Vive la France?

[Michael Pugliese]

<URL: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/16059 >
> ...Anti-Europeanism in America
By Timothy Garton Ash
This year, especially if the United States goes to war against Iraq, you 
will doubtless see more articles in the American press on "Anti-Americanism 
in Europe." But what about anti-Europeanism in the United States? Consider 
this: To the list of polities destined to slip down the Eurinal of history, 
we must add the European Union and France's Fifth Republic. The only 
question is how messy their disintegration will be. (Mark Steyn, Jewish 
World Review, May 1, 2002)
And:
Even the phrase "cheese-eating surrender monkeys" is used [to describe the 
French] as often as the French say "screw the Jews." Oops, sorry, that's a 
different popular French expression. (Jonah Goldberg, National Review 
Online, July 16, 2002)
Or, from a rather different corner:
"You want to know what I really think of the Europeans?" asked the senior 
State Department Official. "I think they have been wrong on just about 
every major international issue for the past 20 years." (Quoted by Martin 
Walker, UPI, November 13, 2002)
Statements such as these recently brought me to the United States—to 
Boston, New York, Washington, and the Bible-belt states of Kansas and 
Missouri—to look at changing American attitudes toward Europe in the shadow 
of a possible second Gulf war. Virtually everyone I spoke to on the East 
Coast agreed that there is a level of irritation with Europe and Europeans 
higher even than at the last memorable peak, in the early 1980s. Pens are 
dipped in acid and lips curled to pillory "the Europeans," also known as 
"the Euros," "the Euroids," "the 'peens," or "the Euroweenies." Richard 
Perle, now chairman of the Defense Policy Board, says Europe has lost its 
"moral compass" and France its "moral fiber."[1]This irritation extends to 
the highest levels of the Bush administration. In conversations with senior 
administration officials I found that the phrase "our friends in Europe" 
was rather closely followed by "a pain in the butt."
The current stereotype of Europeans is easily summarized. Europeans are 
wimps. They are weak, petulant, hypocritical, disunited, duplicitous, 
sometimes anti-Semitic and often anti-American appeasers. In a word: 
"Euroweenies."[2]Their values and their spines have dissolved in a lukewarm 
bath of multilateral, transnational, secular, and postmodern fudge. They 
spend their euros on wine, holidays, and bloated welfare states instead of 
on defense. Then they jeer from the sidelines while the United States does 
the hard and dirty business of keeping the world safe for Europeans. 
Americans, by contrast, are strong, principled defenders of freedom, 
standing tall in the patriotic service of the world's last truly sovereign 
nation-state. A study should be written on the sexual imagery of these 
stereotypes. If anti-American Europeans see "the Americans" as bullying 
cowboys, anti-European Americans see "the Europeans" as limp-wristed 
pansies. The American is a virile, heterosexual male; the European is 
female, impotent, or castrated. Militarily, Europeans can't get it up. 
(After all, they have fewer than twenty "heavy lift" transport planes, 
compared with the United States' more than two hundred.) Following a 
lecture I gave in Boston an aged American tottered to the microphone to 
inquire why Europe "lacks animal vigor." The word "eunuchs" is, I 
discovered, used in the form "EU-nuchs." The sexual imagery even creeps 
into a more sophisticated account of American–European differences, in an 
already influential Policy Reviewarticle by Robert Kagan of the Carnegie 
Endowment for Peace entitled "Power and Weakness."[3]"Americans are from 
Mars," writes Kagan approvingly, "and Europeans are from Venus"—echoing 
that famous book about relations between men and women, Men Are from Mars, 
Women Are from Venus.
<SNIP>

-- 
Michael Pugliese

"Without knowing that we knew nothing, we went on talking without listening to 

 each other. Sometimes we flattered and praised each other, understanding that 

 we would be flattered and praised in return. Other times we abused and shouted 

 at each other, as if we were in a madhouse."
-Tolstoy