Those Crazy Americans
FERGUSON, ANDREW
Those Crazy Americans by Andrew Ferguson Excuse me for asking, but do you feel Bloated? Callous and Vain, perhaps? How about Schizo and Talky, Robotic and Obvious and Cutthroat? No? Not even the...
...I myself would have thought that people with little gray stumps on their gums were the ones suffering a loss, but what do I know...
...But enough, enough...
...Three Nobelists...
...From 18 countries the editors ingathered prestigious contributors...
...There is not, in truth, a great deal of joie in the special issue's ecrire, either...
...India: What's with those suits...
...But we still might get them to switch sides...
...The Times overlooks nothing...
...Two management consultants from Italy, whose names are too long to print here, think we're Plucky...
...To recap: Americans, say the Times experts, are too fat and diet too much...
...You don't need a brewery to bottle water.' It's an alcoholized soft drink...
...Even what were once thought to be virtues prove deficient when measured by the Times's contributors...
...Bigness still defines America," she writes, "but a bigness grown pillowy and flaccid and fluffy and fat like baby flesh...
...Another writer, Britain's Ian Hamilton, complains that when he writes for American publications, they often ask him to check his facts...
...I'm an American—a Yankee—a jingo—a flosser...
...Americans are unembarrassable," says Martin Amis...
...Vikram Chandra admires the technical proficiency and big budgets of Hollywood movies—especially (he's a writer) the big budgets—but gosh, they're so soulless...
...They'll invite a camera crew into their toilet out of a general openness...
...Are we all really, as Gene Wilder said to Zero Mostel in The Producers, "big fat fat fat fatties...
...chefs," and so on...
...It is of course unreasonable to expect the editors of the New York Times to avoid cliches...
...Surely this is an odd charge to bring against the country that has offered Tyra Banks to the world...
...Russian graffiti are totally derivative, complains this self-hater...
...As an instance of How the World Sees Us, the special issue is unreliable...
...In "Bloated," the Brit writer Marina Warner says we're too fat...
...He's from the Netherlands but lives in Manhattan, and you would not believe the look his English teacher gave him when he tried to sleep with her...
...The Soviet Union's collapsed, Reagan's retired, and the Times's editors have yet to scrape the "U.S...
...My God—European brewers don't like American beer...
...It's something my society would find soul-destroying...
...but as an instance of How the New York Times Sees Us, it is definitive...
...Are you confused...
...Speaking of phallic hardness, Arnon Grunberg's got a problem...
...In the end he decides he prefers "cheesey Hindi movies with half-naked guys and babes dancing in the rain...
...It's not every day that Americans are told they could improve their country by making it more like Nigeria...
...Each contribution was given a one-word title—the adjectives (Robotic, Schizo, etc...
...Out of Nicaragua" bumperstickers from their Volvos...
...A novelist from Moscow named Victor Pelevin searched and searched and discovered something to love about America: our bold, expressive, colorful . . . graffiti...
...Does the special issue omit any anti-American cliches...
...yet his only evidence is the 1960s sitcom Hogan's Heroes, which tends to undercut his argument...
...Not even the teensiest bit Powerless and shortsighted...
...But mostly the tone of the Times's special issue is unmitigated contempt...
...The Greek journalist/rich person Taki says we're Forgiving, and the German historian Josef Joffe, in a splendid opening essay, opines that the United States is rightly a model for the world...
...No, they are all here...
...Better to keep busy with something wholesome and soul-enriching, like starving all the Biafrans...
...Of course, not all the contributions were derisive...
...How prestigious...
...And, yes, Germany: Nothing a little fluoride can't fix...
...So uninhibited...
...A young German Internet expert thinks Americans are "cool...
...They cannot appreciate the idea that natural diversity or incompleteness is part of a person's character...
...But the question rises implicitly from every page of the June 8 number of the Times Sunday magazine...
...These Americans...
...A fat Bigness...
...You're my student," she protested...
...Who can blame him...
...It seems so...
...These Americans...
...Thus: "Once they gave me a bottle of [Budweiser] in Texas," says a Belgian master brewer...
...Gina Lollabrigida, who's been chunking up steadily since her starlet days, complains in "Vain" that Yank gals are obsessed with dieting...
...Barbarians...
...leaders from the world of finance, advertising and media...
...A Big fatness...
...They should get hep to the times...
...This nexus of ideas," she continues, "[has] buried phallic hardness under an esthetic of polymorphous billowing flesh...
...I said: 'This is reinvented water...
...In the specific examples the contempt is scattershot, often contradictory, but this seems not to matter to the editors...
...It is the newspaper of record...
...so 1983...
...Then again, "something must be done about this shameless glorification of self-exposure...
...This was a special issue, a plump and portentous project, titled "How the World Sees Us...
...The British historian John Keegan, in "Powerful," points out that we have a beefy, well-armed military, some of whose officers are even black...
...Oral hygiene, for example...
...They'd never come right out and demand an answer, of course...
...Soyinka's views, though incoherent, at least have the virtue of originality...
...Some verged on the complimentary...
...Not like in Nigeria...
...France: If we invade, will they fight back this time...
...So there...
...you see above...
...It would take a Nobel prizewinner to straighten this whole thing out, and the Times, as noted, has not one but three...
...How about a special issue devoted to "How We See Them...
...Most of the other contributors reach for pre-packaged criticisms...
...The Times asked each to delineate some aspect of the American character, and the responses took the form of brief essays or transcribed interviews...
...they're straitlaced Puritans with no sense of privacy or shame...
...You censor language, you censor conduct...
...But Marina Warner's view is too large to be restrained by evidence...
...The result, he thinks, is a loss of joie d'ecrire, as the British say...
...Also Trendy, Assertive, Relentless, Fleeting, and Hellbent...
...Senior editor Andrew Ferguson wrote last week's cover story on John Kasich...
...In the American vernacular: He ain't gettin' any...
...On Britain: Can they learn to bathe...
...Then the patriotic editors of the New York Times Magazine have a simple question for you: You call yourself an American...
...So uptight...
...It would surely devastate the Times editors—who prize sophisticated hipness, being ahead of the curve, above all—to point out that there is something hopelessly retrograde about their orgy of anti-Americanism...
...You Americans may have everything but you don't have this: Our fervent, expressive passion," says Mayra Montero, a novelist who hails from that volcano of unfettered self-expression, Cuba...
...Those with perfect teeth unwittingly suffer a loss," writes yet another German...
...Very prestigious, in other words...
...Not surprisingly, many of these compliments are backhanded...
...The great anti-American cliche once had to do with "getting on the right side of history...
...Wole Soyinka, perhaps the greatest belletrist in all of Nigeria, clears it up like so: "Americans are so open, so uninhibited, but it's really all a facade...
...editors at the New York Times are decorous ladies and gentlemen...
Vol. 2 • June 1997 • No. 40
