The Day I became an American

[Brad]

I became an American when I was forty-nine.



No, I did not become an American after immigrating from another country, passing tests, and taking an oath of loyalty, as millions of other Americans have to become Americans. My people were born here, and as far back as any of them could remember, their people had been born here as well. They were farmers, and like most farmers, they were convinced that they had sprung up from the soil, like corn-stalks. No, I became an American during the course of a conversation that I had on a night train from Innsbruck to fabled Vienna.



Across from me, in the compartment I was riding in was a young Austrian. He noticed that I was reading a German magazine, and we began a conversation, half-German, half-English, in which I explained to him that I had never been to Vienna before, and how excited I was at the prospect of seeing the city that I had so often read and dreamed about. I started off by explaining my passion for the great nineteenth century Austrian composer, Anton Bruckner, a farm boy whose majestic symphonies I had long regarded as one of the pinnacles of human achievement. Yes, my traveling companion, being Austrian, knew about Bruckner. Then I asked the young man if he had been to St. Florian, the Catholic monastery where Bruckner often played the organ, improvising out of his head — like a jazz musician — great cathedrals of sound, and whose earthly remains lie embalmed in a crypt directly beneath the organ itself. But, much to my puzzlement, the young Austrian did not seem to know about St. Florian: he said he had never heard of it.



Perhaps I had gotten my facts confused, I thought. Was I absolutely sure that I had gotten the name of the monastery right? Once or twice in my life I had been wrong before. Maybe I was wrong this time too. (I wasn't.) So I changed the subject and asked the young Austrian what he thought about another great Austrian symphonist, the late nineteenth and early twentieth century composer, Franz Schmidt. Which of his four symphonies did the young Austrian like best?



Once again, I struck out. My companion had never heard of Franz Schmidt.



Undaunted, I proceeded to turn the conversation to two of the greatest of Austria's nineteenth century writers, the poet and dramatist Franz Grillparzer and the novelist and short-story writer, Adalbert Stifter. Here, at last, I found that I was on safer ground. Yes, he had heard of them, and I proceeded to explain my enormous admiration for Grillparzer's Medea trilogy, and for Stifter's beautiful autobiographical novel Nachsommer (Indian Summer.) I remarked on Stifter's tragic fate — how he deliberately cut his throat one morning with a straight razor, and how terrible it was that such a gifted genius could come to such an end. (Not only was Stifter a great writer, but he was also one of the foremost landscape painters of the nineteenth century.) After that, I turned to twentieth century Austrian writers, and I expressed my enthusiasm for Arthur Schnitzler, Robert Musil, and Joseph Roth.



After so much musical and literary seriousness, my traveling companion explained to me the litigious history of the famous Sacher Torte, one of Vienna's miraculous pastry confections. Then, while he was on the subject of food, he looked at me and asked with a laugh: "What do you Americans do when you go to a foreign city? Do you only eat at McDonald's?"



The laugh had a mocking and smugly superior edge to it; and, like the question itself, it disconcerted and befuddled me. Being a good American, I expected him to break out into a grin and say something like the German equivalent of, "Oh, I'm just joshing you." But he didn't. It was embarrassingly obvious that he was quite sincere. After all, where else would we Americans eat in a foreign land except McDonald's? Isn't that all we eat at home?



Suddenly I realized that to my young Austrian companion, it made no difference whether I knew Bruckner's symphonies backwards and forwards; it mattered not in the slightest that I could appreciate the poetry of Grillparzer in the original German. I was an American, and, therefore, I had to be the kind of person who, when in a strange land, would make a bee-line to the closest McDonald's, out of fear of tasting the food of foreigners.



Of course, I tried to explain that Americans weren't like that. I tried to tell him that in any American city of any size there were restaurants that specialized in the cuisine of virtually every culture under the sun; but I sadly realized that all my efforts at enlightening the young Austrian were in vain. For him, it was a self-evident truth that all Americans eat at McDonald's, both at home and when abroad. What else can you expect them to do, being crude and vulgar Americans?



