What the Brits think of Americans

Besides bafflement and confusion:

It's not so much contempt they feel toward America as bafflement: Sarah Palin is as alien to Brits as a prehistoric creature dragged from the depths of the sea. You can't accuse them of objecting to a strong, ideologically rigid female presence in politics (hello, Margaret Thatcher and her handbag of doom!), but the forces that formed her ideology are bewildering. Remember, fewer than 10 per cent of Britons regularly attend church; they do not have the death penalty; abortion is a private, not a political matter; and their familiarity with guns extends to occasionally going out in plaid trousers and blasting the heads off tiny birds.

So the British newspapers have, like The New York Herald shoving Henry Stanley out the door in search of Dr. Livingstone, sent their reporters to explore America's dark, unknowable heart. “Judgment day is not far away,” read the headline on The Times's story about one of Palin's spiritual advisers – the one who thinks the apocalypse may be coming, and not just to a cinema near you.

The Daily Mail, as cheeky as it is fear-mongering, sent a female reporter to have a Palin makeover, which, she informed us perkily, made her feel “very powerful indeed.” The story was illustrated with a series of famous faces – including Barack Obama's – stuck under the now-famous glasses and bun.

When The Sunday Times sent its acerbic critic A.A. Gill (no bleeding heart) to the Republican convention, he watched Palin speak and pronounced, “I think she looks hard and calculating and a bit of a bitch.” This week the BBC released a poll of 22,000 people in 22 countries, which revealed that by an overwhelming margin – four to one – the world wants Obama to win. Of course, their vote is as meaningless as mine, which raises the dire prospect of four more years trying to explain a country that, increasingly, I don't understand myself.

(The writer is Canadian.) And as an American, I'd like to apologize profoundly for the last eight years. I'd like to say we won't do it again, but we have yet to figure out a way to fumigate for stupidity.