I was struck particularly by this:

quote:

---

In Disney World and elsewhere, you often meet Americans who have done long “tours” to distant lands, frequently as military, yet seem strangely unmoved by the experience, as if they went on a Disney Park Hopper pass. Contrast this with other imperial powers. The British or French often got deeply involved, colonized lands, learned the language, sometimes “went native,” exchanged populations and entered reciprocal relations, negative or positive but, at any rate, recognizing each other’s particularity and autonomy, so that Yeats the Irish nationalist “pardoned” Kipling, the English imperialist, because of their common devotion to the English language. The U.S. doesn’t get entrenched or culturally “bogged down” in this way. They don’t put themselves in the heads of the locals — which may be self-preserving but means a reaction you never asked for, like the current one in Iraq, can take you completely aback.

---