“There’s a bright golden haze on the meadow…”

Man, what a fine day today turned out to be. Warm and sunny, I mean, it’s Washington.  Who would’ve ever thought? But it did not rain, nor sleet nor hail. Unlike the song, it was not “Oh what a beautiful morning”, but the haze slowly did clear off and the sun came out stronger and stronger and I was actually able to get outside and do some work around the house, namely painting, that requires dry weather. I would like to get this place sold.

Well, now all the outside repairs are done, one occasional sunny day at a time, the grounds are picked up and the junky stuff gone to the dump. If it doesn’t rain tomorrow, and no bets on that as rain is predicted, maybe my rapidly growing grass can be mowed.

The other day while I was still in the grip of that more-than-24-hour flu, and having somewhat depressing thoughts, it occurred to me that I hadn’t had a happy dream in as long as I could remember, but this morning I awoke with a lingering dream that I was all moved into my new home, it was sunny, and it was DRY. Waking up like that makes all the difference.

So as this passing Sunday fades into the sunset, may I wish all of you who read this a sunny and dry day, that puts a glow in your heart and a song on your lips.

This last week an article made the media rounds that listed the worst to the best countries in terms of rudeness, as ranked by travellers.

Out of a field of 34 countries, France won 1st Place as World’s Rudest People.  The United States came in as #7 and Australia as #21.

What this proves is that you can get pretty much any result that you want from a poll depending on what questions you ask, how you ask them and who answers them.

For instance, Australians consider Americans to be the very worst of the tourists who visit. Not because of anything that Americans do while there but because Australians have had this attitude ever since the Colonial days. We went to war with England and won our freedom as a nation at the same time that Australia was being colonized with their excess criminals, who were all British and who hated us Damned Colonists for separating from England.  

Apparently we got along well during the first World War, but that took a slide when we all fought together in World War II, I think because it was our generals and our war machine that was dominating the action and the Aussies didn’t like being told what to do by American generals. Damned colonists.

Anti-Americanism really took hold during the George W. Bush administration because of his policies toward Australia. That was when the Australian Prime Minister added a bunch of Australian troops to G. Bush’s Iraq assault force and the Aussies didn’t like that one little bit, since they already didn’t like us anyway. Remarks were made about Australians being treated like The 51st State. Damned uppity colonists.

So I’ve been doing my own little poll by Googling around and checking on websites both Australian and American, to see what we and they really do think about each other, rather than where we and they place out of 34 countries. How do we place, one on one? From my point of view, we come out pretty well

Expatriot Australians who’ve returned to Australia after at least 5 years of absence, and generally more, all say that they’re greatly dismayed at the dramatic increase in bad attitudes and manners of their countrymen compared to how things were before they left.

The Majority of Americans who’ve visited Australia recently praise Australia as a beautiful country (which I did as well, because it is) and describe the people as very rude, loud and obnoxious, which they are and which I also did as well after my visit there.

The majority of Australians don’t like Americans because they’re, well, they’re AMERICANS. They don’t seem able to pin anything down specifically, but those damned Americans, damned colonists….

Australians are also very racist, though in their case it’s primarily directed at the native aboriginal people. Frankly, I can’t blame them much in that regard. The aboriginals are the crudest, rudest, stupidest, ugliest and most violent specimens of humanity that you could ask for. I found nothing good about them. At one of the little cultural shows they put on for us tourists, one native was explaining the use of their wooden swords. When someone committed a crime in a tribe, they would stand him up to a tree, tie his hands and feet to it and then slam the edge of that sword-board down on his right collar bone and smash it to pieces. Maybe both collar bones. Then the poor guy would have to try to get himself free with his nearly useless arms.

In the rare event that he did instead of being eaten by wild dingoes, he would be welcomed back to the tribe to start a new life. As a cripple, of course. The native who was regaling us with this description of tribal justice made sure to point out what a true and wonderful system of justice they had, not like the sissy court systems we white people use, and he glared at the audience menacingly while telling this, as if to dare anyone to challenge the superiority of his tribe’s brutality over the White Man’s laws. 

Over the 50,000 years or more since the first of these people arrived on that oversized island, they learned to do only three things. Throw a flat, curved stick in an arc, throw long, sharpened sticks with a throwing stick, and make weird noises with another stick that termites had hollowed out. That’s it. Even though they all lived on the one same chunk of dirt, they were so hostile that each tribe developed a separate language, resulting in over 200 separate languages. Talk about having no social skills at all, they don’t. These are, as I said, stupid, hostile and violent people who barely qualify as human.

Australia exports commodities like chemicals and minerals rather than products like furniture and car parts. At the same time, the population is rapidly expanding and they’re developing the most easily usable land as fast as they can. This is already resulting in the mass destruction of habitat and creation of instant ghettos and it looks like they’re making exactly the same mistakes we did, only more and faster. As short-fused as the average Aussie is now, I can only imagine the gang wars in the next 20 years.  For people who don’t like us they’re in an awful big rush to imitate us.

Lately there’s been a rash of people with Down-under accents pitching junk on television, with the unspoken idea behind that, that if an Australian says it’s good, then it must be good. Yesterday I even saw a guy with a thick Scots accent selling lawn fertilizer, and while that could just be to get our attention as a selling gimmick,  it may also be  that our media is trying to convince us that anything is better than American. Well, a lot of our media is owned by Rupert Murdoch, who happens to be Australian.

I don’t think that we Americans have become nicer, politer people than we used to be. If anything, we’ve become less so. But in comparison to the way the rest of humanity is behaving, and Australians in particular, we’re actually improving. I’m just not sure if we should be happy about that, or not.