Wednesday, September 22, 2004

Europe to America: Suck My Ass!

Some years ago, I wrote a feature story for the Camden Chronicle-independent about a group of foreign exchange students visiting Camden, and it kicked up a small storm.

The students had been nursed from birth with this idea that that they were inherently superior to this country of vulgarians which they had apparently been sentenced to visit. People here ate with their fingers, for God's sake; they saluted the flag -- which, a German kid actually had the King Kong-sized balls to lecture me, people in his advanced country associated with the Nazis -- they go to church (the German kid, again, pointed out that most people in his country don't make such an extravagant display of religious faith, provided they have any) and, worst of all, people in this country smile and say hello even to complete strangers, the very epitome of insincerity. The standard line, repeated ad nauseum, was that they knew about our country but we knew nothing about theirs. These little pronouncements were all met with the approvingly smug nod of a host parent, a loud, garish, overweight hairdresser who -- appearances to the contrary -- seemed anxious to demonstrate that she wasn't an ugly American. Whenever I pressed a student on any point, she jumped in to explain his point for him, usually with double the smugness.

The hour or so I spent in the company of these kids brought out my own arrogance, although I held it in check. Why should we know about your country, I wanted to say. The reason you know about us is because you live in our shadow, not the other way around; what we do in this country affects you and what you do back home in Grevenmacher or Prague or Brussels or wherever you hail from just doesn't account for one whole hell of a lot.

On the other hand, they did have an advantage in that they were here and I'd never been to Europe in my life; hell, I've barely been out of the South. Maybe they knew something I didn't. I like to think of myself as something of a non-citizen of the world, not unlike Mason O'Leary in Anne Tyler's The Accidental Tourist, who wrote travel books for stay-at-home types who find themselves in the unfortunate situation of having to actually go somewhere. So I suppose I have to contend with the fact that I'm very limited in how far I can see this country with a foreign point of view -- which, ever since President Dumbass wandered into Iraq, seems to be the one with the most currency. Improving the world's low opinion of America is a central theme of Kerry's presidential campaign for the presidency, or it will be if he can ever shake the Swift Boat Veterans for Slander off his ass.

“Foreigners can see things about America that natives cannot," says Mark Hertsgaard in his book The Eagle’s Shadow: Why America Fascinates and Infuriates the World " . . . Americans can learn from their perceptions, if we choose to.”

Whoa horsey, says Bruce Bawer in his superb "Hating America" in the Spring issue of The Hudson Review -- an exhaustive rebuke to Hertsgaard, his academic kin, and most of the European world.

What [Hertsgaard] fails to acknowledge, however, is that most foreigners never set foot in the United States, and that the things they think they know about it are consequently based not on first-hand experience but on school textbooks, books by people like Michael Moore, movies about spies and gangsters, “Ricki Lake,” “C.S.I.,” and, above all, the daily news reports in their own national media. What, one must therefore ask, are their media telling them? What aren’t they telling them? And what are the agendas of those doing the telling? Such questions, crucial to a study of the kind Hertsgaard pretends to be making, are never asked here. Citing a South African restaurateur’s assertion that non-Americans “have an advantage over [Americans], because we know everything about you and you know nothing about us,” Hertsgaard tells us that this is a good point, but it’s not: non-Americans are always saying this to Americans, but when you poke around a bit, you almost invariably discover that what they “know” about America is very wide of the mark.

Bawer writes dispassionately, but his essay is something of an act of vengeance; he spent several years in Norway, and the deep-seated anti-Americanism of his former countrymen clearly continues to stick in his craw. The Hertsgaard book, and several others on the same topic, gives him a perfect opportunity to respond.

Hertsgaard claims that Americans are poorly served by the media; actually, as Bawer sees it, what we have in this country is a free-for-all of multiple viewpoints.

Reading the opinion pieces in Norwegian newspapers, one has the distinct impression that the professors and bureaucrats who write most of them view it as their paramount function not to introduce or debate fresh ideas but to remind the masses what they’re supposed to think. The same is true of most of the journalists, who routinely spin the news from the perspective of social-democratic orthodoxy, systematically omitting or misrepresenting any challenge to that orthodoxy—and almost invariably presenting the U.S. in a negative light. Most Norwegians are so accustomed to being presented with only one position on certain events and issues (such as the Iraq War) that they don’t even realize that there exists an intelligent alternative position.