I said at the beginning of this piece that I became an American on that night train to Vienna; but I must take that back. I became an American on my return from a concert at the Musikverein, where Kurt Masur had just conducted the Gewandhaus Orchestra in a radiant performance of farm boy Bruckner's sublime Seventh Symphony.



For nearly a week, I had dutifully been eating at authentic Austrian restaurants, and I was beginning to get a bit weary of the tiresome monotony of Viennese cookery. Across the street I spotted the familiar golden arches of a McDonald's. I hesitated, then I strode resolutely toward it. Yes, I was an American, and I was going to eat at McDonald's, by God, and be proud of it.



It was the best Big Mac I have ever had.



Lee Harris is author of Civilization and Its Enemies.

http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=031606C

[AmericanGirl]

I love it! Thanks for sharing.

[Grimmy]

Anti Americanism is as deeply ingrained in the europers psyche as is anti semitism.

It is said that in europer politics, there's one uniting thread that can never be broken. From the hard corps fascists to the raving lunatic commies...all are anti-American in an unthinking, subconcious knee-jerk kind of way.

[AmericanGirl]

Grimmy, not every non American hates us... I personally know there are a couple dozen people from Germany, Austrailia, the Netherlands, and Sweden who are currently supporting our AMERICAN soldiers serving in Iraq right now, they do not always understand us Americans, but you have to figure that the majority of things they know about us are gleaned from movies, and from tourists. They have no idea what Americans are actually like.

[Grimmy]

Actually AG, I was speaking in gross generalities, of course..but you are a bit nieve.

Anti Americanism is, very much, hard coded into the europers psyche.

I've posted several links to folk from "over the pond" that keep an eye on such things. One of the more popular magazines regularly has for its front cover the very same imagry depicting America and/or Americans as was used by the nazi's of the 1930s and 40s to depict the jews.

The public "education tv" channel in both germany and france are known to run constantly with grotesque spin against any and all things US.

The statement I made above about the unifying thread is actually a quote from a promenint french politico...one belived to be "conservative" but who often and loudly chants along with the A-A crowds.

btw, when I say europer, I specifically mean those who's ancestors were too stupid, lazy, scared or weak to leave the hell hole that was 18th and 19th century france and germany for other places like US, Canada, Central and South American states or Australia.

The sons and daughters of those that submitted to the romantics view of peasants vs aristocracy seem to remain stuck in that mold. The peasants..the common citizenry must waite to be told, in detail, what to think, where to go, what to do, how to do it, when to do it..and what to feel about it.

[AmericanGirl]

I am not niave, I may CHOSE to view things through rose colored glasses sometimes, but I know what is going on in the world darlin... I also know that making judgments based on generalizations about a group of people is a representative heuristic, and maybe some people will fit that "profile" but to ASSUME that everyone does can be ignorant and dangerous.

[Grimmy]

Sweets:

It is much more than mear generalizations. Try doing a bit of web searching on the topic. You'll find a rich, deep, comprehensive history of europer hatred for, disgust with and deriding of Americans. Since the advent of postmodernism, it's been the mainstay of europer philosophical "thought".

Btw the "modernism" that postmodernism was created to oppose WAS the US.

It actually is that silly, and that simple.

[Grimmy]

http://medienkritik.typepad.com/blog/

Here's a link to a site that exposes what's going on in germany.

below are some snipits from a quick google. (I understand you're studying for rather difficult courses so I thought this might save you some time)

http://www.forbes.com/global/2003/0721/017.html
Anti-Americanism Is Racist Envy
Paul Johnson, 07.21.03, 12:00 AM ET

Anti-Americanism is the prevailing disease of intellectuals today. Like other diseases, it doesn't have to be logical or rational. But, like other diseases, it has a syndrome--a concurrent set of underlying symptoms that are also causes.

• First, an unadmitted contempt for democracy. The U.S. is the world's most successful democracy. The right of voters to elect more than 80,000 public officials, the length and thoroughness of electoral campaigns, the pervasiveness of the media and the almost daily reports by opinion polls ensure that government and electorate do not diverge for long and that Washington generally reflects the majority opinion in its actions.

