[Grit]

An interesting read on the history of Anti-American sentiment.

[Maelstrom]

bump

[Stentor]

Two centuries of alienating Europe.

Fortunate is the existence of the Atlantic ocean. While we were alienating Europe, they were killing each other in great numbers.

[Davis]

Check out American anti-Americans, HERE

[Publius]

Citizens, Schama's book on the French Revolution, is still one of the greatest history books of the past generation.

This article is pretty good, but I'm surprised that Schama mentions Charles Dickens without mentioning Martin Chuzzlewit, which contains some hilarious -- and devastating -- views of Jacksonian America along the Ohio River.

[Utah Girl]

Bump

[Shermy]

It's odd. A narrative of the prejudices of mostly snobbish European literary figures complaining about perceived American faults which their homelands practice or suffer worse. Kipling complaining about American patriotism? Gag me!

The author has an inferiority complex about being American (if he is). A standard line with these folk is that anything European is better, smarter, lacking in self-interests, etc.

[SquirrelKing]

More proof that there's nothing new under the sun. Remember, we didn't go over in WWI or WWI because we loved "good 'ol Europe", we went to kick some a$$ because somebody had to do it.

[Chi-townChief]

Don't you just love those wacky half-baked EuroPeons?

[Mears]

THe thing I've been trying to figure out for all of my 70 years on this earth is why,if you hate America so much,don't you leave?


It's a puzzlement!

[Frankss]

Oh Lord it's hard to be humble!

[CyberCowboy777]

Check this out

http://www.teesdale.com/global/global.html

[Shermy]

The title is:

Two centuries of alienating Europe.

Loaded, to say the least. Places "America" as the actor-subject, even transgressor, and plays "Europe" as neutral or victim. Yet Schama's tale is mostly Europeans coming to America and seeing Americans act like themselves. The sentiment reads as a mix of resentment and disgust.

[dasboot]

There's a common theme running in all the citations: the conditions found in specific parts of America didn't meet the genteel requirements of these traveling diarists. What snobbery!

America was--and is--the regional reflection of the free inhabitants: some people freely choose to live, and find comfort, in squalor..or chrome skyscrapers...or farms...or sanitized cul-de-sacs. The lack of homogeneity--to anyone's perticular standards--is the natural and preferrable result of freedom.

I've read some of the works the author cites, and they are hardly as negative in the main as she asserts. There are some parts of this society in which I find little of redeeming value; other parts to which I aspire. I take freedom, warts and all. I can freely choose my existence: I can wolf my corned beef among the unwashed, or extend my pinky with the wealthy. This is inclusiveness, diversity.

My immigrant fathers and mothers were variously political refugees, slaves, paupers, farmers.....I'm grateful they chose this offensive "sewer" in which to live.

"Sour Eurograpes." Achieve us, y' girlie whimps.

[jpl]

The "sophisticated" folks in Europe (and their American ideological soul mates) can recite all our historical blemishes and hypocricies and quote all of the "ugly Americans" they want to as far as I'm concerned. It's all just a fancy way of covering up the bottom line. They viewed the colonial Americans as being backwards, uneducated, simple rustics well before we even gained our independence. It's completely incomprehensible to them that such a bunch of low-life unworthies became #1, and it galls them to this day.

[xJones]

I kind of lost interest when I read to the paragraph about,

The conduct of Americans at dinner said it all. They wolfed down their food, cramming corn bread into their sloppy maws during meals that were devoured in silence, punctuated only by slurps, grunts, scraping knives, and hacking coughs.

Granted, that does sound like a like of my family dinners, but we don't think anymore of that than a sheikh slopping a lamb's eyeball with his hand, or a Frenchman munching on his snail.

[fr_freak]

This is an interesting read on the history of anti-American sentiment, but you'll notice that the author never says a thing to suggest that the purveyors of the sentiment may have gotten it wrong. In fact, his conclusion, which incorporates all the typical European (and American lefty) attitudes regarding the impending war with Iraq (the US can't go it alone, the US needs Europe, etc.) suggests that he believes that all of the European anti-American observations were correct, that the US is a rough country of raw meat-eating unsophisticates who can't be trusted to lead world affairs.

I've had personal experience with this kind of attitude from Europeans. I remember one discussion I had with an Englishman who questioned my expressions of patriotism in the same way that Kipling was described to have done. This guy couldn't believe that I would make statements like "the USA is the greatest nation on Earth". He claimed that Europeans, through centuries of experience, had become far too wise and sophisticated to make such claims about their countries. One incredible example he gave me was that France is world-reknown for their cheese, but the French don't go around claiming to be the greatest nation on Earth (although I would argue tht point). Cheese, for God's sake. My response to him was that Europeans generally refrain from running around claiming their country is greatest not because of a greater sophistication and worldliness, but because every single one of them knows that it's not true. The USA dwarfs every one of them in every way that matters, and that's what bugs them the most. They WISH they could brag about their country, but the reality of US supremacy would make them appear ridiculous.

The European brand of nationalism has usually been a mindless one, borne from emotion and upbringing than real thought. But what these guys don't understand is that my patriotism is derived from my whole-hearted belief that the USA embodies the best of human principles, both in the construction of government outlined in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution (however improperly interpreted and ignored they may be in recent years) and in American culture, which, until recently, was extremely moral. And those principles have so far saved us from a full slide into the Leftist brand of tyranny that now seems to own most of western Europe and Canada.

And please excuse my long-windedness.