European anti-Americanism

Illustration by Barbara Kelley

After my visit to Germany last summer, I posted here a piece on German anti-Americanism. The Germans, however, are only indulging in a widespread European phenomenon, as evidenced by what I read in today's edition of "euro|topics," a daily digest I receive in my email box. I receive the German version, but the link here is to the English homepage. It is well worth subscribing to if one wants to get a feel for what agitates Europeans about the world. Every weekday there is a new topic on which the European opinion class opines Today's digest concerned "One Year Trump." To be fair, there was a variety of views. Trump remains mysterious at best to Europeans, and not all the commentators were uniformly negative, although it could be expected that Le Monde would assert that Trump represents the end of liberal democracy. I get Europeans to some extent, and the disruption of their pieties is not surprising.

One response from the Belgium newspaper De Standaard, however, was a really stand-out piece, exposing not simply hatred of the the U.S. president, but also every preconceived notion about the kind of country the U.S. represents. Here is the short version in English, oozing disdain and hatred, by Nick De Clippel:

“The problem is not Trump but that there were enough voters who lifted this rodeo clown into the saddle. If Trump falls from the horse, they're still there. ... The question is how could the US be allowed to go to rack and ruin like this, to gamble away all the moral authority it had, to fall behind on all levels (except the stock markets). ... Basically it was written in the stars that sooner or later a country with shopping mall schools, with Fox News as an analysis programme, with monsters like The Gong Show and The Jerry Springer Show as 'human interest' programmes would sooner or later have someone like Trump as president. A society driven by blind greed for profit and the resulting decay in education and media is responsible for this.”

That's pretty rich coming from a citizen of Belgium.

Excuse my arrogance, but Belgium is country that can't even keep track of the terrorists it harbors. That has two language populations that hate each other. That has a history of colonialism that is the worst in modern history. What has Belgium done for the world, aside from chocolate and beer?

De Clippel reproaches the U.S. for loss of "moral authority." What moral authority does "Europe" possess aside from its pieties and platitudes?

Airing one's dirty linen in public

North Carolina, 1950, Courtesy Arnika Dawkins Gallery

Today there was a discussion among friends about Paul Beatty's book The Sellout. We get together to talk about books, but for me this one was a slog to read. Partly that was due to the "rap" nature of the narration. Beatty's background, before his ventures into fiction, was as a rap poet, for which he has enjoyed considerable success. And while I concede the excellence of the conceit of the novel -- a black man in Los Angeles claims a bit of the city and reinstitutes slavery there for which he is arrested for offending the constitution -- I was uncomfortable with the novel. Of course, my friends and probably everyone else would say that discomfort was the author's intent: I, a white person, deserve to be made uncomfortable by racism experienced by blacks throughout the novel.

Later, however, thinking back on our discussion, I discern another reason for my discomfort. Thus, the title of this post. Let me explain.

I grew up in the 1950s, when divorce among ordinary folks was quite rare. In 1955, for instance, the rate stood at about 2.2 percent. Among that 2.2 percent was my father, who had been married for a short time many years before meeting my mother. Compounding this unusual state of affairs was that my father was Catholic. He and my mother, who was Protestant, were not married in the Church. As a Catholic child, this was an excruciating state of affairs, as my religious instruction made clear that divorce was a serious sin. It was indeed a shameful subject, one that was never talked about. I am sure I never mentioned it to any of my friends.

Fast forward. I go to college. In my first semester I take a course called Sociology 101. A friend of mine, a veteran of high school English instruction, has coined the term "the Rubicon theory of reading," according to which there is a sentence beyond which no student will pass. For me, the very first sentence in the textbook in the sociology course might have signaled the end of my university career: "Sociology is one of the social sciences." It was English, but what did it mean? I think you get where I was coming from. Still, with persistence, I came to terms, sentence by maddening sentence, in the thick textbook, with concepts like culture, socialization, role conflict, division of labor, altruistic suicide (!), secularism, gemeinschaft, gesellschaft, and ethnocentrism.

