Does European anti-Americanism exist ? (Normblog)
Several friends and acquaintances of mine, including intelligent and well-educated people with PhDs, have repeatedly admonished me over the past 5 years that there is no anti-American feeling in western Europe (or barely any). There are simply some disagreements with specific policies of the US government.
(Popular Francophobia in the US--which upsets many of these same people--is of course another matter entirely. That genuinely exists, and has no reasonable connection to anything that the French government or the French public have ever done.)
I must confess that my first reaction when I hear this is to suspect that these people are either unwilling to face reality, semi-delusional, or pulling my leg. But I suppose that this response on my part is mistaken and unsophisticated. Norman Geras (at normblog) just drew attention to a typical piece in the Guardian that might appear, at a superficial first glance, to be a banal expression of the kind of taken-for-granted anti-Americanism that pervades much allegedly "progressive" public opinion in western Europe. Closer inspection, however, reveals that it is actually an example of rigorous and penetrating policy analysis. For example:
(Kim Jong Il, Robert Mugabe, and the high officials in the Sudanese government "fuel themselves" on pizzas and hamburgers? I didn't know that, but that's interesting information, if true, since it suggests that an embargo on pizzas and hamburgers might be a useful humanitarian measure. But wasn't Hitler a vegetarian non-smoker? Maybe I'm missing something here. At all events, I'd certainly support any plan to round up SUVs and convert them to scrap metal.)
Norman Geras especially agrees with the concluding sentence of this piece::
Amen.
Cheers,
Jeff Weintraub
P.S. By the way, to forestall one obvious response .... If someone wants to argue that, OK, European anti-Americanism does exist, but it's justified (and even illuminating) ... then that's a different argument. It may be right or wrong, or maybe even a little of both ... but at least it starts out from some contact with reality.
Update, February 2007: See Andy Markovits - "Western Europe's America Problem".
======================
The Guardian
June 11, 2005
Nuts all round
Lucy Ellmann recoils from Francine Prose's A Changed Man, a novel smothered in optimism
Saturday June 11, 2005
The Guardian
Changed Man by Francine Prose (421pp, Allison & Busby £10.99)
American sentimentality may once have seemed endearing, but now we know it's just another instrument of evil. Every aspect of American culture has begun to stink of the grave. The pizzas and hamburgers: this is how world tyrants fuel themselves. The cars, the drugs, the music, the TV: this is how they distract themselves from their crimes. But how can they still think they're right about anything? Their children are deep-fried, drug-soaked numbskulls, the adults hapless lemmings in their SUVs, heading straight into the back-end of the American dream. Where is the guilt - and where the apology?
You won't get one from Francine Prose. Reading her is like going on an anthropological excursion into the heart of that darkness. The horror of it is not just that she seems to go along with the suburban-commuter lifestyle she depicts, but that she concludes, from her tale of neo-Nazi woe, that everyone is basically good, or at least redeemable. It's Panglossian! Her faith in America and the essential innocence of its inhabitants turns what could have been a challenging read into a witless fable for our times. What's more, it all has to happen in the present tense: Americans have no past.
Vincent, a neo-Nazi with SS tattoos and a nut allergy, has had an awakening brought on by taking ecstasy. He has decided to love everyone. So he steals his Nazi cousin's money, drugs and truck and drives straight to the Manhattan headquarters of World Brotherhood Watch, a human rights organisation, where he offers his services as informant and publicity coup. Is he for real, or a saboteur? The people at WBW (whose ideals have been spelled out for them by the founder, a Holocaust survivor, in several books that don't sell very well) seem surprisingly trusting of this shaven-headed stranger. He's given an office, two hundred bucks a week and sent home to live with Bonnie, the tremulous development director, and her two jittery teenage sons.
Vincent's rehabilitation proceeds apace; he soon loses any cynicism and falls in love with Bonnie. Within weeks he is able to prove his sincerity by determinedly finishing his speech at the Human Rights Gala dinner, despite having a severe allergic reaction to nuts in the salad, an incident that is referred to later as heroic (an evaluation that strikes even me, a fellow nut-allergy sufferer, as absurd).
