Why must these gentle exiles from the world's most powerful nation humbly apologise for everything?

By Jeremy Atiyah

Published: 12 November 2000

Don't talk to me about American politics. The only Americans I care about are the exiles: the sad ones, travelling the highways and byways of the world.

I am not, of course, talking about the sort of people who spend a week in New York and then go home to Texas believing they have seen Rome. Or the schoolkids in Wisconsin who don't even know that there are foreign countries.

No. It's the real American travellers - the world specialists - who fascinate me. The best travellers you can ever meet. There's no greater pleasure in life than bumping into solitary, bearded Americans in places like Kashmir or Beirut, looking depressed about the state of the world.

They don't necessarily say it out loud, but the feeling is written all over their pale blue eyes, watery after the latest sandstorm in, say, the Sinai Desert: "We come from a powerful country," they want to say, "but unfortunately we are powerless people."

They explain to me, modestly, that this country of theirs is located in the ocean half way between Japan and Britain. ("It divides the Atlantic from the Pacific," they say. "You find it between Canada and Mexico.") They then spend hours crushed into uncomfortable buses, telling me how sorry they are for everything.

It's taken me years to get the point. "Sorry for what?" I say, wondering if it is their squashy peaches I am sitting on. "Oh, you know," they murmur, in non-assertive voices, with Burmese peasants sleeping on their shoulders or sundry Vietnamese babies in their laps. "For... isolationism. For ignorance. For what we have done. For the mistakes we have made."

It is as if they think that the whole world is lined up in righteous accusation against them, behind Ayatollah Khomeini, and, moreover, that they themselves - even in sarongs - are morally responsible for global warming and Third World debt.

I actually feel very sorry for them. They are doing their bit. They know what all good travellers should know (that Yemenis, for example, use tufts of camel hair as coffee filters, and that there are pirates in the Sulu Sea).

I want to try to reassure them. "Oh don't worry about it," I say. "We're still grateful for the Marshall Plan." But they keep on giving me that sad and guilty look, even if they then turn out to have done a seven-year PhD in a dialect spoken only by the tribespeople of eastern Bangladesh, and have since devoted years of their lives to re-educating child-prostitutes and drug-users in northern Thailand.
A strange symptom of the heavy responsibility of world leadership? Probably. And perhaps these sad, gentle people in their big quilted coats up there in the High Karakoram (or in their sandals down there by the Ganges) were once sponsored by the State Department. Who can say?

But now they have become ultra-knowledgeable travellers. They are experts in unusual kinds of tea. They can summarise nations. They speak quietly, in the hope that nobody will recognise their accents. They get their facts right.

And regardless of whatever happens in Washington, I am looking forward to meeting many more American travellers like these in the very near future.