That is perhaps because all right wingers are now having an orgy of France bashing. I am monitoring the readers opinions posted to BBC and Yahoo/Reuters news - virtually every comment posted by a US-ser is gloating about the French riots followed by real nasty comments about the French concluding that they got what they deserved because they did not support "us" in Iraq.
My explanation is that scapegoat bashing is the only way US "patriots" can feel about their beloved nation-state nowadays, because there is nothing else that can "make them proud" - they beloved leader not only failed to implement their agenda but is cutting their benefits (medicare), his popularity seems to be plummeting, the economy is limping, "their" jobs are going overseas, "America" is a dirty word all around the globe, and EU seems to be doing far better, their problems notwithstanding.
W. Kiernan:
> I wrote earlier in this thread, "It's our turn." What I mean is,
> imagine the internet existed in the 1930s, so the man-in-the-street
> could fire off comments to international news websites with smaller
> effort than popping the cap off a bottle of beer, do you think emails
> out of the German or Japanese commenters would have been less stupidly
> arrogant than Americans's are today? or Englishmen's emails from the "by
> jingo if we do" era of Indian and South African colonialism? or
> Frenchmen's emails during Napoleon's Spanish and Russian wars, or during
> that revolting Dreyfus business? Spaniards's emails about the
> destruction of the Aztecs? Romans's emails during Caesar's conquest of
> Gaul? Athenians's emails regarding the sack of Melos?
You certainly have a point here - those kinds of feelings are not unique to the US. However, the brash and bombastic style of the US style of expression was already observed by Alexis deTocqueville well before the US was even dreaming of being an empire (i.e. during the Andrew Jackson administration). DeTocqueville's explanation of that tendency (I paraphrase) is that individualism and anti-intellectualism (which he mistakenly in my view sees as a product of democracy) creates indifference to public concerns, so one needs to be brash and bombastic to attract public attention.
A somewhat similar argument was proposed by Hofstadter, who linked it to anti-intellectualism that developed on this side of the pond as a result of religious and business influences, and the class structure. I tend to agree with this line of thinking.
So while I agree with your argument that asshole jingoism, arrogance, bombastic hyperbolism and self-righteousness are not unique to the US, I also believe that the US is particularly fertile and tolerant of this form of expression.
Wojtek