Never mind Vincent's ambivalence, where exactly does Prose stand? Not only is her complacency troubling, her subject matter's tricky: romance and the Holocaust were never easy bedfellows, and require a delicacy of touch to which Prose does not aspire. Instead, she continually subverts her own writing by underestimating the reader's attention span, compensating for our supposed failings by relentlessly repeating herself, back-tracking, and telegraphing events 50 pages before they happen.
Prose's flair is for quiet moments, and she can be funny. There's a touching scene in which the head of the organisation arranges himself seductively for his wife, clutching a snifter of brandy and a copy of IBM and the Jews. Prose is nicely scathing about Bonnie's ex-husband with his Lincoln Navigator, new woman and new apartment in a "mammoth penile column rising forty stories over the East River, a whole building full of middle-aged doctors starting second families". When considering the efforts of an animal rights group keen to ensure that Timothy McVeigh's last meal was vegetarian (enough blood had been shed already), Vincent muses: "By those rules - kill someone, and you're looking at tofu."
So why does she insist on lurching the plot forward with a bunch of crowd scenes? No novel needs two dinner parties, a gala charity do, a TV talk-show reunion and a high school graduation. And in the middle of it all, there's an ad for Planeta wines: "It's as if they're drinking sunlight!" Perhaps she's got Spielberg in mind for the movie - everything's been pre-smothered for him in primness and optimism. So, we're all basically okay, and everything will be all right? Tell that to the 6m Jews who died, tell it to the Iraqis. Aw, tell it to the marines. As EE Cummings said: "There is some shit I will not eat."
· Lucy Ellmann's Dot in the Universe is published by Bloomsbury.
(Popular Francophobia in the US--which upsets many of these same people--is of course another matter entirely. That genuinely exists, and has no reasonable connection to anything that the French government or the French public have ever done.)
I must confess that my first reaction when I hear this is to suspect that these people are either unwilling to face reality, semi-delusional, or pulling my leg. But I suppose that this response on my part is mistaken and unsophisticated. Norman Geras (at normblog) just drew attention to a typical piece in the Guardian that might appear, at a superficial first glance, to be a banal expression of the kind of taken-for-granted anti-Americanism that pervades much allegedly "progressive" public opinion in western Europe. Closer inspection, however, reveals that it is actually an example of rigorous and penetrating policy analysis. For example:
American sentimentality may once have seemed endearing, but now we know it's just another instrument of evil. Every aspect of American culture has begun to stink of the grave. The pizzas and hamburgers: this is how world tyrants fuel themselves. The cars, the drugs, the music, the TV: this is how they distract themselves from their crimes. But how can they still think they're right about anything? Their children are deep-fried, drug-soaked numbskulls, the adults hapless lemmings in their SUVs, heading straight into the back-end of the American dream. Where is the guilt - and where the apology?
You won't get one from Francine Prose. Reading her is like going on an anthropological excursion into the heart of that darkness. The horror of it is not just that she seems to go along with the suburban-commuter lifestyle she depicts, but that she concludes, from her tale of neo-Nazi woe, that everyone is basically good, or at least redeemable. It's Panglossian! Her faith in America and the essential innocence of its inhabitants turns what could have been a challenging read into a witless fable for our times. What's more, it all has to happen in the present tense: Americans have no past.
[....] So, we're all basically okay, and everything will be all right? Tell that to the 6m Jews who died, tell it to the Iraqis. Aw, tell it to the marines.
(Kim Jong Il, Robert Mugabe, and the high officials in the Sudanese government "fuel themselves" on pizzas and hamburgers? I didn't know that, but that's interesting information, if true, since it suggests that an embargo on pizzas and hamburgers might be a useful humanitarian measure. But wasn't Hitler a vegetarian non-smoker? Maybe I'm missing something here. At all events, I'd certainly support any plan to round up SUVs and convert them to scrap metal.)
Norman Geras especially agrees with the concluding sentence of this piece::
As EE Cummings said: "There is some shit I will not eat."
Amen.
Cheers,
Jeff Weintraub
P.S. By the way, to forestall one obvious response .... If someone wants to argue that, OK, European anti-Americanism does exist, but it's justified (and even illuminating) ... then that's a different argument. It may be right or wrong, or maybe even a little of both ... but at least it starts out from some contact with reality.