The European mindset, says Bawer, is so adamantly anti-American because it is preserves a mentality of victimhood.

If Europe’s intellectual and political elite was briefly pro-America after 9/11, it was because America was suddenly a victim, and European intellectuals are accustomed to sympathizing reflexively with victims (or, more specifically, with perceived or self-proclaimed victims, such as Arafat). That support began to wane the moment it became clear that Americans had no intention of being victims.

Bawer, paraphrasing Jean-François Revel’s L’obsession anti-américaine, says the America seen by Europe is a cartoon.

... the European media still employ the same misrepresentations as they did back then, depicting an America plagued by severe poverty, extreme inequality, “no unemployment benefits, no retirement, no assistance for the destitute,” and medical care and university education only for the rich. “Europeans firmly believe this caricature,” Revel writes, “because it is repeated every day by the elites.”

This goes rather a long way toward explaining not just the students I met, but the Danish director Lars von Trier, whose films are deeply absorbing and profoundly stupid. He has a kind of pornographic fetish for the idea of women as Jesus figures: pure sacrificial martyrs, trusting, decent, kind, and born to be victims.

With Dancer in the Dark, the victim was the singer Bjork, cast in the role of a poor factory worker who is slowly going to blind, and is struggling to hold on to a job and save money for an operation that will prevent her son from having the same debilitating illness. The Bjork character is obsessed with The Sound of Music and sees her life, for all its grimness, as a fantastic musical, complete with choreographed dance numbers and bursts of song; if you like Bjork, as I do, these numbers are easily the best thing in the film, which begins as an absorbing melodrama and ultimately becomes this ludicrous story of a poor woman who gets screwed by the American system of justice. It's a movie made with very much of a preconceived notion that American justice is an oxymoron and if you're poor and noble and decent you're finished before you've started.

The same goes double for Dogville -- a strange, beautiful, highly stylized, fascinating and abysmally stupid kind of pornographic S&M thing that follows very much the same track, only this time with Nicole Kidman as the martyr, a gangster's moll who hides out in a small town, makes nice with everyone, and ultimately is turned into everyone's bitch. Again with the preconceived notion: it's a movie made with a mythically ugly viewpoint of this country. Unless you believe that the worst that can be said of any place is the truest reflection of it, then this film exists in the America that lives in von Trier's head.

Perhaps I shouldn't be so offended by all this, and in fact I have resisted becoming so; because, really, this vulgar little parable, right down to its Old Testament-by-way-of-Chicago-gangland-justice ending, could have taken place anyhere in the world, as von Trier says on the Dogville website. But the credits stick it in all over again: a montage of pictures of nothing but wretchedly poor people -- from the iconic Dorothea Lange ones right up to the present day -- playing against David Bowie's "Young Americans," the absolute nadir of von Trier's facile, high school, and amateurish mindset. A great, imagistic song, and it towered over von Trier's little slide show.

*****

Ever read any Gorki? I tried reading The Lower Depths this afternoon and I don't think I understood a fucking word. Oneof those Russian things, I guess -- you have to styart over forty times before you get this long name properly associated with this or that character. I want to read the play before I watch the double-DVD of the movies made from it, one by Renoir, one by Kurosawa.

*****

I am quite taken with the "Bjork in Heat," as the new CD should be called. This is the sound of a little Scandinavian pup who needs it bad. More later. I'm letting it just play on and on, which I'm convinced is the only way to full suck all of the juice out of her insistently beautiful, repetitious and rather throbbing metallic/ techno sort of music. It makes for a warm and creepy companion. Also, like all of her CDs, there are times when you're not entirely certain it isn't skipping. (The "Desired Constellation" track in particular.)

*****



I think the Free Times site is kind of fucked up, so here's a review I wrote some weeks ago that never made it on-line.

Bad News From All Over

Best American Crime Writing : 2004 Edition, edited by Otto Penzler and Thomas H. Cook. Pantheon. 521 pages. $29.95.

Crime is a personal business, and so are writing and reading about it. An ace crime writer gets too involved in his work and takes you with him; in the process, he reminds you of both your vulnerability and your mortality.

