> I did, mainly London and Dublin, and few brief excursions outside these
> metropolitan areas. However, I did not witness much of what most visitors
> to the US notice immediately - inordinate amounts of trash and noise
Well, I can only surmise that you either haven't been here for a long time, or that you stayed well away from the parts of town popular with young males on weekends, because in my experience as a five year resident of Dublin, and a student in London before that, that is *exactly* what you will see. Indeed when my sister came out to visit me last year she was utterly appalled at the behaviour she witnessed on the streets late at night. And she lives in Manhattan.
I take your point about the general ugliness of cities, but that wasn't what I took issue with in your post - it was your description of littering and anti-social behaviour as "uniquely Yank". It's simply not.