It is this feature that intellectuals--especially in Europe--find embittering. They know they must genuflect to democracy as a system. They cannot openly admit that an entire people--especially one comprising nearly 300 million, who enjoy all the freedoms--can be mistaken. But in their hearts these intellectuals do not accept the principle of one person, one vote. ... (full story at link above)

http://www.taemag.com/issues/article...cle_detail.asp
Anti-Globalism = Anti-Americanism
By Jean-Francois Revel

How to understand this war against globalization, which has grown in scope and virulence over the past five years? First, we must realize that it is a war in the real, not the figurative, sense of the word. It is a physical struggle being fought in the streets, not just theoretically. The demonstrators who are its shock troops are organized by activist organizations, many of them subsidized by governments, and they sack cities and lay siege to international meetings during their battles.



What motivates this extraordinary resistance? Globalization simply means freedom of movement for goods and people, and it is hard to be violently hostile to that. But behind this fight lies an older and more fundamental struggle—against economic liberalization, and against the chief representative thereof, which is the United States. Anti-globalism carnivals often feature an Uncle Sam in a Stars-and-Stripes costume as their supreme scapegoat. In this way, the new movement taps into an old socialist tradition, where opposition to economic freedom and opposition to America are impossible to separate.



The simplistic article of Marxist faith that capitalism is absolute evil, and that it is incarnated in and directed by the United States, may be the most important principle shared by the current crop of anti-globalizers. America is the object of their loathing because for a half century or more it has been the most prosperous and creative capitalist society on earth. But ultimately it is something even bigger that the anti-globalizers want to destroy: liberal democracy and free-market economics. Or quite simply liberty itself. ... (full story at link above)

http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~chazell...cs/antiam.html


Anti-Americanism: A Clinical Study
By Bernard Chazelle

Last summer, with France on his mind, the British historian Paul Johnson graced the pages of Forbes Magazine with this trenchant observation: "Anti-Americanism is racist envy" [1]. Lest anyone miss the point, the best-selling author quickly rephrased it in more accessible language: "France is not a democracy." His novel insight could hardly be dismissed as mere anti-Frenchism for the simple reason that the word does not exist. In fact, neither does anti-Polishism, anti-Spanishism, or even anti-Vaticanism. (Each one googles in the single digits—the modern definition of nonexistence.) With over 115,000 Google hits, anti-Americanism stands alone: a living testament to US exceptionalism.

But what is it, anyway? As so often, ingenuousness is of no help. Indeed, if the word were to connote simple, unadorned hostility toward Americans, wouldn't the enslavement of half the population of the Deep South in the mid-19th century constitute its most perfect embodiment [2]? Slavery, lynchings, miscegenation laws... Truly, can anything be more anti-American?

Apparently yes. Google the words anti-Americanism, Jim Crow and you get a paltry 390 hits. Substitute Jacques Chirac for Jim Crow and you rake in a much healthier 5,210 hits. Trade the French president for intellectuals and up you soar to 14,000. Paul Johnson understands: "Anti-Americanism is the prevailing disease of intellectuals today," avers the historian, who, leaving Osama off the hook, proceeds to aim his fire at effete gaggles of Gauloises-puffing café intellectuals. What gives? ... (full story at link above)

[Grimmy]

If you do any study on the subject, you'll soon find that fascism, communsim, postmodernism and anti-Americanism are all blended together now-a-days under "anti-Globalism"

Below is a pretty good primer on how such filthosophy has shaped, motivated and instigated the terrorists of the last few decades and still today.

http://ontology.buffalo.edu/smith//c...rtw/Newell.htm

Postmodern Jihad: What Osama bin Laden learned from the Left.
Foreign Affairs
Source: The Weekly Standard
Published: 11/26/2001 Author: Waller R. Newell
Posted on 11/17/01 12:34 PM Pacific by Pokey78


MUCH HAS BEEN WRITTEN about Osama bin Laden's Islamic fundamentalism; less about the contribution of European Marxist postmodernism to bin Laden's thinking. In fact, the ideology by which al Qaeda justifies its acts of terror owes as much to baleful trends in Western thought as it does to a perversion of Muslim beliefs. Osama's doctrine of terror is partly a Western export.

