MR. NICE GUY

(From "A Weekend Note," the editor's letter in Style Weekend, Manila Bulletin's weekender, Friday, November 2, 2007)

At the news recently is the collaboration between Walt Disney Co. and the Bush administration, a seven-minute video to be played at US airports and embassies around the world. Set to a familiar Disney score, the film, Welcome: Portraits of America, premiered last week at the Washington Dulles International Airport and the George Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston, Texas.

I just want you to know that, when we talk about war, we’re really talking about peace. —George W. Bush

I’m sure that film will be so much more entertaining than the video to which I was subjected exactly 10 years ago. At the American embassy in Manila in 1987, the continuous reel was pure torture, the price I had to pay for my 10-year visa. Scene after scene, the video showed clips of Filipinos who cheated on their visa application. “I’ll never have a US visa in my life,” said one of the role-players in the vernacular, “because I lied about my marital status (or age or income).” It didn’t help that the queue was long (at breakfast time) and we were herded like cows not so much by the Americans but by the Filipino guards, who addressed the admittedly sometimes-rowdy crowd with words like “Hoy!”
Still, I was happy to have had my visa and my US visits had been very enriching experiences. I don’t know about people who hate Americans for good reason because I hardly ever really paid attention to the US foreign policy as it unfolded in good or bad light on CNN or BBC.
In Paris a few years ago, however, it dawned on me that the impression that Parisians were not warm to tourists applied particularly to American tourists. I have had many occasions to be a visitor in Paris and each time I thought the French were helpful and accommodating to me, including the Frenchwoman I could have mistaken for Cruella de Ville, but who proved to be more than generous with her time helping me figure out the “Foto Me” machine at a Métro station. I’ve also tried to travel to my hotel in Montmartre from Gare du Nord using the Métro, where I had to change trains and climb stairs and, without fail, where I needed a hand in carrying my luggage, a Frenchman was there to give it to me.
At a café in Saint-Germaine, I was a hapless witness to a word war between a young French girl and a middle-aged American tourist, who kept going on and on about Paris being “beautiful, but nothing works!” Apparently, the older woman lost a coin at the lavatory, where a coin was required to get a cubicle open.
Both women were nice to me, but I did find the American quite overbearing, as though Paris owed it to her to work perfectly. Like the American tourist, I could not really speak French beyond “Bonjour, je suis… et vous?,” but the French girl took the time to explain to me, in broken English, that she hated it that the Americans assumed that everyone understood their twang or behaved as though the world was theirs to enjoy.
To me, the American lady was simply having a bad day. I have, however, encountered a lot of other foreigners who have similar feelings about the Americans, to think I have yet to visit Iraq or Iran or Spain, where, according to a recent CNN survey, nearly 40 percent of the population has ill feelings about George W Bush’s countrymen.
I can’t wait to see Disney’s Portraits of America just to check if, like the Beauty and the Beast, it can endear us all to the “beastly” work America is supposed to be doing in its war against terrorism or, as in the Hunchback of Notre Dame, we can begin to see past all the ugliness the anti-Bush elements have given the American president and discover the good intentions behind it all.
At any rate, I really have nothing against America. Like I said during my interview at the US embassy 10 years ago when the officer asked me why I wanted to go, I do have desire to go the US the same way I do have desire to go to every other part of the world, Kabul included.

A
post me at aapatawaran@yahoo.com