Old and in the way. (Bird's Eye).

In April of this year, I was asked by the State Department to give a presentation on American culture at a large conference of European academics, government officials, and businessmen held in Warsaw, Poland. The event was sponsored by a major German foundation, and there were hundreds of Germans and Poles in attendance, plus smaller numbers of Brits, Scandinavians, Dutch, and other Europeans. There were barons and sirs and Danish executresses in microskirts and fey Frenchmen and Italian journalists sucking cigarettes as if a firing squad awaited--the whole panoply of Eurocharacters, set among the old buildings, gray skies, jammed streets, creaky plumbing, odd haircuts, high expenses, and cramped horizons that characterize so much of Europe today.

To my knowledge I was the only American participating. This was an occasion for Europeans--Germans especially--to talk frankly to other Europeans. The panel on which I spoke was chaired by Reiner Pommerin, a professor at the University of Dresden, colonel in the German air force reserves, and advisor to the German Ministry of Defense. My fellow speakers included Germany's former ambassador to the U.K., the current German ambassador to Poland, a DaimlerChrysler managing director, and a professor from Britain. We were to focus on transatlantic relations.

Throughout the two days, Pommerin set the tone with an aggressively antagonistic attitude toward all things American. "Thank God we had the 11th of September," he declared--for this showed the U.S. how it feels to be humbled. Herr professor-colonel went on to suggest that Americans often feel nostalgic for the "good old days of slavery in the nineteenth century." He told ludicrous stories about seeing empty bottles and litter piled "one meter deep" along roadsides in America, illustrating our environmental slovenliness. He insisted the seemingly mighty U.S. military was now a hollow force, all flash and no substance.

Picking up on this, another panelist stated with authority that most Microsoft products, and indeed most American technologies generally, are junk, and have come to dominate world commerce solely through manipulative trade and advertising. These McProducts will be dashed, he suggested, once Europe gets its high-tech sector (which was sound asleep last I checked) in gear with superior European engineering. A short while later, a British professor pronounced doom on yet another of our industries, insisting gravely that America is going to be wholly uncompetitive in the biological sciences because "hardly any U.S. college students accept the reality of evolution," and science teaching in the U.S. "blinds students with dogmatism." No mention of American kids showing up at school barefoot in patched overalls, though I was ready for that.

Much of this would have made me laugh out loud, except that the vehemence and envy and certitude with which it was pronounced gave the proceedings an extremely ugly texture. Plus, these were European movers and shakers, not a bunch of pastry chefs. So it wasn't ignorance I was hearing. It was animus, jealousy, and willful spite.

With this experience under my belt, I wasn't the slightest bit surprised when the German elections this fall turned to high-stakes Yankee-bashing. First, Germany told the U.S. it wouldn't supply evidence against Zacarias Moussaoui (the "missing" September 11 hijacker) because he might get the death penalty. Then Chancellor Gerhard Schroder loudly vowed to obstruct further U.S. anti-terror efforts in the Middle East, for instance by pulling Germany's useful chemical-weapons-detecting vehicles out of Kuwait.

An "adventure" is how Schroder characterized President Bush's plans. This within a year of the snuffing out of 3,000 American lives in a single day by Middle Eastern radicals, and within weeks of when we would learn that North Korea has developed a nuclear bomb, while Saddam Hussein, killer of one million people, many of them with chemical weapons, could be just a few months or years from having one of his own. Schroder's fervor was such that he announced Germany would resist any plan to disarm Iraq even if the U.N. fully sanctioned the effort.