Do Europeans hate the US or love it? Lately the answer might seem a no-brainer. But The Anti-Americans, a one-hour documentary that had its premiere on PBS last night, suggests that the correct response is "both."
We have, the show declares, "a hate-love relationship."
We see both sides in the program. First the hate: At a fashionable dinner party in London, a proper Englishwoman sniffs with supreme condescension, "Americans are the first nation to come from barbarians, skip the civilized bit and go into decline."
In a French country kitchen, a woman recalls, with horrified outrage, a trip to Chicago, where she encountered "the fattest people I ever saw in my life." She gasps that she could have ridden on their "big fat behinds."
At a raucous public forum in a Dublin pub, the one brave soul who speaks up in the US' defense is shouted down with angry obscenities.
Then the love: In Poland, a large crowd in cowboy hats and boots waves US flags and cheers a bluegrass performance. If it weren't for the accents and the odd spellings like "piknik" and "hod dog," you might think it's Branson, Missouri.
Shooting in 2005 and last year, Louis Alvarez, Andrew Kolker and Peter Odabashian of the Center for New American Media, a New York documentary production company, discovered one thing these countries have in common -- the omnipresent culture of the US is like a giant funhouse mirror in which Europeans see their own distorted reflections.
"America is a very, very useful construct for us to ventilate our own inadequacies and frustrations with ourselves," one Irishman confesses.
The British novelist and journalist Will Self accuses his countrymen of being "blatantly hypocritical" and "extremely shallow" about the US. They speak about US culture with great disdain, he says in the documentary, even as they consume it with a bottomless appetite.
As a case in point The Anti-Americans, part of the America at a Crossroads series, includes segments from a London stage production of Jerry Springer: The Opera.
"Jerry Springer is very American, but only the British would make an opera about him," Alvarez said.
Kolker compared this program to The Japanese Version, which he and Alvarez produced in 1991. That show explored how the Japanese fascination with American pop culture may say more about the Japanese as cultural magpies than it does about the global influence of the US.
Similarly, when French people complain on camera about everything from US cuisine to US foreign policy to American terms infiltrating their language, they really seem to be lamenting France's own loss of power and influence in the world.
Because France declined on the world stage as the US rose, the cultural anthropologist and marketing guru Clotaire Rapaille says in the film, "Americans are the ideal enemy."
The French writer Pascal Bruckner agrees.
"The fact that you're hated means that you matter," he says.
Kolker put it more bluntly: "They have empire envy."
He said the producers chose Britain and France because "they were low-hanging fruit really. They're the greatest America haters in the world, yet they also love America."
They chose Poland, he said, as representative of the New Europe, where they expected to find "a fundamentally different attitude toward America."
He added with a smile: "What we found out was that they're mostly just glad we're not Russian."
After decades of domination by the Nazis and then the Soviets, the Poles seem more willing than the British or French to be dominated by US culture. They speak of Uncle Sam as though he were a rich relative, if a distant and rather aloof one. It's love with a distinct tinge of neurotic insecurity.
"If Poland were a person, they would be in permanent analysis," the British-born historian Tony Judt observes.
For the legions of country music fans in Poland, idealized images of the US West represent freedom. Michael Lonstar fondly remembers hearing Ernest Tubb on Voice of America radio as a boy growing up behind the Iron Curtain. He performs country music in Polish and English, complete with achy-breaky dancing girls in denim miniskirts and cowboy boots.
In doing historical research for the program, Alvarez said, the producers were interested to find that Europeans' stereotypes of the US and Americans have remained fundamentally unchanged for generations.
But, Judt says in the program, in recent years the Bush administration's foreign policy has amplified traditional European dismay and "switched on something I haven't see in a very long time."
He says that Europeans now want to tell us: "Damn it, you're doing stupid things that could screw up my world, in which case I want the right to have some say in who runs your country. If you must have stupid presidents, I want a vote."
A sense of humor and a light touch are trademarks of the documentaries Kolker and Alvarez have made together for 30 years, the last 10 with Odabashian.
Those have included Vote for Me, a four-part series on grassroots politicking that was shown on PBS in 1996; People Like Us, in which Americans openly discussed the often taboo subject of social class, shown in 2001; and Small Ball, which had its premiere in 2004, about the 2002 Little League Baseball World Series.
"We look at culture with a bit of whimsy and a serious undertone," Alvarez explained. "We want people chattering when it's over. We're not propagandists, but we do have a message."
One message to take away from The Anti-Americans is that "Europeans love to criticize us, but they can't take their eyes off us," Alvarez said. "That's because there's no escaping us. Every day they have to deal with America politically, economically and culturally. We're the 800-pound gorilla in their lives."
There is much evidence that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is sending soldiers from the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) to support Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — and is learning lessons for a future war against Taiwan. Until now, the CCP has claimed that they have not sent PLA personnel to support Russian aggression. On 18 April, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelinskiy announced that the CCP is supplying war supplies such as gunpowder, artillery, and weapons subcomponents to Russia. When Zelinskiy announced on 9 April that the Ukrainian Army had captured two Chinese nationals fighting with Russians on the front line with details
On a quiet lane in Taipei’s central Daan District (大安), an otherwise unremarkable high-rise is marked by a police guard and a tawdry A4 printout from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs indicating an “embassy area.” Keen observers would see the emblem of the Holy See, one of Taiwan’s 12 so-called “diplomatic allies.” Unlike Taipei’s other embassies and quasi-consulates, no national flag flies there, nor is there a plaque indicating what country’s embassy this is. Visitors hoping to sign a condolence book for the late Pope Francis would instead have to visit the Italian Trade Office, adjacent to Taipei 101. The death of
The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), joined by the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), held a protest on Saturday on Ketagalan Boulevard in Taipei. They were essentially standing for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which is anxious about the mass recall campaign against KMT legislators. President William Lai (賴清德) said that if the opposition parties truly wanted to fight dictatorship, they should do so in Tiananmen Square — and at the very least, refrain from groveling to Chinese officials during their visits to China, alluding to meetings between KMT members and Chinese authorities. Now that China has been defined as a foreign hostile force,
On April 19, former president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) gave a public speech, his first in about 17 years. During the address at the Ketagalan Institute in Taipei, Chen’s words were vague and his tone was sour. He said that democracy should not be used as an echo chamber for a single politician, that people must be tolerant of other views, that the president should not act as a dictator and that the judiciary should not get involved in politics. He then went on to say that others with different opinions should not be criticized as “XX fellow travelers,” in reference to
RSS