What Europeans Really Think of America

...My perspective, of course, also reflects my having lived in Europe for more than 30 years and confronted stereotypes about Americans most of my life...

...In the past half century, global TV and cinema have made the USA familiar, almost a part of our daily existence and a fixed reference of modernity...

...They are almost all performing to a script...

...In a sense, it is like what happens in Galaxy Quest, the 1999 science fiction spoof that is one of my favorite movies...

...The Guardian correspondent was by no means the first British reporter to express a love-hate/attraction-repulsion relationship with the United States and its people in print...

...For years, I have been lectured about Yankee imperialism, civil rights abuses, CIA covert actions, religious fundamentalism, puritanism, prurience, and—lately—the U.S...

...These range from Friends, to Seinfeld, to various Star Treks, to Sex and the City, to Dr...

...Her new book...

...they are united within the socalled First World and share similar living standards, religious orientations, economic systems, and forms of democratic government...

...even many interviews are, if not scripted, at least predictable...

...Consider, for instance, the American broadcasts available in Italy...

...In Muslim and developing countries the image of America is skewed by North/ South, East/West economic inequalities, by longstanding, direct grievances over foreign policy, and by sharp differences in contemporary culture...

...The inventions and goods we cannot do without, even if we detest them, are American: the car, the telephone, the airplane, the cinema, television, and, further, the atomic bomb, the exploration of space, the computer, Coca-Cola...

...He declaims about its culture, politics and social systems at length, but he has never been there.His entire knowledge comes from movies, books, articles, television, and othermedia, plus limited firsthand contact with Americans...

...To that I usually reply, Yes, I am—very typical of a certain type of American (East Coast, urban, college educated, middle class, liberal Jewish intellectual, ex-hippy, etc...

...Since September 11, a lot of people have been wondering about what others really think of the United States, especially now that the initial outpouring of sympathy has been rather rapidly replaced by a torrent of anti-Americanism in newspaper columns and once-polite salons...

...The bulk of attention, not surprisingly, has centered on the Muslim and developing worlds...

...Though I haven't explored all of them, they include CNN International, MSNBC, Fox News, and National Public Radio...

...Indeed, the idea of America is so potent that it was present even before the rest of the planet was aware of the continent's existence...

...He then proceeded to list 50 "reasons why the U.S...

...Dickens dedicated his book to his friends in America, who, he said, "giving me a welcome I must ever gratefully and proudly remember, left my judgment FREE...

...Before America could be discovered, it had to be imagined," wrote Peter Conrad in his 1980 book Imagining America...

...Afterward, I had a long discussion with my hosts, trying to explain that life in America was really not—quite— like that...

...It was neocolonialism and cultural imperialism...

...One was that he felt he had to write it in the first place—that is, to remind his readership there is something to like about the United States...

...Long before the United States became the earth's only superpower it was "the new world," the "last frontier," the "Far West...

...He began with the state of race relations in America compared with that in Europe, went on to mention the weather, the landscape, public libraries, the First Amendment, legroom on Amtrak, walk-in closets, clapboard houses, and the fact that "America has a sense of occasion," making "every rite of passage into an event: commencement, homecoming, the high school prom, whatever...

...He calls me a nationalist and I tell him that if I had the money, I would buy him an airplane ticket to New York and a sixmonth pass on the Greyhound bus...

...Subsequently, America's overwhelming media, economic, cultural and political reach has been such that impressions of it were and are, for the most part, constructed and concretized with little or no direct contact with the country itself, and often with only limited firsthand contact with its people...

...But there is a lot that I love, or at least like...

...Yet these are the Americans, and the slices of America, that come into my living room, more often and in greater numbers than my friends and family...

...political policy...

...It was the land of superheroes, but also supervillains...

...Even I, an American, thus end up having a virtual relationship with my countrypeople and my country asportrayed on the screen...

...correspondent, Matthew Engel—who has something of a reputation for being tough on the Yanks —in direct response to feedback on earlier articles...

...The "ordinary people" and "ordinary situations" portrayed in movies and sitcoms are actually fabricated...

...WHICH BRINGS ME back to Matthew Engel's column...

...I personally experienced an instance of this syndrome when I spent the night, during the late 1980s, with a Muslim family in a small town in the highlands of Montenegro...

...Never mind whatever evidence you present to the contrary, let alone whether or not they have ever set foot in the United States...

...For Italians over the past 50 years, "the United States has been an active and constant presence we have had to deal with in every aspect of civil, political and economic life, both internal and external," writes Italian sociologist Massimo Teodori in Maledetti Americani ("Damned Americans"), a recent book about anti-Americanism...

...This has created multiple visions, pro and con, that were brought sharply into focus by September 11 and its aftermath...

...Many non-Americans feel they know, they absolutely know, what an American is, or should be...

...its streets were paved with gold and everyone was rich...

...Here in Europe, however, I cannot turn off the TV, go outside, and find the broader, three-dimensional, fleshand-blood American context in which they were created...

...Until then, I had never seenDynasty in English and had not been able to appreciate the arch campiness of the dialogue...

...Europe and America, by contrast, are joint pillars of "the West...

...A land of Puritan obsession, yet a jazz-hot place where anything goes...

...itself is often in the background of American life, for better or worse, as it is lived day by day...

...In Italy, where I occasionally watched it, it was dubbed by serious actors speaking beautiful Italian, as if they were performing a serious play or film, and this lent a strong aura of "reality" to the production...

...role as the devil behind globalization by earnest strangers who regard individual Americans, no matter what theirpolitics, as representatives of the state...

...But my insistence often falls on deaf ears...

...The list mostly comprised elements of American life that are perfectly quotidian, but are apparently little known, much less appreciated, in Britain...

...is wonderful...

...For me the evening was revelatory in a different way, too...

