America: not such the new black

Apropos of the previous post. I was in the locker room at the my council-run gym, the deteriorating spartan facilities of which resemble a sports club in some post-Ceauşescu Romanian parochial city about five or so years after the Soviet money dried up. The staff at that Romanian sports club would probably be cheerier than my gym's.

At any rate, these two guys were next to me, completely ripping into their incompetent colleague who had "cost the company shedloads, shedloads, mate." I couldn't follow what kind of business they were in, it was something financial or insurance which made my eyes glaze over. But my ears perked up at the last word, spoken with Olympian finality: "Yeah, well, he's American. From the American Hawaiian Islands, so you know he would be a bit dim."

I was mildly irritated, partially at the off-hand received wisdom that an American would be stupid. But what really galled was this bozo had emphasised that their co-worker was from the American Hawaiian Islands. As opposed to what, the Russian Hawaiian Islands? Obviously he had conflated some of his Pacific islands and doesn't know shit from Samoa.