Jan Morris: Once the most beloved country in the world, the US is now the most hated | Business | Guardian Unlimited Business

Jan Morris: Once the most beloved country in the world, the US is now the most hated Business Guardian Unlimited Business



Once the most beloved country in the world, the US is now the most hated
The American swagger has become bombast, the cocky GI a bully. But with luck the pendulum may be ready to swing back

Jan Morris
Wednesday February 14, 2007
The Guardian

'Whisper of how I'm yearning', sang George M Cohan in one of the great American songs of nostalgia, 'to mingle with the old time throng'. Well, I'm yearning too, not for the gang at 42nd Street exactly, but for the America that Cohan was indirectly hymning - for the Idea of America, with a capital I, which once made the United States not just the most potent of all the nations but genuinely the most liked.
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Perhaps, with a future new president already champing at the bit, we are about to witness its rebirth. As a foreigner I am immune to the rivalries or seductions of American party politics, but I have loved the old place for 60 years, and I simply pray for an American leader to give us back its baraka, as the Arabs say - nothing to do with religion or economics or power or even ideology, but the gift of being at once blessed and blessing.
Of course nobody can claim that the old dreams of America were ever perfectly fulfilled. They often let us down. They were betrayed by the national reputations for crime, corruption, racism and rampant materialism. Not all the presidents, God knows, were icons of virtue or even of glamour, and the benevolent Uncle Sam of the old cartoonists was more often interpreted, around the world, as a fat moron in horn-rimmed spectacles, chewing a cigar. Nobody's perfect"