...What fills the flashy foreground of TV screens, videos, magazines, newspapers and whatnot in the U.S...

...And since my student days I have had to respond to locals who tell me, as a compliment: "You are not a typical American...

...Columbus knew what he hoped to find before he left Europe...

...Another, as noted by an American reader in London, was that on his long list of reasons why the United States is wonderful "there was not a single political or government accomplishment, unless you count the legroom on Amtrak trains or the First Amendment to the Constitution...

...We all watched an episode of the soap opera Dynasty, shown in the original English, with Serbo-Croatian subtitles...

...This was long before I read Mark Twain's Innocents Abroad and recognized that the first and fullest stereotype of American tourists abroad was provided by the pen of one of America's own finest writers and social critics...

...Today, I find the disconnect between the image the American media sends to Europe (and the world) and the America I find when I return home for a visit even more sharply defined, and disturbing...

...an oasis of freedom with a violent heart of darkness...

...I found Engel's column remarkable for a number of reasons...

...Historically, too, America is a product of Europe...

...There is no context...

...America's influence is felt in every corner of the world and in every sphere of life...

...As a child in London, I had a friend who came to a masquerade party in costume as an American wearing baggy shorts, with a goofy grin and a camera slung around his neck...

...That's not to mention the many American films and the music videos shown on MTV What one gets from all this is such a broad vision of America and Americans that it is easy to mistake it for the real thing...

...They have fixed notions of a people and a country that are derived from lifetimes of looking toward the other side of the ocean through lenses frequently distorted—by yearning, envy, resentment, distance, stereotype, disgust, or desire...

...After dinner, they herded me into a room whose centerpiece was a large TV with a bust of Marshal Tito on top...

...from the media that I see in Europe—positive and negative—is there, but, unlike in Europe, it is not there in a vacuum...

...On the contrary, he almost seemed to be emulating Charles Dickens, whose 1842 work, American Notes: A Journey, contained a damning indictment of slavery and sharp, sometimes sarcastic descriptions of the behavior, personal and political habits, and even speech of Americans...

...It is easy to feel this familiarity...

...They recognized that Dynasty was a TV show, fiction, but they were convinced it reflected a higher, common reality...

...Similarly, the German writer Karl May, whose enormously popular novels about the Far West have sold in the multimillions over the past century, never set foot in the United States...

...The driving theme of Galaxy Quest is that aliens in outer space have been capturing broadcasts of American TV shows and watching them not as fiction but as "historical documents," as reality, the truth...

...People react to the representation of Jews, or to the idea Jews and what they represent, rather than to flesh-and-blood, living Jews themselves...

...everything is taken at face value: a mention of Gilligan's Island prompts sad shakes of the head and sorry murmurs about the fate of "those poor people...

...In an odd way this phenomenon is similar to anti-Semitism, and in particular to the "anti-Semitism without Jews" and "philo-Semitism without Jews" found in parts of contemporary Europe where few if any Jews live today...

...Letter from Morruzze What Europeans Really Think of America By Ruth Ellen Gruber MORRUZZE This past June the Leftleaning British Guardian published a column titled "Fifty Ways to Love America...

...I also can see Meet the Press, the Late Show with DavidLetterman (several times a day) and, on weekends, The Tonight Show with Jay Leno and Late Night with Conan O'Brien...

...But despite the glut of images, products, sounds, reports, and ideas about America and Americans, much if not most is absorbed, assimilated and makes its impact without the benefit of context...

...The entire globe fantasizes about America, with the help of America's own cultural and pop cultural mass market exports, colored by U.S...

...Other stations run various American sitcoms and dramas, some in English, the majority dubbed into Italian...

...Yes, I recognize that the simulated situations on the tube may be "realistic" but are not "real...

...The Italian spaghetti Westerns, after all, were shot near Rome...

...In addition, they are partners—if unequal ones—in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization...

...Like millions of other people here, I subscribe to a digital satellite system that provides hundreds of channels...

...Quinn Medicine Woman...

...In London, I nearly got up and left the dinner table last fall when an Englishman I know, speaking about the September 11 attacks, said "America had it coming...

...Let's face it, there is a lotthat I cannot stand about America, a lot thatscares me, depresses me, worries me, repels me, and drives me crazy...

...A German acquaintance of mine, for example, a Leftist member of the 1968 generation, considers himself an expert on the United States...

...Virtually Jewish: Reinventing Jewish Culture in Europe, has just been published by the University of California Press...

...The Americans I see, though, are either actors, journalists, politicians, pundits, or other celebrities...

...And this, in an age of U.S.-media overload, was perhaps most remarkable to me...

...Apparently trying to mollify me, he added that what had truly "surprised" him on a trip to the United States was "the fact that it was so beautiful...

...It was written by the newspaper's chief U.S...

...Europeans have had centuries of experience in imagining America from many points of view: as explorers, as conquerors, as potential settlers, as adversaries, as the source of immigrants, as older, established societies that saw themselves challenged and overtaken in many ways by the younger nation...

...Our conversations usually degenerate into volcanic arguments...

...Ruth Ellen Gruber is a regular contributor to The New Leader...

...But I myself have been thinking, in particular, about the image of America in Europe...

...Some readers, wrote Engel, "appear to have inferred that because I might consider American gun laws insane, their executions primeval, their fruit tasteless, their work ethic relentless, their intelligence agencies incompetent, their Attorney General sinister, and their President a nudnik, that this makes me in some way anti-American...

...The list ended with "the sense that things are getting less decrepit, not continually worse," and then the exhortation, "God bless America...

...Everything I know, learn and perceive about the U.S...

...Or it was the land of opportunity, but of racial discrimination as well...

...and who, loving their country, can bear the truth, when it is told good humoredly, and in a kind spirit...