America and the world

Sorry for the late update - Blogger is bouncing requests from Firefox with a 400 error, meaning it thinks Firefox is sending malformed http requests - and I didn't think to try Internet Explorer until this morning. Here's what I wrote for y'all last night:

Something that fascinates me without cease is the impact of American politics around the planet, and the extent to which it is followed abroad. An Italian man once told me he'd happily trade his Italian suffrage rights for the ability to vote in American national elections, because he thought their results had more of an impact on his life than the ones he could influence.


As a result, the State of the Union address President Obama delivered yesterday was in all the papers and on all the news programs. Isn't that amazing? When was the last time a speech by the German chancellor was covered on the 10 o'clock news?

Just to be clear, I'm not as critical of Americans as some our for our tendency to be ignorant of other countries' affairs. America simply plays such a massive role in the world that everyone has an interest in our politics. I used to feel incredibly ignorant because of my relative ignorance of European geography and politics, until I realized that Germans also have no idea who's in charge of Japan, the Japanese have no idea who's running things in France, the French do not know the name of Australia's head of state, and so on. Americans, I think, only give the impression of relative international ignorance because we happen to come from the country that everyone else everywhere else knows about.