Update, February 2007: See Andy Markovits - "Western Europe's America Problem".
======================
The Guardian
June 11, 2005
Nuts all round
Lucy Ellmann recoils from Francine Prose's A Changed Man, a novel smothered in optimism
Saturday June 11, 2005
The Guardian
Changed Man by Francine Prose (421pp, Allison & Busby £10.99)
American sentimentality may once have seemed endearing, but now we know it's just another instrument of evil. Every aspect of American culture has begun to stink of the grave. The pizzas and hamburgers: this is how world tyrants fuel themselves. The cars, the drugs, the music, the TV: this is how they distract themselves from their crimes. But how can they still think they're right about anything? Their children are deep-fried, drug-soaked numbskulls, the adults hapless lemmings in their SUVs, heading straight into the back-end of the American dream. Where is the guilt - and where the apology?
You won't get one from Francine Prose. Reading her is like going on an anthropological excursion into the heart of that darkness. The horror of it is not just that she seems to go along with the suburban-commuter lifestyle she depicts, but that she concludes, from her tale of neo-Nazi woe, that everyone is basically good, or at least redeemable. It's Panglossian! Her faith in America and the essential innocence of its inhabitants turns what could have been a challenging read into a witless fable for our times. What's more, it all has to happen in the present tense: Americans have no past.
Vincent, a neo-Nazi with SS tattoos and a nut allergy, has had an awakening brought on by taking ecstasy. He has decided to love everyone. So he steals his Nazi cousin's money, drugs and truck and drives straight to the Manhattan headquarters of World Brotherhood Watch, a human rights organisation, where he offers his services as informant and publicity coup. Is he for real, or a saboteur? The people at WBW (whose ideals have been spelled out for them by the founder, a Holocaust survivor, in several books that don't sell very well) seem surprisingly trusting of this shaven-headed stranger. He's given an office, two hundred bucks a week and sent home to live with Bonnie, the tremulous development director, and her two jittery teenage sons.
Vincent's rehabilitation proceeds apace; he soon loses any cynicism and falls in love with Bonnie. Within weeks he is able to prove his sincerity by determinedly finishing his speech at the Human Rights Gala dinner, despite having a severe allergic reaction to nuts in the salad, an incident that is referred to later as heroic (an evaluation that strikes even me, a fellow nut-allergy sufferer, as absurd).
Never mind Vincent's ambivalence, where exactly does Prose stand? Not only is her complacency troubling, her subject matter's tricky: romance and the Holocaust were never easy bedfellows, and require a delicacy of touch to which Prose does not aspire. Instead, she continually subverts her own writing by underestimating the reader's attention span, compensating for our supposed failings by relentlessly repeating herself, back-tracking, and telegraphing events 50 pages before they happen.
Prose's flair is for quiet moments, and she can be funny. There's a touching scene in which the head of the organisation arranges himself seductively for his wife, clutching a snifter of brandy and a copy of IBM and the Jews. Prose is nicely scathing about Bonnie's ex-husband with his Lincoln Navigator, new woman and new apartment in a "mammoth penile column rising forty stories over the East River, a whole building full of middle-aged doctors starting second families". When considering the efforts of an animal rights group keen to ensure that Timothy McVeigh's last meal was vegetarian (enough blood had been shed already), Vincent muses: "By those rules - kill someone, and you're looking at tofu."
So why does she insist on lurching the plot forward with a bunch of crowd scenes? No novel needs two dinner parties, a gala charity do, a TV talk-show reunion and a high school graduation. And in the middle of it all, there's an ad for Planeta wines: "It's as if they're drinking sunlight!" Perhaps she's got Spielberg in mind for the movie - everything's been pre-smothered for him in primness and optimism. So, we're all basically okay, and everything will be all right? Tell that to the 6m Jews who died, tell it to the Iraqis. Aw, tell it to the marines. As EE Cummings said: "There is some shit I will not eat."
· Lucy Ellmann's Dot in the Universe is published by Bloomsbury.
posted by Jeff Weintraub at 2:01 PM
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