So, anyway, are my thoughts after reading the latest anthology from Penzler and Cook. It covers a broad range of turf from both sides of the aisle, cop and criminal, and a number of them pull you right into the heart of the writer's own private obsessions.

Take James Ellroy. Riffing away in his trademark staccato style, he gives us the story of Stephanie, a straight-arrow middle-class teenager whose body is discovered one bright day in August, 1965, leaving behind no motive and no suspect. Nearly 40 years later, as the cold trail suddenly heats up again, Ellroy finds himself getting closer to her as he gets close to the case: "Stephanie was a daughter or a prom date. I don't know her. I can feel her. She's twirling. She's showing off her prom gown. I can smell her corsage."

In Sabrina Rubin Erdely's "Who is the Boy in the Box?" an aging detective is similarly haunted by a frustrating case involving the murder of a child from decades before. Cecilia Ball's "Ciudad de la Muerte" takes us to a desert in Northern Mexico that has become a dumping ground for the maimed corpses of poor young Hispanic women who fell into the hands of the mob. Ball can't help but relate; if she lived here, she might end up the same way.

In the single best piece here, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., recounts the recent trial and conviction of his cousin Michael Skakel for the 1975 slaying of Martha Moxley. Kennedy sees Skakel as the innocent victim of a media circus led by Vanity Fair writer Dominick Dunne and his partner Mark Fuhrman, who helped revive the unsolved murder by depicting the local authorities as fraidy-cats who wouldn't dare go up against the Kennedys. Kennedy has an ax to grind, alright, but he delivers a compelling defense that is surprisingly not defensive. It's passionate and thoughtful, and it made an at least nominal believer out of me.

In "Night of the Bullies," Robert Draper revisits a story which all but the principals have forgotten: the random brutalization of a young teenager by a band of Texas fraternity thugs in 1978. Delving into the case 25 years later, Draper finds a victim who is haunted by his memories, and well-to-do perpetrators who are too ashamed of their past to face it. More than that, Draper examines himself, too, drawn to this peculiar story by his identification with both sides; like every man, he's had his ass kicked, and he's also joined the crowd to deliver the same treatment to others.

Lethal testosterone is also on display in Clara Bingham's "Code of Dishonor," an investigation of the "rape culture" at the Air Force Academy that will sicken anyone who reads it.

James Fallows' "Who Shot Mohammed Al-Dura?" reminded me of Antonioni's film Blow-Up, where a photographer discovers that he may have accidentally captured a murder on film. Fallows' story is about a presumed death that, according to some, wasn't recorded on film: the shooting of a 12-year-old Palestinian boy who was presumably felled by an Israeli bullet during a skirmish with the Palestinians. Subsequent examination of the news footage, which has turned the boy into a martyr in the Arab world, suggests the bullets may well have come from the other side, spawning a host of shaky conspiracy theories that the death was a staged Palestinian exercise in demonizing Israel.

Aside from the perfectly serious stuff, there's David Grann's "The Old Man and the Gun," about a senior citizen who has excelled at the art of bank robbery and breaking out of jail. I also thoroughly enjoyed grossing out the folks at the coffee shop by reading aloud from Pat Jordan's "CSC: Crime Scene Cleanup," which tells more than you may want to know about decomposing bodies and the hardy souls who scrape them up.

On the philosophical side, don't pass up two meaty think pieces: Scott Turow's thoughtful reconsideration of the death penalty and Mark Bowden's tough-minded article on the lifesaving morality of torture.

I wasn't crazy about everything here, but the best are knockouts. In Ellroy's apt phrase, they "hook you fast and drag you in slow."

(P.S. The "Stephanie" story is included in Ellroy's new Destination: Morgue! along with lots of other Ellroy short pieces.)

*****

Did I ever mention that my favorite terrorist group is the Baader-Meinhof gang? Favorite meaning most interesting, of course. I checked out two books bout them the other day: Stefan Aust's The Baader-Meihof Group: The Inside Story of a Phenomenon, considered something of a definitive work, I think, and Jillian Becker's Hitler's Children.

Richard Huffman, who is intent on writing the new definitive work, has a great website about these doomed souls -- This is Baader-Meinhof -- and I access it frequently.

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