America – the middle finger of the world

Jerome a Paris

19 years ago

I haven’t seen this around here yet, but it is too funny to pass:

US flips its lid over ‘middle finger’ tag

India-born PepsiCo president Indra Nooyi, one of Fortune’s most powerful businesswomen, anointed America the “middle finger” of the world in a speech to Columbia Business School’s graduating students.

In her speech, Nooyi attributed fingers to the other continents, none of whose proponents have reacted in cyberspace: the thumb for Asia, strong and powerful and looking to turn into a bigger global player; Europe, the index finger, pointing the way; South America, the ring finger to symbolize love and sensuality; Africa, the little finger, small and insignificant but when it is injured, the entire hand hurts.

Nooyi described the US as the middle and biggest finger. In a rejoinder Nooyi has explained: “In my comments, I used the analogy of a human hand to illustrate that people in countries around the globe need to join together to make the world work in harmony – just as all the fingers of a hand work together. It is an illustration that I learned when I was a student, and that I have shared with others on many different occasions.”

The rest of the article describes the controversy (pretty much exclusively on US blogs that fely insulted) that followed, but a number of things strike me:

that description of America as a middle finger to the world, while apparently unintentional (the article makes that clear), was immediately understood by everybody and felt to be fair by the entire world
Americans, or at least a number of them, live in a state of denial about the opinion the rest of the world has of their country (interestingly, the article is more optimistic than me, saying that it is provoking such reactions precisely because Americans realise that they cannot go on being obnoxious and that things must change).

So, what finger are you?

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