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The World's Schadenfreude
I watched teevee again to follow the events, and I got that impresssion too, even in small things like the I-Télé (ok, that's a lefist channel) anchorman's facial expression after showing policewimmen looting and complaining that only clothes remaining were children sizes... you could taste the schadenfreude(Tm).More than 50 countries have offered money, medicine and equipment for relief efforts along the American Gulf coast devastated by Katrina. While that generosity is welcome, we can't help but notice the finger-wagging and anti-Americanism that has also followed in the hurricane's wake. The gloating editorial in yesterday's Le Monde typified a common strand of European thinking. "At this moment, America discovers or rediscovers that she shelters the Third World in herself," the daily wrote. "'L'hyperpuissance,' as a former French foreign minister said [of the U.S.], in spite of its economic and military potential that it's quick to deploy abroad, is unable to handle a domestic catastrophe of this size." (The French, for the record, don't blame Bienville for founding New Orleans below sea level in the first place.) The BBC trotted out one of its veteran foreign correspondents, Charles Wheeler, who covered the 1960s race riots in the U.S. and declared, on the evidence of the TV footage from New Orleans, that "nothing has changed." In Saturday's Financial Times (of London), Edward Alden blamed the levee's break in New Orleans on Ronald Reagan and the "orthodoxy" of small government and low taxes. By this view, Katrina slew Reaganism; by another, Katrina ended the post-9/11 era, as if terrorism has suddenly stopped being a threat; and in yet others, it banished the myth of American greatness. "One storm and they're finished," a Londoner told CNN, talking about a hurricane that inundated an area the size of Great Britain. Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro took the opportunity to grandstand for the Third World. For the German Greens, Katrina was nature's revenge for America's refusal to sign the Kyoto "global warming" pact. For the world's Islamists, she was Allah's punishment of the infidels. "The terrorist Katrina is one of God's soldiers, although she's not an adherent of al Qaeda," Mohammed Youssef Al-Malaifi, a director at Kuwait's ministry of religious affairs, wrote in Al-Siyassa daily. We suppose such Schadenfreude is inevitable given America's economic vigor and current global dominance. The temptation to see the U.S. humbled is great, especially when that humbling can be exploited to justify assorted domestic political agendas and to bash a Bush Administration that is unapologetic about asserting U.S. power. That America has flaws is hardly breaking news, of course, least of all to Americans who debate their weaknesses endlessly in public and in a fashion the rest of the world can hear. In the weeks ahead, Americans will debate the handling of Katrina and adapt, as it always has, and we suspect the verdict that it is "finished" will prove to be as exaggerated as the glee at its temporary misfortune. Posted by: anonymous5089 2005-09-06 |
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