Yankee in a nation full of Dodgers fans?

I feel comfortable saying Australia is obsessed with America. Our news is all over their tv stations, our television shows are streaming in their living rooms, and iconography about America is everywhere. Every trip to the beach turns up a swimsuit or towel bedecked with the American flag. Maybe one of the most conspicuous things is that about one in three people seem to own a Los Angeles Dodgers hat, and maybe one in five seem to own a New York Yankees hat. I am increasingly sure those two teams are almost entirely funded by sales of their merch in Australia. 

This is particularly mysterious because baseball is (emphatically) not a thing in Australia. Cricket is the thing played in back yards, at parks, and on beaches. It's the thing people listen to on the radio and watch on tv in the bars. The baseball caps are popular because the interlocking LA is taken to just mean, well, Los Angeles, California -- and the interlocking NY on the Yankees hat has come to symbolize New York City itself. It's some strange baseball cap-based metonymy. But the USA-themed clothing doesn't end there. It's extremely common to see people wearing t-shirts that say "California", for instance. There are at least two shops downtown that specialize in vintage American t-shirts, and where you can buy questionably licensed new shirts with university names on them, but these are not likely to be the correct colors. Last week at the pub quiz (=bar trivia night) I saw someone wearing a shirt from a tourist trap in Florida.

But America is somehow both cool and uncool. Americans are frequently referred to somewhat derogatorily as "Yanks" (the American connotations of Yankee don't apply in Australia -- you're a "Yank" whether you're from New England or the Pacific Northwest or anywhere else. Even more derogatorily, rhyming slang labels Americans "seppos". If you're confused about that, it's because "Yank" rhymes with "septic tank" and anything longer than two syllables follows Australian abbreviation rules, which are simple, if weird. You just drop everything after the first syllable and add "-o". Voilà: seppo. It's not my favorite moniker ever.

Everyone keeps well apprised of US news. It impacts a lot of people, so this makes sense. But it puts me in a weird situation, too. Americans abroad have a reputation for believing the world revolves around them, and that others' cultures should adapt themselves to our tastes, interests, and level of adventurousness. I don't like that stereotype and honestly about 10% of my brainspace at any given moment when I'm out in public is taken up by anxiously worrying about whether people think about me as one of those Americans. Given my intense desire to avoid looking like the world revolves around me, I don't usually want to talk about what's happening in America, and I feel like it is especially easy to look arrogant and self-centered if I go with this line of conversation. The thing is, the level of attention paid to US politics, pop culture, and current events suggests that, uh, the world does in some ways revolve around us.

I'll tell you what, though. I am tired of being the token American in the Donald Trump era. I cannot wait for people to stop seeing me and then immediately asking about whatever the hell Trump did this week. I am hoping we can wade through the threat of domestic terrorism and pandemic devastation into a nice, boring stretch of US politics.