Itzaz� Around Here!

Itzaz� Around Here!

Wednesday, November 17, 2004

An Open Letter to Europe

November 17, 2004 -



Hi. Are you nuts?



Forgive me for being so blunt, but your reaction to our reelection of President Bush has been so outrageous that I’m wondering if you have quite literally lost your minds. One of Britain’s largest newspapers ran a headline asking “How Can 59 Million Americans Be So Dumb?”, and commentators in France all seemed to use the same word – bizarre -- to explain the election’s outcome to their readers. In Germany the editors of Die Tageszeitung responded to our vote by writing that “Bush belongs at a war tribunal – not in the White House.” And on a London radio talk show last week one Jeremy Hardy described our President and those of us who voted for him as “stupid, crazy, ignorant, bellicose Christian fundamentalists.”



Of course, you are entitled to whatever views about us that you care to hold. (And lucky for you we Americans aren’t like so many of the Muslims on your own continent; as the late Dutch film maker Theo van Gogh just discovered, make one nasty crack about them and you’re likely to get six bullets pumped into your head and a knife plunged into your chest.) But before you write us off as just a bunch of sweaty, hairy-chested, Bible-thumping morons who are more likely to break their fast by dipping a Krispy Kreme into a diet cola than a biscotti into an espresso – and who inexplicably have won more Nobel prizes than all other countries combined, host 25 or 30 of the world’s finest universities and five or six of the world’s best symphonies, produce wines that win prizes at your own tasting competitions, have built the world’s most vibrant economy, are the world’s only military superpower and, so to speak in our spare time, have landed on the moon and sent our robots to Mars – may I suggest you stop frothing at the mouth long enough to consider just what are these ideas we hold that you find so silly and repugnant?