To see this, it is necessary to revisit the intellectual brew that produced the ideology of Third World socialism in the 1960s. A key figure here is the German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), who not only helped shape several generations of European leftists and founded postmodernism, but also was a leading supporter of the Nazis. Heidegger argued for the primacy of "peoples" in contrast with the alienating individualism of "modernity." In order to escape the yoke of Western capitalism and the "idle chatter" of constitutional democracy, the "people" would have to return to its primordial destiny through an act of violent revolutionary "resolve."

Heidegger saw in the Nazis just this return to the blood-and-soil heritage of the authentic German people. Paradoxically, the Nazis embraced technology at its most advanced to shatter the iron cage of modernity and bring back the purity of the distant past. And they embraced terror and violence to push beyond the modern present--hence the term "postmodern"--and vault the people back before modernity, with its individual liberties and market economy, to the imagined collective austerity of the feudal age.

This vision of the postmodernist revolution went straight from Heidegger into the French postwar Left, especially the works of Jean-Paul Sartre, eager apologist for Stalinism and the Cultural Revolution in China. Sartre's prot g , the Algerian writer Frantz Fanon, crystallized the Third World variant of postmodernist revolution in "The Wretched of the Earth" (1961). From there, it entered the world of Middle Eastern radicals. Many of the leaders of the Shiite revolution in Iran that deposed the modernizing shah and brought the Ayatollah Khomeini to power in 1979 had studied Fanon's brand of Marxism. Ali Shari'at, the Sorbonne-educated Iranian sociologist of religion considered by many the intellectual father of the Shiite revolution, translated "The Wretched of the Earth" and Sartre's "Being and Nothingness into Persian." The Iranian revolution was a synthesis of Islamic fundamentalism and European Third World socialism.

In the postmodernist leftism of these revolutionaries, the "people" supplanted Marx's proletariat as the agent of revolution. Following Heidegger and Fanon, leaders like Lin Piao, ideologist of the Red Guards in China, and Pol Pot, student of leftist philosophy in France before becoming a founder of the Khmer Rouge, justified revolution as a therapeutic act by which non-Western peoples would regain the dignity they had lost to colonial oppressors and to American-style materialism, selfishness, and immorality. A purifying violence would purge the people of egoism and hedonism and draw them back into a primitive collective of self-sacrifice.



MANY ELEMENTS in the ideology of al Qaeda--set forth most clearly in Osama bin Laden's 1996 "Declaration of War Against America"--derive from this same mix. Indeed, in Arab intellectual circles today, bin Laden is already being likened to an earlier icon of Third World revolution who renounced a life of privilege to head for the mountains and fight the American oppressor, Che Guevara. According to Cairo journalist Issandr Elamsani, Arab leftist intellectuals still see the world very much in 1960s terms. "They are all ex-Sorbonne, old Marxists," he says, "who look at everything through a postcolonial prism."

Just as Heidegger wanted the German people to return to a foggy, medieval, blood-and-soil collectivism purged of the corruptions of modernity, and just as Pol Pot wanted Cambodia to return to the Year Zero, so does Osama dream of returning his world to the imagined purity of seventh-century Islam. And just as Fanon argued that revolution can never accomplish its goals through negotiation or peaceful reform, so does Osama regard terror as good in itself, a therapeutic act, quite apart from any concrete aim. The willingness to kill is proof of one's purity.

According to journalist Robert Worth, writing in the New York Times on the intellectual roots of Islamic terror, bin Laden is poorly educated in Islamic theology. A wealthy playboy in his youth, he fell under the influence of radical Arab intellectuals of the 1960s who blended calls for Marxist revolution with calls for a pure Islamic state.

Many of these men were imprisoned and executed for their attacks on Arab regimes; Sayyid Qutb, for example, a major figure in the rise of Islamic fundamentalism, was executed in Egypt in 1965. But their ideas lived on. Qutb's intellectual progeny included Fathi Yakan, who likened the coming Islamic revolution to the French and Russian revolutions, Abdullah Azzam, a Palestinian activist killed in a car bombing in 1989, and Safar Al-Hawali, a Saudi fundamentalist frequently jailed by the Saudi government. As such men dreamed of a pure Islamic state, European revolutionary ideology was seldom far from their minds. Wrote Fathi Yakan, "The groundwork for the French Revolution was laid by Rousseau, Voltaire and Montesquieu; the Communist Revolution realized plans set by Marx, Engels and Lenin....The same holds true for us as well."

