Why They Hate Us — the Europeans, That Is

A cool essay by Janet Daley in The London Telegraph today:

.... I am off to Washington at the end of the week, where a think tank has invited me to discuss European anti-American attitudes. What shall I say to them?

That the obvious truth - America is resented because of its enormous power - is only a fragment of the picture? That the foundation of anti-Americanism lies deep in the pathology of a Europe that has never recovered from its own guilt and self-loathing over the two great wars of the past century?

How to make Americans, most of whom are descended from the most despised and wretched of the populations of the Old World - poor southern Italians, landless Irish peasants, ghetto Jews of eastern Europe - understand that much apparently political resistance to them is grounded in pure snobbery? The great American virtues - self-improvement, ambition, individualism - are, in European establishment eyes, the characteristics of vulgarity.

The consumer-led culture of America, so embarrassingly coveted by the poor peoples of the world, is crass, sentimental and socially gauche. Of course it is. It is the only popular culture there has ever been that is cosmopolitan and affluent, as opposed to the folk cultures of Europe, which dwell in provincial poverty but have their own "integrity" in patronising bien-pensant terms.

I shall have to explain, too, that none of this is very consistently held. The demonised America of the imagination has little to do with the actual one that many of those same intellectuals know well from their book-plugging tours and their visiting professorships. The same people who ridicule American culture will tell you that The Sopranos is the best drama series on television and that Philip Roth is the greatest living novelist.

But how much reality can the ideologically committed be expected to digest? And when has self-contradiction and incoherence ever been a problem for the Left?

(Thanks, Charles.)

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Wed. 04/09/03 07:39:17 PM
Categorized as Social/Cultural.