Heather has written a wonderful and timely entry on weblog hate mail and how horrible people can be when they’re not talking to your face. Timely, since I got my own wonderful personal attack this morning: “there are plenty of misguded [sic] expats living abroad who no [sic] SO much more because of their current foreign surroundings… if you can’t tell your [sic] being an “expat snob” … read your post on when you returned to South Bend for the wedding.” I was confused at first because I couldn’t remember any rampant snobbery on my part when I got home. I had to go back through the archives and the only thing I could find was this incident with the dumb teenage couple on the plane. So, just to clarify, I wasn’t being an expat snob in that post, I was being an intellectual snob. My mockery had nothing to do with the girl’s nationality and everything to do with her NOT KNOWING WHERE ONE OF THE CONTINENTS WAS. It’s not like that is some random bit of trivia, now is it? And I felt my slam on the local school system was entirely justified, given that I’M A PRODUCT OF IT. Oh, and we call out bad writing around these parts too. I guess that makes us grammar and spelling snobs.
And you know what prompted that little diatribe? My praising Australia’s contribution to tsunami relief. I didn’t even mention the US in that post (and explained to a few folks in the comments that I didn’t intend it as a slam). Yet somehow, just because I live overseas, every time I say something good about another country it has to be interpreted as a criticism of the US. Come on, back me up folks. That’s ridiculous, right?
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