The influence of Qutb's "Signposts on the Road" (1964) is clearly traceable in pronouncements by Islamic Jihad, the group that would justify its assassination of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat in 1981 as a step toward ending American domination of Egypt and ushering in a pure Islamic order. In the 1990s, Islamic Jihad would merge with al Qaeda, and Osama's "Declaration of War Against America" in turn would show an obvious debt to the Islamic Jihad manifesto "The Neglected Duty."

It can be argued, then, that the birthplace of Osama's brand of terrorism was Paris 1968, when, amid the student riots and radical teach-ins, the influence of Sartre, Fanon, and the new postmodernist Marxist champions of the "people's destiny" was at its peak. By the mid '70s, according to Claire Sterling's "The Terror Network," "practically every terrorist and guerrilla force to speak of was represented in Paris. . . . The Palestinians especially were there in force." This was the heyday of Yasser Arafat's terrorist organization Al Fatah, whose 1968 tract "The Revolution and Violence" has been called "a selective precis of 'The Wretched of the Earth.'"

While Al Fatah occasionally still used the old-fashioned Leninist language of class struggle, the increasingly radical groups that succeeded it perfected the melding of Islamism and Third World socialism. Their tracts blended Heidegger and Fanon with calls to revive a strict Islamic social order. "We declare," says the Shiite terrorist group Hezbollah in its "Open Letter to the Downtrodden in Lebanon and the World" (1985), "that we are a nation that fears only God" and will not accept "humiliation from America and its allies and the Zionist entity that has usurped the sacred Islamic land." The aim of violent struggle is "giving all our people the opportunity to determine their fate." But that fate must follow the prescribed course: "We do not hide our commitment to the rule of Islam, . . . which alone guarantees justice and dignity for all and prevents any new imperialist attempt to infiltrate our country. . . . This Islamic resistance must . . . with God's help receive from all Muslims in all parts of the world utter support."

These 1980s calls to revolution could have been uttered last week by Osama bin Laden. Indeed, the chief doctrinal difference between the radicals of several decades ago and Osama only confirms the influence of postmodernist socialism on the latter: Whereas Qutb and other early Islamists looked mainly inward, concentrating on revolution in Muslim countries, Osama directs his struggle primarily outward, against American hegemony. While for the early revolutionaries, toppling their own tainted regimes was the principal path to the purified Islamic state, for Osama, the chief goal is bringing America to its knees.



THE RELATIONSHIP between postmodernist European leftism and Islamic radicalism is a two-way street: Not only have Islamists drawn on the legacy of the European Left, but European Marxists have taken heart from Islamic terrorists who seemed close to achieving the longed-for revolution against American hegemony. Consider Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, two leading avatars of postmodernism. Foucault was sent by the Italian daily Corriere della Sera to observe the Iranian revolution and the rise of the Ayatollah Khomeini. Like Sartre, who had rhapsodized over the Algerian revolution, Foucault was enthralled, pronouncing Khomeini "a kind of mystic saint." The Frenchman welcomed "Islamic government" as a new form of "political spirituality" that could inspire Western radicals to combat capitalist hegemony.

Heavily influenced by Heidegger and Sartre, Foucault was typical of postmodernist socialists in having neither concrete political aims nor the slightest interest in tangible economic grievances as motives for revolution. To him, the appeal of revolution was aesthetic and voyeuristic: "a violence, an intensity, an utterly remarkable passion." For Foucault as for Fanon, Hezbollah, and the rest down to Osama, the purpose of violence is not to relieve poverty or adjust borders. Violence is an end in itself. Foucault exalts it as "the craving, the taste, the capacity, the possibility of an absolute sacrifice." In this, he is at one with Osama's followers, who claim to love death while the Americans "love Coca-Cola."

Derrida, meanwhile, reacted to the collapse of the Soviet Union by calling for a &qu