Sauerkraut Cowboys
GRUBER, RUTH ELLEN
______Letter from Berlin_______ Sauerkraut Cowboys By Ruth Ellen Gruber Berlin On My First Day back in Europe after a week and a half in the United States this winter, I attended a dinner...
...Ray Allen Billington, the late, great historian of the American West, illustrated this brilliantly in his Land of Savagery, Land of Promise: The European Image of the American Frontier in the Nineteenth Century (1981...
...For America is regarded by Europe’s elite as both the center of superpowerdom, of the international art world, of insidious pop culture, etc...
...Whatever, after my Berlin intellectual dinner it was refreshing to spend a few days in the company of people I have come to call “Sauerkraut Cowboys...
...too prudish, too pornographic...
...across the table sat a British historian...
...George W. Bush is a fake cowboy,” he wrote...
...Meanwhile, the musicians get a chance to network and schmooze...
...Another man I ran into was a die-hard German country music buff I will call Anton, whom I have met several times at previous fairs and festivals...
...GEORGE W. B USH is only the latest in a long line of Presidential “cowboys” going back to Teddy Roosevelt, who, along with his friends Owen Wister (author of The Virginian) and the painter Frederic Remington, was one of the inventors of the archetype...
...I’m a great dancer, but you are American...
...Folks sporting cowboy hats, boots, buckles, and fringes, plus older participants dressed hobbyist style in hoop skirts and frock coats, swished and swaggered, drinking beer and munching nachos and chili...
...too obsessed with history, not having any history...
...his wife, at the end of the table, wore clear-framed glasses and slightly spiky short hair...
...The cowboy is a patriot...
...I knew only the friend who had invited me...
...I mean, really...
...Anton greeted me like a long lost friend...
...The conversation went, I guess, as conversations at such dinners often go : Abitof this and abitof that with the soup, leading to a bit of Am erica-bashing with the main course...
...Later, on my way out, I ran into him on the dance floor...
...It has possessed me like a disease...
...Bands played half-hour sets on four stages—simultaneously...
...Although out of print, Billington’s observations remain extremely relevant today...
...most of the acts were German, but there were also some this year from Poland, Norway, the Netherlands, and the U.S...
...too anarchic, too controlling...
...For festival organizers, agents, promoters, and club bookers the Fair provides an opportunity to assess the bands...
...Anton leads a double life...
...Y e t by now those attitudes are pass...
...They made up the crowd of thousands who attended the annual Country Music Fair—a three-day event held each winter at the rambling concrete community center of a huge residential and commercial development in the far northern end of the city...
...Their comments reflected a much more nuanced understanding of the United States, of its culture and ideals...
...and “the frontier” of lawlessness—or at least the flaunter of international laws—frequently governed by a “cowboy...
...Artists selling CDs, screening DVDs and videos, giving autographs, etc...
...He must be a good worker...
...Bring on the criticism, OK...
...But liberals from both coasts and Europeans who derisively call Bush a ‘cowboy’ foolishly insult not Bush, but one of America’s prime ennobling myths...
...He has traveled in Texas, speaks English with a Texas accent, and once told me he preferred Lone Star beer to any German brew...
...Presidents have used this powerful iconographic symbol to define themselves and their administrations to the nation and the world...
...Everything is cool, Anton is here,” he said...
...A silver Texas medallion hung, as always, around his neck...
...You are a great dancer,” I told him...
...It will, the Center says, “explain how the Presidency became intertwined with the emerging image of a heroic American cowboy at the turn of the 20th century, and will explore the ways that U.S...
...he declared, singing along...
...too concerned with culture, not having any culture...
...Oh God, I thought, not again...
...I am a terrible two-stepper...
...Their views are more often based on the propaganda of Communist countries than on reality, but those views are nonetheless firmly planted— to the detriment of world harmony...
...Ruth Ellen Gruber writes regularly for The New Leader on her travels in Europe...
...To my right was a former Swedish ambassador...
...He must not advocate or possess racially or religiously intolerant ideas...
...During his free time he is a “Texan,” a man who feels such identity with the state— and its state of mind—that he sometimes sounds like a Texan born in a German body...
...As I was writing this letter, I paused to read Jonathan Yardley's Washington Post review of a new book by Andrei S. Markov its called Uncouth Nation: Why Europe Dislikes America...
...he said...
...He was wearing a white cowboy hat and a blue and white checked shirt he had just bought...
...too idealistic, too materialistic...
...It was a far cry from that dinner table...
...In such European circles, Markovits notes, Americans are viewed, paradoxically, as “too religious, too secular...
...Fittingly, for 2008 the Autry National Center in Los Angeles is planning an exhibition on Presidents and cowboys...
...A professor of comparative politics and Germ an studies at the University of Michigan, he portrays their stance "as a generalized and comprehensive normative dislike of America and things American that often lacks distinct reasons or concrete causes...
...Don't they read the New York Times online...
...Among those he quotes is the British author Margaret Drabble, who, for exam - pie, makes an amazing self-assessment that anyone with a brain should be embarrassed to admit: "My anti-Am eric anism has become almost uncontrollable...
...And, tragically, those views are rooted in the long-held belief that frontier America—and to a lesser degree the United States as a whole— was a land where might ruled over right, where brutality was the way of life, and where an Indian minority was heartlessly wiped out by white aggressors...
