HOT SPRINGS, Virginia — Some years ago, while dining in a Paris
restaurant, I asked the waiter about the venison on the menu. He
told me that it was smaller than that served in the United
States. The waiter, a long-faced man, who, come to think of it,
looked rather like the junior senator from Massachusetts, went on
to say, “But then, everything in Europe is smaller than in
America.” I was too much the gentleman to tell him that my corn-fed
venison back in the American Midwest was more tender than his and
tasted better, if only un peu meilleur.
Given France’s unwillingness to support our humanitarian efforts
in Iraq, I shall not be spending much time in French restaurants
for the foreseeable future or, for that matter, in German concert
halls. I have long admired the charm of French life and the
Germans’ conception of music, at least from the 17th century to the
early twentieth; but misgivings about the French and the Germans
that began with their behavior in the 1930s and have continued to
the present make them repellent to me. They never faced up to
post-World War II Communism or to their responsibility for the
cruelty and destitution that replaced their colonial empires in
what came to be called the Third World. Even in the NATO alliance,
they almost never met their military budgets.
Now they are sitting back and lecturing us while our coalition
attempts to lift barbarism from the Iraqis, to sober up the
nihilists of the Middle East, and to defeat terrorism. The French
and the Germans have revealed no plan, no will, and no intention of
bringing justice or peace to Iraq. The only evidence I have seen of
their involvement in the area is long inventories of arms they sold
to Saddam and catalogues of payoffs they received from the United
Nations oil for food scheme.
The French and the Germans have almost always let the
English-speaking peoples bear the cost of liberty. Even in the
Balkans in the 1990s they importuned upon the United States for as
much military might as they could possibly inveigle from us.
Nonetheless, throughout the Cold War and now into the war on terror
we Americans have episodically had to witness their imbecilic
anti-American rallies. As they burn our flags and ignorantly depict
our presidents as cowboys, we are supposed to take instruction from
their infantile tantrums. Old Europe obviously is conflicted about
cowboys. Their chattering classes are given to using the term
“cowboy” as one of disparagement. Yet American westerns remain a
staple of entertainment on television stations all over the old
bone heap — Orwell’s term — that is Europe.
As the French and Germans continue to dodder around in their
moral and intellectual senescence, they are hastening the day when
they move from being a topic for historians to being a topic for
archaeologists. Tom Wolfe once joked that their countries had
become theme parks fit for the commercial genius of Disneyland.
Actually it now appears that under the leadership of Jacques Chirac
and Gerhard Schroeder their countries are more likely to become
archaeological digs. If the terrorists of the world have their way,
unimpeded by the military resolve of the English-speaking peoples,
the day will come sooner than later.
These thoughts struck to me the other day while driving from
Washington some 250 miles into the Virginia mountains. Just weeks
before I had been driving in Europe, in Ireland to be specific. The
Irish countryside, like the countryside of those countries I have
now banished from my travel plans, France and Germany, is lovely.
But that French waiter of years ago was right. Europe is not as big
as America. From my car roaring along spacious four-lane highway I
see vast rolling hills, wide valleys, large modern cities popping
up and then dropping off as I accelerate on. The fields are alive
with cattle and crops about to be planted or freshly planted. The
roads bustle with huge trucks hauling an enormous variety of
product. Overhead blue sky and huge billowing clouds contend for
attention. America really is big.
That, of course, is only the American countryside. Old Europe
also has to shiver at the sight of American cities, hundreds of
them. It has only taken a little over two centuries to create them
and to transform a wilderness into the brilliant and productive
landscape I pass through en route to the lovely Virginia mountains.
Perhaps because our ancestors were so energetic and capable Old
Europe’s descendants of peasants and effete aristocrats feel a bit
ashamed. Still, this is no excuse for acting so shamefully. If the
French and the Germans have any sense of honor they will lend a
hand in rebuilding Iraq. More chapters of appeasement and
collaboration will do them no good.
