Descending on Whom? Thus far it's been a fine week for boneheaded, blinkered, thick-witted Euro-takes on the American polity and American policy. My fellow 'merkins can get quite a few good snickers out of Anatole Kaletsky's boilerplate caricature; I'll highlight just a few, er, points of his thesis that the properly and eternally divided quality of our democracy is actually a pathological Manichean conflict between the (highly unsavory) religiosity of the right and the more-or-less sane and secular left. The implicit contrast is to a Europe evolved far beyond "culture wars". Heh. Good one, sir:

The America that is feared, distrusted and increasingly disliked in the rest of the world, and especially in Europe, is the conservative country that constitutes George Bush's political heartland in Texas and the South - the America of self-righteous Christian fundamentalists, of military machismo, of gun shops, lethal injections, anti-abortion zealots and gas-guzzling pickup trucks spewing out greenhouse gases. The America that Europeans find fascinating and beguiling, albeit a bit frightening because of its shifting moral compass[whatever that's supposed to mean - mb], is the liberal US of Bill Clinton, centred on Hollywood, Manhattan and Silicon Valley.

Drunk the Kool-aid, Kaletsky? Is it possible to write a paragraph sillier than this? Is he really trying to persuade that Europeans in general are this simple-minded, this ignorant, and this self-righteous?

Reviled red-zoners never have creditable reasons for holding opinions contrary to a Clintonite or a Kaletsky. Support for Israel, for example, is never a reasoned support, it's "unstinting", entirely without reservation on any point whatever of Israeli policy, utterly mindless. The intrepid Kaletsky has obviously braved terrifying red-zone America, yea even beyond the Olive Garden, to learn such things, and in the very best line in the whole article he solemnly intones -

I have heard Christian preachers on American radio saying that Israel was clearly in the right because God promised the whole of Palestine to the Jews and that fulfilment of the promise might bring forward the Second Coming of Christ.

He hath heard on American radio...

You can hear a lot of neat stuff on the radio, Mr. Kaletsky. I keep my car radio tuned to the most whacked-out AM stations I can find. (Unfortunately for your thesis, though, the hostess on the fundie-Christian radio station yesterday afternoon was in a lather over the depredations of the Patriot Act.) Great stuff, endlessly entertaining. I guess AM radio is to America what the French bestseller list is to France. But keep on preaching, brother:

Secular Europeans, whose pragmatic scepticism has been tempered in the furnaces of Hitler's and Stalin's dogmas, feel a certain chill when they see the poison of religious certainty seeping into the mainstream democratic politics of the world's sole nuclear superpower.

Odd thing is, Mr. Kaletsky, at the beginning of the last century pragmatic and sophisticated Europe bore the same condescending relation to the idealistic, religious, puritanical boobs'n'rubes of America as it does today. But it was not American souls that Hitler's and Stalin's dogmas came to own.

UPDATE: James DiBenedetto puts this much more succintly in the comments section: "[I]t's typical Euro-whining with a pretense of serious analysis. Don't these people ever get tired of their own stupidity?" (He also comments at length over at his blog.)

Posted by Moira Breen at July 03, 2002 06:48 PM