Probably anti-Americanism will be with us for a long time yet. This is a shame, because the one thing everyone notices about us Americans is how much we want to be liked. That, at any rate, used to be the thing everyone noticed. I do not think the yearning to be liked has departed from the American psyche yet, but it now finds itself sharing that psyche with some other wishes: principally, the desire that if we cannot be liked, we shall at least be respected. If it should become clear that Americans are to be denied even respect, I think quite a lot of us will settle for being feared. We are not much given to Latin tags nowadays, but there is one that keeps popping up in American newspapers and web sites, and which just this last week I actually saw printed on a T-shirt. The tag is the one Seneca denounced as a "vile, detestable and deadly sentiment," but which had a steady currency throughout the late-Republican, early-Imperial period of Roman rule: Oderint dum metuant-"Let them hate us, so long as they fear us." I am with Seneca on this one; I hope things never come to that; but I am bound to say, from talking with and listening to my fellow Americans, that is the direction in which they are heading.
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