The subject around which American liberal and illiberal political opinion was centered in 1961 was that of racial integration, a charged issue to which I was introduced, of all places, in the sociology class. In my perusal of the table of contents in the textbook, I had noted that a chapter was devoted to race, but one morning this perplexing American social problem was addressed by my professor with considerable vehemence. I can't recall the specific content of his utterance, for the blood rushed to my head and made coherent thought impossible. To hear this white professor dwell so openly on instances of shameful treatment of blacks made me uncomfortable, which I suppose was his intention. My discomfort could be seen as an effect of the new environment into which I had plunged at seventeen, one that challenged one's dearest preconceptions. Indeed, the episode is the first I recall in which new social realities truly collided with my own convictions.

I speak not of civil rights, however, but, rather, of the professor's forthrightness. From my point of view, the professor was engaging in a flagrant breach of decorum: he was talking about inappropriate things, like sexual intercourse, in mixed company. My discomfort was principally because of the black students in the class. I would have been equally mortified had he held me up as an example of the suffering that a child feels because of a parent's divorce Although I could scarcely know what a black person had suffered –– no more than could the professor –– I knew that blacks suffered. But I also felt that suffering was an intensely personal matter and that the real blight was the deep inner wounds. The shame of discrimination was probably as deeply rooted as were my father's shame about his divorce and his conviction of living in sin. Being forbidden to use a water fountain was not something you wanted people to notice when they thought about you.

What had a strong effect on me was the professor's breach of decorum, particularly the lack of challenge or response to it. Although his comments, focused as they were on the less-than-human treatment of blacks, might be very wounding to blacks, openness was apparently part of being a smart, with-it person, especially if it concerned airing mortifying aspects of one's experience.

Now, to the point of this long preface. One thing Beatty's novel makes evident is the relentless focus on the shame blacks often feel about "being black," especially if "black" is the first thing with which one identifies oneself. In the last chapter of The Sellout, the narrator goes to open-mike night at a club patronized by blacks. The black comedian opens with this line: "Your mama been on welfare so long, her face is on the food stamp." Now, that is not something to joke about, IMHO. Whites should not find this funny. On one evening a white couple strolled into the club and took front-row seats and laughed and snickered knowingly at the comedian's jokes,"like they'd been black all their lives." The  comedian got irritated by their laughter, "howling the loudest. Slapping the table. Happy to be noticed. Happy to be accepted." He finally drove them from the club.

I was thinking about that when I watched the opening of Dave Chappelle's Netflix special. I had never heard of him until I read about The Sellout. What struck me about Chappelle's show was the number of white and Asian faces right up front laughing their heads off at his jokes. I didn't watch very long, so I don't know if he engaged in the "mama's picture on the food stamp" variety of one-liners, but every other word out of his mouth was a "foul" one.

So, when I think back about my life and that of my parents in the 1950s, it strikes me that, above all, even in our shame about certain things in our lives, we always kept our heads up and maintained our decorum. And I bet that was also the case for blacks, who lived in even more shameful circumstances: they kept their heads up and maintained appearances. Now that we have all become "liberals," we air our dirty linen in public and find it funny to do so.

The Face of Love

During this Christmas season it strikes me that many of the posts on this blog have a Grinch-like tone. Indeed, I live at odds with much that is valued in the current Zeitgeist. Thus, when I started "One Off," one of my purposes was to vent at what I consider the stupidities of the present opinion class. Thus, the "Reflections on Life, Culture, Despair, and Joy." In my eyes, reflection is lacking at the present time.

Today, however, as indicated by the title of this post, I will try to write something un-Grinch-like. Because I am Grinch-like, when I walk down the streets of Manhattan I am constantly making unreflective judgments about much that I encounter. In other words, spontaneous reactions. Quite often, these judgments are negative and pessimistic. For instance, so many fat people. So many people without any style. So many stupid conversations of adults with children. On and on it goes. And, yet, I also constantly monitor myself and my negativity. I know that I am looking at the world and the life around me via my own set of eyes. These eyes are a sensuous instrument, and other people have different eyes from mine. Regarding the same phenomena, they may not agree with what I see.