...Already in the early 1970s, while I was a student in Italy, I had become sick of being told I am "not a typical American" when, in fact, I think I am quite typical of a certain American type...
...Billington’s book concludes with an epilogue titled “The Persisting Image...
...He must never go back on his word, or a trust confided in him...
...political (and social) history, not to mention disregarding the 2006 election as well as the loud, angry and eloquent criticism of the Bush Administration I had just heard to the max from friends and family, let alone the media, in the United States itself...
...But please, please, make it something other than a self-satisfied nyah nyah nyah...
...Letter from Berlin_______ Sauerkraut Cowboys By Ruth Ellen Gruber Berlin On My First Day back in Europe after a week and a half in the United States this winter, I attended a dinner at a research institute in Berlin...
...Before the 2004 Presidential election, Eric Baard, writing in the Village Voice, deconstructed the Code and demonstrated that Bush, far from being a cowboy, violated in one way or another each of the Code’s tenets...
...the United States] as a ruthless predator, a foe of minorities, and an enemy of progress...
...The animus against the U.S.—against "US," "Americans," rather than the Bush Administration— was so predictable, so smug and, well, so uncreative...
...It will also show how the press, foreign governments, and domestic political opponents have found cowboy imagery useful in criticizing Presidential policy and leadership...
...He must respect women, parents, and his nation’s laws...
...To my left sat a German historian, a heavyset man in his 60s with a stubbly white beard and a nice, wide smile...
...In an essay in Granta m agazine a few years ago, the American-born Israeli H aim Chertok recalled how he encountered such "vacuous anti-Americanism" for the first tim e while hitchhiking around France in the 1960s...
...too elitist, too populist...
...Wow...
...It rises in my throat like acid reflux...
...He described Bush as an “asshole...
...Dozens of vendors and reportedly over 100 country-and-western artists were jammed into the complex, creating a teeming “Wild Western space”—a razzle-dazzle kaleidoscope of red, white, blue, and buckskin...
...It was Gene Autry who inspired a generation and more of children, including the current Oval Office occupant, with the following 10-point “Cowboy Code”: “The cowboy must never shoot first, hit a smaller man, or take unfair advantage...
...But you are American,” he replied...
...If these views helped shape the attitude of Europeans today, as the evidence seems to indicate, the image-makers played a larger role in history than anticipated, and must be recognized if we are to understand the world we live in...
...German Wild West wannabes, they dress the part to demonstrate their connection with and often lust, if not love, for the United States...
...All the contradictory criticisms and simplistic stereotypes—both positive and negative—were more or less set in stone by about 1838...
...See also~New Books by NL Writers...
...too dominated by women, too controlling of women...
...Youre-electedhim in 2004," was repeated with a wistful yet accusatory little curling of the lip, like a m antra— a mantra sweeping aside the complexities of U.S...
...The love of the country, the music, the people, does not depend on love of the President,” one man in his 50s who was dressed in fringed buckskin and a Davy Crockett-style cap told me...
...The book dealt with the way literate Europeans then saw the American frontier (and, by extension, America...
...Over my years in Europe I have heard my fill of anti-American rhetoric...
...Booths overflowing with Western-themed T-shirts, trinkets, jewelry, and the like lined the corridors...
...He must be gentle with children, the elderly, and animals...
...had booths too...
...too individualistic, too conformist...
...All week he holds an executive-level job in downtown Berlin...
...Slow down, slow down...
...America, in the view of some Europeans, is so obsessed with freedom and individualism that this obsession impedes genuine individuality...
...He must help people in distress...
...He must always tell the truth...
...For them, the “Land of Promise” is still no less a part of the American equation than the “Land of Savagery...
...He must keep himself clean in thought, speech, action, and personal habits...
...Maybe it was my jet lag, but I found the anti-Americanism expressed during that dinner in Berlin particularly irritating...
...This is country music...
...He swept me onto the crowded space, backpack and all...
...I soaked up the atmosphere and reconnected with a number of musicians, vendors and Western-scene stalwarts I had met in previous years...
...After sherry in a pleasant reception parlor, we took our places around a candle-lit table for six...
...Upon discovering they had made a temporary American captive," he wrote, "salesmen, farmers, truck drivers seemed driven to challenge the teenager in the passenger seat: 'How do you explain Selma?' As thoughl were Bull Connor incarnate or the French were not themselves torturers...
...None, however, made sweeping dismissive statements about “you Americans...
...It points out that the “Land of Savagery” vision of America appears to have become dominant in post-World War II Europe, displacing the “Land of Promise” ideal: “What is vital is that an alarming number of people see the nation [i.e...
...Many of the people I talked to were as opposed to George W. Bush and the Iraq War as the intellectuals I had encountered at the research institute dinner...
...The music ranged from solo acoustic to country-rock...
...Markov its, it turns out, examines in particular the knee-jerk anti-Americanism of academ ic and intellectual elites like the people with whom I dined here...
...Don't these people ever watch Jon Stewart...
...Fans came to enjoy the performances, line-dance like crazy, and meet the musicians...
...CNN International runs a roundup of The Daily Show several times every weekend...
Vol. 90 • March 2007 • No. 2
