Americans Or Idiots?

Walking down Friedrichstrasse the other day, I saw a poster proclaiming, “Bush isn’t an American! He’s an idiot!”

“Gee, thanks,” I thought, for implying that the two concepts are mutually exclusive. Many people throughout the world have become more inclined to see “American” and “idiot” as intimately linked. The British tabloid Daily Mirror famously asked in a front-page headline on November 4, 2004: “How can 59,054,087 People Be So Dumb?”

Of course, the Friedrichstrasse sign also implied that those who chose Bush were idiots, but the basic notion of divorcing a hated leader from a larger population is common here in Germany. Perhaps this is based on their particular history and its larger-than-life villain, but regardless of the reason, it is a fairness I have come to highly appreciate.

The even-handed, rational German approach to forming political opinion certainly doesn’t mean that people are uncritical. There is hefty, biting criticism of America here. But it is measured, justified, and rarely leveled in the mainstream press for aesthetic trendiness or out of the sort of emotional infancy on hand at The Daily Mirror.

Not so different after all

The Mirror’s emotional outburst irks because it makes Americans “the other,” when in reality the relationship between the United States and Europe is much closer than Mirror editors may be comfortable admitting.

As historians from Eric Foner to Reinhold Wagnleitner have pointed out, America is none other than a continuation of post-Enlightenment European trends of individual freedom, capitalistic enterprise, etc. left to ripen in modernity without the tempering and derailing influence of continually destructive domestic wars.

Supported by copious Alexis de Tocqueville quotes, commentators from all spectrums also like to point out how little the American character has changed in the last two hundred years, becoming merely an enhanced caricature of itself. In other words, we remain the transplanted Europeans we once were.

Crass American commercialism

The European creation of America was quite clear to me this weekend in Hamburg, where I learned about local shipping company HAPAG’s advertisements for the land of freedom and opportunity. Through trained representatives, the corporation spread glorious images to the poorer farming areas of southern Germany as well as to Eastern Europe so that emigrants would decide to make the trip on their ships.

If that’s not crass “American” commercialism, I don’t know what is. And we mustn’t forget that colonially ambitious British monarchs actively worked to convince their subjects that a fresh, young land lay open for exploitation just across the Atlantic. No wonder Americans feel so entitled to rule the world -- they were promised it long ago, when they were still Europeans.

I had a very European moment of not understanding the US the other day when I wondered aloud how Bush found so much support from middle America in the last election (I, too am susceptible to Mirror-like astonishment at times).

A friend from the Midwest responded by explaining that Kerry embodied the arrogance of coastal people like me, a born-and-raised New Yorker, and that it was difficult for people to vote for someone who condescended to them. In order to help me understand this mindset, he entreated me to remember moments when Europeans acted as though they were more “civilized” than Americans.

Even if I agreed with some of what Jacques Chirac said, my friend asked, would I vote for him for president?

A circle of condescension

But if Europeans are busy disapproving of America, and coastal Americans are busy disapproving of central ones, who are those “heartland” inhabitants looking down on? Those who look down on them, of course -- and this is the mirror image of European resentment of American cultural hegemony, the resentment of a perceived encroachment of values.

It might not sell ship tickets, but disdain and resentment are common factors on both sides of the Atlantic. Thank goodness, however, that knee-jerk anti-Americanism -- so trendy in other regions -- barely has a toehold in mainstream German society. I get to enjoy living in a place where the resentment and disdain are backed up by carefully-weighed arguments.