That is surely the case when one regards another person with the eyes of love. What may appear ugly or not very attractive to my eyes will manifest itself differently to a person in love with that person. Getting over our first impression of a person is the first step in moving toward the state of love. In fact, my own experience has shown that exceptionally positive initial judgments often turn out to be wrong. Love is not a matter of the eyes, but of the heart.

Photo credit: Dreaming newborn

Liberal group think

When my liberal friends talk about Donald Trump, I point out to them that, on any given day, they all make the same points about him and that they all use the same language. The following passage, which I came across yesterday in Dorris Lessing's novel Martha Quest, portrays the "intellectual" ambience in which liberals exist:

“As she turned the pages [of the New Statesman] and the lines of print came gently up through her eyes to her brain, without assault, what she gained was a feeling of warmth, or security; for here were ideas which she had been defending guiltily for years, used as the merest commonplaces. She was at home, she was one of a brotherhood. Yet when she laid down the journal she could not have said in detail what she had read, what were the facts; but she gave, unconsciously a great quivering sigh, and lay back on her bed …”

This passage portrays so beautifully why liberals don't have to think and why they all simply say the same things on any given subject: they need only soak up and repeat the phrases offered by the prominent media. Thus, the current tax proposals of Republicans will "kill." Subjecting immigrants to careful background checks is "Islamaphobic." There is no nuance among liberals.

Some people might object here and say that conservatives also depend on such an intellectual life line for their opinions. However, if you read the leading conservative publications (in particular The Weekly Standard and The National Review), you will discover quite a variety of points of view concerning the president. Some writers positively hate him, while others, even if approving, find him aesthetically revolting. The pieces that favor certain presidential policies or acts (tax reform, immigration, Jerusalem) are not the majority, by a long shot.

So, while the title of this post is "Liberal group think," in reality liberals do not think. Or, to put it more kindly, they are relieved of the burden of thinking by repeating what they are told, somewhat like children in a catechism class.

The Ungrateful Generation

I used to write a lot of short stories and have recently begun trying my hand again. Tastes have changed since those early days, so I have been browsing story collections. A glowing review in The New York Times led me to a collection by David Gates entitled A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me. Wonderful title, right? The following comment in the review made me want to read more: "a smart book about smart, articulate people who get in their own way again and again, engaging in episodic festivals of bad decisions and then talking about their plight with arresting candor, in language rife with humor and allusion." I have made my share of bad decisions. Sometimes I think I have learned from them, become wiser. Mostly I wish I had never made them.

Associate professor, University of Montana

So, I checked the book out of the library yesterday and began reading. The first thing that struck me was their totally in-the-present character, mostly about places and people in New York and the Northeast. The first story I read, "An Actor Prepares," dropped references to the theater Circle in the Square, The Fantastiks, episodes of Kate & Allie, Cherry Lane theater, David Sedaris, Ben Kingsley's performance in Twelfth Night, and a Singapore Airlines commercial.  Had I not lived in New York City for the last 30 years, the topics that come up in conversation in the course of the story would totally have escaped me. The story appeared in The Paris Review in 2014, but already it is outdated.

Now, for the bad decisions. The story concerns an actor, handsome in his youth, who had some breaks, bringing him minor, local repute, but nothing big. He has aged out, and his sustenance (aside, we assume, from commercial residuals) is a teaching gig in "theater arts" in Westchester. He travels to Vermont to appear in a summer production of Twelfth Night, is not wise enough to avoid being seduced by the girl who plays Viola, ends up with a broken nose and is out of the play. At the end, the mood is wry. He spends the rest of the summer in a small house overlooking a lake in Dutchess County, a man alone without any attachments, getting along, enough money to be able to float through life without any deep personal investments. He is a bit like the remittance men in the novels of Dickens, having enough money to get by, but lacking the incentive to undertake the real work of life.

