than others around the world to controversies the war has engendered. While 3 in 4 Americans said they had heard reports of abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and at the U.S. naval base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, substantially more West Europeans and Japanese - 9 in 10 - had heard about them.

On the positive side, many individuals do draw a distinction between the U.S. government and the American people:

Majorities in 7 countries polled had favorable views of Americans, led by Japan, at 82 percent, and Britain, at 69. But only in India and Nigeria did majorities express confidence in Bush.

This is in line with my own personal travel experiences, in which people criticize the U.S. government and then go on to speak of how much they like America and Americans.  A perfect example of this came last summer in Egypt.  Lisa and I were there during the time of the terrorist bombing at Sharm el Sheikh and we had numerous conversations with Egyptians in the wake of that event.

“Look,” said one person, “it is true that we don’t like Bush. Or Cheney. Or maybe Condoleeza or Rumsfeld. And we don’t like decision to go to war in Iraq. But American people we like. People are not government. We know there is a difference.”

O.K., this is more politics than culture, but there is a tenuous tourism link - and, in any case, it’s funny.  Saturday Night Live recently broadcast an imaginary 2006 State of the Union speech by Al Gore — and actually delivered by the real Al Gore  — in which things are going so well in the U.S. that ”American tourists can’t even go over to Europe anymore without getting hugged.”  The clip is hilarious and can be seen here on Crooks and Liars.  Thanks to World Hum for the link.