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Originally posted by Roguish Lawyer
[B]OK, I don't have much time because I have to get a bunch of stuff done and forgot I have to go to a family thing tonight. But here are my quick thoughts to get this started:
1. While we love to criticize others like the French and the Japanese for thinking they're better than everyone else, it seems to me that we are just as bad if not worse. Now don't get me wrong here -- I agree that we are better than everyone else.  But that doesn't mean we have to announce that to the world and act like it all the time. Arrogant people are really annoying, and I believe that many American tourists piss off their hosts when they say and do stupid things. I cringe when congressional delegations go abroad, because I think many of our representatives are no better than our average tourists when it comes to being diplomatic.
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My observations are that American tourists are far less likely to piss off their hosts than Germans, French or English tourists. Japanese tourists are at least as arrogant, but they display it in a very different way. As for most of our elected officials, they are not "no better than our average tourists", they are significantly worse.
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3. The fact that other countries do things differently does not make them inferior per se. I think many Americans think our way is the only way, and that's a big part of the problem. I don't support going to the other extreme and accepting Nazis and Cannibals, but I do think we need to be not only tolerant but respectful of other countries. We tend to be very disrespectful, I think. I'll bet lots of American tourists ask where they can buy a burger in India, for example, and get upset if they can't. (Haven't been there; don't know if it's an true example, but you get the idea).
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Poor example, and makes assumptions about tourists that are not true for most.
Every people in the world thinks their culture is better than others, thinks theirs is the right way, and is culturally blind to their own culture's biases until exposed to other cultures and given the opportunity and external viewpoint to consider those cultures as well as their own. Some Americans (some NYC residents for example) are actually more accepting of other cultures because they have had the opportunity to deal with other cultures at home.
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4. How many Americans speak more than one language? I find it extraordinary when tourists get upset that no one speaks English! (Note: I am part of the problem. While I've spent time working on two other languages, I can't speak either one worth a damn.)
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For all the claims that Americans don't speak more than one language, my experience has been that many Americans do speak more than one language, but often they did not learn that language in school. For those who learned Cantonese, Spanish, German, Italian or Hebrew because it was their parents' or grandparents' native language, they may not show in the statistics...but they will probably learn additional languages more easily than those who grow up with one language (multiple studies have found that children who grow up learning multiple languages have a higher aptitude to learn language throughout their life). Regardless, English is the primary communication language worldwide, and only very arrogant peoples would expect someone to learn more than a few words of a language that is insignificant on a worldwide scale for a trip as a tourist (oops, did I just suggest the French are arrogant?).
I can say "hello" and "thank you" in a lot of languages. But if anyone thinks I am going to learn Japanese for a two-week holiday in Japan, they are sadly mistaken.
On the other hand, the expectation that people speak some English is legitimate (the expectation that they understand American accents, rhythm and speed is not) as English is the worldwide standard language for communication today. Most of the world is very, very aware of that.