A reference in the story to the actor's father having worked with Stanley Donen (b. 1924), whose most famous films (Singin' in the Rain, On the Town) were made in the early 1950s, situates the actor in the same generation as David Gates, born 1947. This is the generation that now makes up much of the teaching staff in colleges and universities across the land. In another story we are introduced to just such an academic couple -- teaching at Yale. Although now divorced, they are forced into contact because of an out-of-control teenage son who runs rings around them. Without any backbone, but with those teaching jobs (tenure in the case of the wife) they are never faced, like the rest of us, with responsibility for what are minimized simply as "fuck ups." Only one generation in history has had the benefit of this irresponsible cradle-to-the-grave existence, the kids born in the late 1940s and who entered the institutions of American life in about 1974. They went to school in the early 1950s, where they learned the 3Rs, were taught to write in a comprehensible hand, as well as the ability to sit at a desk for several hours straight. They became the best educated generation in American history and are really characterized by their articulateness. Not only do they fill the teaching professions, they are also in advertising, the media, and the law.

Despite all the advantages they have enjoyed -- and I have to add here that, of course, I am a member of this cohort -- appreciation for all America has given them is not their reigning attitude. American is always lacking, chiefly as represented by their political attitudes. Why did I not find it surprising that the director of the play in "An Actor Prepares" says that he loathed David Mamet before he became a Republican? There is the expected derision of houses displaying American flags. Making bad decisions and bearing no consequences has been their privilege.

This is the kind of story that gets you published in The Paris Review and The New Yorker.

Liberal dogma

Dianne Feinstein used an interesting phrase when questioning one of Donald Trump's judicial nominees, Amy Coney Barrett, a professor at Notre Dame with seven children (!). Concerning Barrett’s writings regarding the professional obligations of Catholic practitioners, Feinstein said of Barrett: “When you read your speeches, the conclusion one draws is that the dogma lives loudly within you.”

Lives loudly in you.

Definition of dogma: a principle or set of principles laid down by an authority as incontrovertibly true. The original meaning comes, of course, from Church doctrine, but Catholic dogma has now been replace by liberal dogma. The views of liberals have become so naturalized that they take for granted that their views are the default setting. And liberals are in lock-step as much as people were in lock-step in the Middle Ages.

One of my favorite instances of this lock-step concerns the role of humans in climate warming. It is always contended that 97 percent of scientists believe that climate warming is caused by humans. My response: 97 percent of theologians once believed that Galileo was wrong when he contended that the earth revolves around the sun. When 97 percent of people agree on something, I am always suspicious.

Liberalism is a religion, and like the Catholic Church in an earlier age, liberals want to erect great monuments to their religion: thus, the huge government expenditures in the last half-century to implement the world's salvation.

Picture credit: Sultan Knish

Europe and "the world"

Macron looks tough

It is amusing to observe how European leaders and, indeed, the "thinking" population of Europe believe that they are responsible for managing the world. Every weekday I receive via email a daily digest of news reports from a German site called euro|topics. (The link here is to the English version.) Every weekday there is a topic, and two of the recent topics prompt the observation with which I began.

For instance, on August 28 the question was "Was the Paris refugee summit a success?" Thus, the photo above.

Apparently European and African leaders met in Paris to discuss ways of stemming migration across the Mediterranean. The summit came up with this response to the refuge problem: Asylum applications can now be processed directly in African states. Commentators have reacted variously, "welcoming the move," but doubting that it can be implemented. Others are aghast, and call the meeting "the summit of disgrace." Among the different news outlets weighing in were The Guardian, Deutschlandfunk, La Stampa, Kurier (Austria), and a Czech newspaper. In other words, these are all the responses of editorial writers of European media.

The UN Security Council meditates

On August 30, today, the question was "How should the world deal with North Korea?"

Indeed.


This topic came on the heels of North Korean launching a missile over Japan and the Pacific. Perhaps I am being supercilious: certainly we should be worried about North Korea. But Europe has got itself in a morass because of Angela Merkel's welcome to immigrants. The reaction to the morass is always a summit. The picture here is apparently a meeting of the UN Security Council. I am sure they will figure things out.

Photos: picture-alliance/dpa