Europe and the "Blessed Country"

By: Pamela Troy

One of the most frustrating aspects of watching the American mainstream media is the sense that many of us sitting at home on our sofas have more insight into what's going on internationally than the media's globe-trotting pundits. At least, that's how it appears. I suppose the highly paid network commentator who announces that we're unpopular in the Middle East mainly because we're just so free and good that those benighted Arab nations can't stand us, MIGHT actually know better than to believe his own copy. But that charitable assumption just leads us to mull over the likely reasons why the owners of these media conglomerates would pay their writers to be deliberately obtuse.

The live coverage of this weekend's peace demonstrations by CNN provided some especially glaring examples of this. While CNN was certainly less offensive than Fox and MSNBC in that it neither actively heckled nor ignored the rallies, the sheer cluelessness of the corporate media was still obvious. CNN was flummoxed by the size of the demonstrations, which defied any meaningful attempt to lowball the numbers and resulted in a comic disconnect between the "info" put out at the home base and the astonished reports from correspondents who were actually at the demonstrations. We would see a shot of Maria Hinojosa in New York, shouting over the roar of the crowd about the thousands who'd shown up to protest the war, while the crawl underneath would read something like: "Several hundred gather in New York to protest the war with Iraq."

But for me, the segment that produced the longest sustained period of muttering disbelief was a brief retrospective they did on the history of "Anti-Americanism" in Europe. This included archival footage of a London anti-Vietnam war march with the camera focused on a deranged, half-naked demonstrator arguing with a Bobby, and a brief quote, introduced with a helpful reminder about the Third Reich, from a demonstrator in this weekend's rally in Berlin. The segment was rounded off with a comment that went something like: "Once Europe stood shoulder to shoulder with the United States against Hitler's Germany and the Soviet Union, but now, oh how that has changed." You could almost hear the announcer add, "go figure". The possible reasons cited for this plunge in our popularity were the increased population of Middle Easterners in England and France, and the possibility that Europe has been feeling cranky and at loose ends since the fall of the USSR.

It was like watching someone fail one of those basic intelligence tests where the subject is supposed to look at three objects and explain what they have in common. Let's see now, the Third Reich was a powerful, well-armed country led by a man who believed that his racist doctrine of Aryan supermen entitled Germany to break treaties and ignore national borders. Naturally, Europe regarded the Third Reich as a threat. Soviet Russia, another powerful, well-armed nation, was imbued with a similar evangelical zeal and contempt for treaties and borders. Naturally, Europe considered the USSR untrustworthy. And the United States today.

In his most recent State of the Union George W. Bush, leader of the world's one remaining super power stated: "As our nation moves troops and builds alliances to make our world safer, we must also remember our calling, as a blessed country, is to make the world better." The nature of these "alliances" and why "moving troops" might be a part of making the world better became obvious when he went on to say: "the course of this nation does not depend on the decisions of others. Whatever action is required, whenever action is necessary, I will defend the freedom and security of the American people." And later, "All told, more than 3,000 suspected terrorists have been arrested in many countries. And many others have met a different fate." Then he leaned over the podium to peer significantly at his audience. "Let's put it this way: They are no longer a problem to the United States and our friends and allies."

By the time Bush observed: "One by one the terrorists are learning the meaning of American justice", it was obvious that "the meaning of American justice" no longer includes either due process or respect for international law. All of this gives a resonance that Bush probably did not intend to his observation that: "Throughout the 20^th Century, small groups of men seized control of great nations, built armies and arsenals, and set out to dominate the weak and intimidate the world."

So the Bush administration's concept of American "blessedness", our President's boasting hint about extra-judicial executions, and his contempt for the sovereignty of other nations couldn't possibly have anything to do with our current unpopularity in Europe now, could it? No, it must be all those AY-rabs who've moved into London and Paris. As I watched CNN coverage of the issue, I wondered if anyone there (aside from the British reporter who was plainly struggling to keep from chortling over the size of the London demonstration) is aware of the current administration's recent public pronouncements on our role in the international community. If not, I don't see how they managed to miss it. I mean, it's been in all the papers and everything.

One of many great unspokens in current American political discourse is where this rift between the United States and Europe is likely to lead. God knows, I'm no foreign relations expert, but from here on my sofa, it does seem to me that the implications of the Bush administration's approach to other countries that displease us do need to be taken into account when looking into future relations with Europe.

So far, I've seen no indication that the American exceptionalism we've embraced would preclude us from treating European nations that anger us any different from Middle Eastern nations that anger us. There might currently be pragmatic considerations about alliances and trade that would give us pause, of course, but times change. If, sometime in the future, we take it upon ourselves to "make the world better" by pressuring other western industrialized nations into adopting, say, our own free-market approach to medical care or social services, we could conceivably find ourselves facing a unified Europe prepared to fight us on every level.

God help me, I hope so. Of all the things we export to England, Germany, and France, I'd hate to see us sending them our life expectancy and infant mortality rates.

Perhaps we can derive some comfort from the fact that our President, this man who has announced to the world our intention as a country of doing what we please when we please, who leant over a podium to all but wink at us as he hinted at murder, whose foreign policy has resulted in an international outcry against our policies that is almost unprecedented, was not elected. He was appointed by our Supreme Court after an attempt to count the votes that would have decided the election for his opponent was halted.

If Bush continues to carry us as a nation and an international power, down the path we are going, we as Americans had better pray that the rest of the world will remember this.