【单选题】

Quick quiz: Who has a more vitriolic relationship with the US The French or theBritish. If you guessed the French, consider this: Paris newspaper polls show that 72 percent of the French hold a favorable impression of the United States. Yet UK polls over the past decade show a lower percentage of theBritish have a favorable impression of the United States.

Britain’s highbrow newspaper, The Guardian, sets the UK’s intellectual tone. On any given day you can easily read a handful of stories sniping at the US and thingsAmerican. TheBBC’s Radio 4, which is a domestic news and talk radio station, regularly lamentsBritain’s social wart sand follows them up with something that has become the national mantra, "Well, at least we’re not as bad as theAmericans. "
This isn’t a new trend:British abhorrence ofAmerica antedates George W.Bush and the invasion of Iraq. On 9/11 as the second plane was slamming into the World TradeCenter towers my wife was on the phone with anEnglish friend of many years. In the background she heard her friend’s teenage son shout in front of the TV, "Yeah! TheAmericans are finally getting theirs. "The animosity may be unfathomable to those raised to think ofBritain as "the mother country" for whom we fought two world wars and with whom we won the cold war.
So what’s it all about
I often asked that during the years I lived in London. One of the best answers came from anEnglishwoman with whom I shared a table for coffee. She said, "It’s because we used to be big and important and we aren’t any more. Now it’sAmerica that’s big and important and we can never forgive you for that. "A、detestation of thingsAmerican has become as dependable as the tides on the Thames rising and falling four times a day. It feeds a flaggingBritish sense of national self-importance.
A、new book documenting the virulence of more than 30 years of corrosiveBritish animosity reveals how deeply rooted it has become in the UK’s national psyche. "[T]here is no reasoning with people who have come to believeAmerica is now a ’police state’ and the USA、is a ’disgrace across most of the world,’" writesCarol Gould, anAmerican expatriate novelist and journalist, in her book "Don’t Tread on Me. "
A、brief experience shortly after George W.Bush’s invasion of Iraq illustrates that.AnAmerican I know was speaking on the street in Lndon one morning. Upon hearing his accent, aBritish man yelled, "Take your tanks and bombers and go back toAmericA、" Then theBritish thug punched him repeatedly. No wonder otherAmerican friends of mine took to telling locals they were fromCanadA、 The local police recommended prosecution.But upon learning the victim was anAmerican, crown prosecutors dropped the case even though the perpetrator had a history of assaulting foreigners.
The examples of this bitterness continue:
I recall my wife and I having coffee with a member of our church. The woman, who worked atBuckingham Palace, launched a conversation with, "Have you heard the latest dumbAmerica nioke " which incidentally turned out to be a racial slur against blacks. It’s common to hearBritsroutinely dismissAmericans as racists (even with anAfrican-American president), religious nuts, global polluters, warmongers, cultural philistines, and as intellectual Untermenscher.
The United Kingdom’s counterintelligence and security agency has identified some 5,000Muslim extremists in the UK hut not even they are denounced with the venom directed atAmericans.A、British office manager atCNN once informed me that anyEnglish high school diploma was equal to anAmerican university degree. This predilection for seeing evil in all thingsAmerican defies intellect and reasonBy themselves, these instances might be able to be brushed off, but combined they amount toBritish bigotry.
Oscar Wilde once wrote, "TheEnglish mind is always in a rage. "But the energy required to maintai