Is It Cool to Say America Is Cool Again?

The producer of Slumdog Millionaire, Christian Colson, told the press briefing after the movie’s big Oscar win that “America is cool again, for the first time in my lifetime..”

http://edition.cnn.com/video/#/video/showbiz/2009/02/23/sot.slumdog.cnn?iref=videosearch

You could hear outraged guffaws from the back of the room. Oblivious, he continued that because the country is ready to embrace a more globalized view of the world, it could now be considered cool.

I find that Americans don’t like hearing anyone knocking their country, let alone a Brit.

Are you saying America wasn’t cool before?!

Brits will happily badmouth their country. They seem to enjoy it. As soon as London was elected as host city for the 2012 Olympics, British tabloids quickly outlined how the city wouldn’t be ready, and would bust the budget.

When England got knocked out of a World Cup, or London struggled with the big snowfall earlier this month, people were quick to lay blame, and seemed to almost relish the failure, as though they anticipated let down.

But here in the US, it seems like you would be committing treason if you suggested the country wasn’t anything but the best.

And I sometimes feel that the fact that I have a British passport makes me look like a less enthusiastic American than my compatriots. I don’t tend to advertise it.

0 Responses to “Is It Cool to Say America Is Cool Again?”



  1. Leave a Comment

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s





%d bloggers like this: