Sporting skin-tight Wranglers, an “Everything’s Bigger In Texas” shirt and cowboy boots, the American raises his voice above the crowd to tell the Frenchman next to him how the United States saved his country during World War Two.

No, this is not a comedy sketch: it is a scene that many less offensive Americans have to endure when they visit our European friends across the Atlantic.

I have lived in Europe, spending the better part of a year trying to convince everyone that I really was Spanish and that my American accent was only a joke.

Why, you might ask?

Not because I am unpatriotic. I adorn my American flag boxers on the 4th of July like the rest of my fellow countrymen, but I am tired of explaining myself. Not all Americans voted for George Bush, not all of us enjoy war, not all of us are cowboys and not all of us disrespect foreign cultures.

For a long time I believed that all these stereotypes were about as unlikely as the American myth that all French smell bad, all Germans eat sausage and the English have bad teeth.

I could not understand why these well-educated Europeans would think that all Americans are culturally ignorant, gun-toting, horse-riding warmongers. It just didn’t make sense, until I started to look closely at my own experiences in Europe.

This summer, while meandering through the timeless artwork of the Reina Sofia, one of Spain’s most famous museums, I encountered an American man being accosted by security for taking flash photographs of “Guernica,” Picasso’s masterful Spanish civil war piece.

The fact that flash photography drains out the color in oil paintings was not even the worst part of the incident. What floored me was that the American leaned over to me and said: “Like any warning is going to stop me.”

“Guernica” is one of Europe’s most cherished cultural artifacts and to proudly place it at risk it is appalling.

Such cultural degradation could only be equaled in our society if a space alien seized control of daytime television and replaced soap operas with informative programming. Think of the hatred and confusion that would ensue, spreading like wild fire through households of stay-at-home parents and pre-pubescent girls.

If this stubborn tourist did not bring home the complete lack of compassion or respect for other cultures that many Americans have, a crass country music fan in Italy did.

One evening, while drinking away a sweltering Roman night in a popular Irish pub, the peace was shattered by an argument.

An American man, about forty years old, dressed in cowboy boots and a Toby Keith shirt, was screaming loudly at an Italian who had suggested that the war in Iraq might have been unfounded.

This quickly escalated, with the cowboy throwing punches while everyone else tried to calm him down. But alas, nobody could calm him down, and the bar had to be closed. How embarrassing.

These are the guys that we fellow American travelers have to look forward to when we go abroad. Not that you might run into too many of them, and I hope for your sake that you won’t, but if you do, be prepared for the fact that everyone will assume you are birds of a feather until proven otherwise, or take a leaf from me and consider going underground.

Until the culturally ignorant, gun-toting, horse-riding war mongers learn to respect other cultures, I will be traveling as Juan, the pale Peruvian.