KEVIN DRUM SAYS THAT Europeans aren’t anti-American — just anti-Bush. There’s something to that, as I recall a story in which a couple of European diplomats said that, sure, they’d back the U.S. against Iraq if Clinton were President, but not with Bush. . . .
But then I read stuff like Harold Pinter’s latest — which Chris Bertram rightly describes as scraping the bottom of the barrel, and what I see is the impotent seething of an entire failed intellectual tradition.
Let’s be honest here: there’s a whole crowd in Europe that can’t get over its disappointment that the wrong side won the Cold War, and that even lesser-path communism (that is, Euro-socialism) has been shown up as a failure. That’s what this is all about, really. And it’s contemptible — and morally indistinguishable from a bunch of fat Germans sitting around nostalgically singing the “Horst Wessel.”
Certain European political and intellectual leaders think that, because it’s militarily impotent, Europe should be a “moral superpower.” But unfortunately, they’ve committed unilateral moral disarmament, too.
For more, see this post by Eugene Volokh.
UPDATE: Reader Warren Ball sends this response to Pinter’s poem:
God Bless! Pinter?!?
Here he goes again,
The Crank in his angry tirade.
Chanting his ballads of hate
As he gallops across the world press
Appeasing the Enemy’s God.
The gutters are filled with his friends
The ones who couldn’t admit
The others refusing to see
The ones who are wasting their voices
The ones who’ve forgotten the past.
Their poems have couplets which suck.
Your head rolls into your hands
Your brain is a pool of mush
Your mind is stained with disgust.
Your eyes roll up and your nose
Sniffs only the pong of bad prose.
And all this foul air derives
From appeasing the Enemy’s God.
Well, it’s as good as the poem it’s parodying!
ANOTHER UPDATE: More poesy at Letter from Gotham.
YET ANOTHER UPDATE: A reader sends this one:
He wrote his poem, and see, he never learns
The use of meter, rhyme (and God knows what he earns).
Motion pens this crap, though not as bad,
As pundits clearly both are raving mad.
Heh. Of course, this all just makes me miss Will Warren.
STILL MORE: Tim Blair weighs in.