Excerpt:
One of the lessons of September 11th is that every day millions of people wear baseball caps, listen to Britney, watch Friends, eat at Dunkin' Donuts, and go see Ali -- and they don't have a clue about America. In London, the broadsheet newspapers that devote most space to American cultural trends -- The Guardian, The Independent -- are the most vehemently anti-American. You can easily like American pop culture without liking America. On the other hand, if you dislike American pop culture, it'll make you dislike America even more. Thus Jean-Pierre Chevenement, French presidential candidate, and his famous statement that the United States is dedicated to "the organized cretinization of our people." There was a whiff of this yesterday when another presidential candidate, Alain Madelin, described this week's massacre in a French town hall as an "American-style byproduct." One Frenchman -- a left-wing eco-nut -- kills eight other Frenchmen, but somehow it's evidence of America's malign cultural influence.
You can sort of see what he's getting at. Wherever you live around the world, the landscape of the imagination is America: In the movie in your mind, the car chase takes place on the Golden Gate Bridge, the love scene in Central Park, the massive explosion at the World Trade Center. The world watches Hollywood's America in a kind of post-neutron-bombed way: You get the sex and the shoot-outs, but the spirit of the country remains as foreign as ever.
In Britain, they played up the "black Oscars" angle because, being a racially relaxed society, they find American breast-beating and self-flagellation on the subject hugely enjoyable. On the Continent, where real racism of all kinds is pervasive, they took Hollywood's bizarre determination to muscle in on the civil rights struggle 40 years too late as confirmation things must be far worse over there. I'd gladly award a lifetime achievement Oscar to each of Halle Berry's breasts, which reportedly received half-a-million apiece for their exposed role in Swordfish -- that's $19-million less than John Travolta got, and they gave a much better performance. I'm certainly happy that Los Angeles' limousine liberals have finally caught up with those right-wing racist Republicans who handed out starring roles to Condi Rice and Colin Powell. But to suggest that giving one beautiful, talented actress a statuette is some kind of civil-rights breakthrough is absurdly self-regarding even by Hollywood's standards. It was compounded by the "tribute" to Sidney Poitier, which solicited testimonials only from black actors and thereby ghettoized his achievement, making "black acting" seem a specialization award, like Best Foreign Language Film.
When Hollywood has such difficulty liking America, it's no wonder its foreign audiences find it so hard. Deprived by their networks of the 9/11 content, the Europeans weren't missing anything: It was victim stuff, strangely outdated, like a movie that's been in development too long. The stars expressed sympathy for New York, but not the Pentagon. They saluted the firemen, but not the heroic passengers of Flight 93, never mind the brave men of the 10th Mountain Division -- or, if we're being multicultural, the Princess Patricias and the Australian SAS. The montage of vox pops that opened the show included Laura Bush plus Willie Brown, Mayor of San Francisco, Jerry Brown, Mayor of Oakland, Lani Guinier, onetime Clinton Administration nominee, and Al Sharpton, New York's pre-eminent racebaiter. That's not just a four-to-one Democratic advantage, that's four far-left ideological Dems to one non-political Republican spouse: A very Hollywood idea of balance. No wonder that when Robert Redford started peddling his boilerplate about how it's more important than ever to cherish "freedom of expression," Mr. and Mrs. America switched off in record numbers.
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