Love and Hate Across the Atlantic

...Lewis, and even Françoise Sagan...

...Price complained of a "view held by a minority of European eûtes on both ends of the political spectrum, that America's egalitarian society caters to the vulgar and rewards the mediocre...

...In television sitcoms, stand-up comedians' routines and newspaper cartoons, the American has once more blossomed forth as the philistine triumphant, unable to tell a Giacometti from a standing lamp or a cordon bleu concoction from a Big Whopper...

...When harmony reigns internationally and domestic stresses are under control, transatlantic disdain and derision ebb...

...It still offers substantial rewards to the visitor from the United States—a host of agreeable sights and sites, an exhilarating taste of a variety of cultures, and a particular sort of living history...

...dotty demagogues who revile America's cultural and political values," and a subtle, insidious anti-Americanism found within elements of the European establishment...

...The sneering Ambassador Price mentioned does occur...

...Europe] had Fellini, de Sica, Renoir, Bunuel—and yes—Brigitte Bardot...

...Where are the ideas now...

...Television and a bewildering deluge of publications have forced the pace, permitting the spotlight to focus only briefly on any one phenomenon, line of reasoning or esthetic creation before moving restlessly on...

...Americans are more likely than Europeans to recall that this year marks the 40th anniversary of the Marshall Plan, on which the United States spent $13 billion to save Europe from industrial stagnation and ruin after World War II...

...We are political and cultural neophytes, they seem to say and...

...Gorbachev may have a more highly skilled public relations team than Reagan...

...Europe is now in a hurry, just as America has been for a long time...

...the outbursts of...

...Reagan, on the other hand, in the words of London Independent columnist Peter Jenkins, is viewed as "imprisoned in a moral universe of his own, surrounded by ideological cronies, the actor-politician who can only play himself—and that has gotten tedious where it is not alarming...

...The seemingly ceaseless flow of violent trivia from Hollywood is again being pointed to as proof of the thrill-seeking shallowness of modern American civilization...

...The Ambassador's assessment was roughly accurate, but he was overreacting...

...On the whole, though, the current upsurge of anti-Americanism in Europe is a mild eruption—practically only a hiccup compared to the massive antiVietnam demonstrations that besieged American embassies in European cities in the late '60s and early '70s, or the protests in this decade against the deployment of U.S...

...It is virtually impossible to find any European this side of the Iron Curtain who holds a higher opinion of Reagan than of Gorbachev, even while many acknowledge that the charismatic Soviet Party chief's impact could fail to live up to present expectations...

...So it is hardly surprising that the recent turmoil in the world's stock and currency markets—seen on this side of the Atlantic as largely a consequence of America's gigantic Federal deficit—has been no exception...

...THE POLITICS OF CULTURE Love and Hate Across the Atlantic By NORMAN GELB London Almost every major international development since World War II appears to have triggered a resurgence of antiAmericanism in Europe...

...Indeed, the sneering and the scolding that has been surfacing of late is perhaps not so much an expression of anti-Americanism as a European response to the contrast between President Ronald Reagan and Communist Party General Secretary Mikhail S. Gorbachev as paladins of their respective nations and peoples...

...I remember," he said, "discovering the Hegelian dialectic, Jungian universal symbols and the world of Kierkegaard...

...Norman Gelb writes regularly for The New Leader on British affairs...

...Yet despite this, on a mass level cultural links between the United States and Europe have, if anything, been growing closer...

...Such recent spectacles as those involving Gary Hart, Senator Joseph Biden and Judge Douglas H. Ginsburg have been cited in some European circles as reflecting the general zaniness characteristic of the American political system...

...Black Monday on Wall Street has given rise to a sustained chorus of public officials, economists, editorialists, and dinner table pundits urging the United States "to get its act together...

...The decline in the value of the dollar has come as a shock for U.S...

...It has become addicted to whims and fancies, rather than ideas and movements...

...But Americans seeking eternal verities are as likely to find them today in Albuquerque as in Athens...

...We had Hollywood...

...Not long ago, U.S...

...Germain have turned, on their individual levels, into extravagances...

...nuclear weapons on European soil...

...American terminology has infiltrated telecommunications, high technology and international business across Europe...

...Americans, meanwhile, are finding Europe something less than enchanting...

...During a recent visit to London from his Brussels bailiwick, Alfred Kingon, the American ambassador to the European Community, told the Royal Institute of International Affairs that he was disappointed with what the Old World has become...

...European anti-Americanism (and American anti-Europeanism) has been built into the transatlantic relationship since Europeans first began flocking to America to shed their origins and create a new nation...

...Ambassador to Britain Charles H. Price spoke of both a "strident anti-Americanism long evident in...

...such amovewouldhaveledtothebarricades going up in the streets a few years back...

...Kingon noted that when he was a young man, intellectual and cultural thought in the United States was dominated by Europeans...

...Why, he might further have rhetorically asked, do European scientists, psychologists, etc., flock to the United States now...

...Revivals of Broadway musicals are a great success in London and, in translation, in West Berlin...

...The London Times recently quoted an American official as confessing that "our studies show many Europeans think more highly of Gorbachev than they do of President Reagan...

...A different dimension of disenchantment with Europe also troubles some Americans...

...But a Welsh-English television executive complained to me that his daughter raced home early from this year's Eisteddfod, the annual celebration of Welsh culture and identity, not to miss cheerleader practice for a group of Cardiff youngsters who have turned their backs on rugby—practically a religion in Wales—in favor of American football, the fastest growing sport in Britain...

...What has happened to Europe is what happened to America earlier...

...But whatever the reason, the simple fact is that the Soviet leader is seen here as superintending what could turn out to be a historic revolution in the largest country in the world—and that is exciting...

...Yet rare is the university don in this part of the globe who would not jump at the offer of a position at an American institution of higher learning...

...Europeans dread the impact of the dollar's decline on their ability to lure formerly free-spending Americans to their shores next summer...

...visitors, who are suddenly discovering that Burberry raincoats, Waterford glasses, boat trips on the Rhine, admission to the Uffizi Gallery, even coffee and a croissant at a café on the Boulevard St...

...Moreover, it is a tidal phenomenon, rising and falling with the circumstances of the moment...

...A good philosopher, a good psychologist, a good musician, a good scientist, a good doctor, a good artist, either fully trained or spent some graduate years in Europe...

...Everything we did in postwar America was a function of European ideas...

...The currents of literature flowed from Europe—from Kafka, Sartre and Camus, from Herman HesseandC.S...

...Referring to Brown University, a British newspaper columnist facetiously asked, "Is that its real name or are they all color coded over there...

...The fact is that America—its on again/of f again reputation for shallowness, immaturity and grubbiness notwithstanding— is still seen, even by most of those who do the sneering, as a land of more good qualities than bad...

...Nonsense...

...At other times, they can reach the floodlike proportions we see now in Spain and Greece, where despite strongly expressed local popular resentment, the United States is begging to retain military bases as part of the NATO defense screen...

...In France, few were the cries of cultural imperialism when it was decided to go ahead with the construction of a Disney wonderland outside Paris...

...pose a danger to all those around us...

...London's Harrods Department Store does not expect a recurrence soon of the remarkable day last year when it closed its doors in the evening to find that it had actually rung up more dollar bills than pound notes...

...Concomitantly, there is excessive concentration on the less attractive aspects of the American image...

...But, asked Kingon, "what has happened to Europe...