I've been Kos participant for almost two years now, and like all of us I've watched outrage after outrage unfold and then more often than not slip back into the memory hole. I've also been abroad in Europe for over a year, and have had plenty of opportunities to watch our "troubles" from a seat in the world to which we've so sadly turned our back.
As far as as the as the vast majority of the people here in Europe I've met are concerned, the primary sense is one of confusion and unease. They simply don't understand what kind of strange madness has overcome what had once been, despite misunderstandings and occasional differences, the closest of partners and friends. For the most part, however, they also understand that the problem is not our nation, but this administration, and look forward to the time when we can start to repair the relationship, and when the US can play the role in the world most Europeans want us and need us to play.
But also from afar, travelling mostly in Germany and Italy, natural thoughts of the travelling American keep coming to mind. Who are we as Americans? What makes us what we are, and what is it that perhaps distinguishes us from, for instance, Germans or Italians (not to be taken as better or worse)? And of course today, from the seaside Salerno, the figure of Mark Twain came to mind, and the many Innocents like myself that have followed in his footsteps. And it was then, for some reason, that the whole mess we've gotten ourselves into, and the crimes which brought us there, sprang into new relief for me. For while I've railed against those fellow, mostly blue state Americans, who have marched along to Bush's tune, I remembered today the reason most of them did it. Because like all of us Americans, they believed in the notion of something better coming along tomorrow, and they believed that Americans working together could make a safer place for themselves and in the middle east. And it struck me, of course, that this conviction was not bad in itself; indeed it is precisely that active engaged America Europeans dream of as well. So perhaps all our naivete, and yes perhaps innocence, isn't such a bad thing. No, the true crime perpetrated in the last several years is not American hopes, but the methodical way these admirable, if problematic, American traits have been warped into a messianism to serve the most corrupt and destructive ends by a jingoistic and greedy few. But if this is true, however horrible, it still may suggest that the ideological gap, between red and blue, is far thinner on many issues than many suppose. So, with the press starting to wake up, maybe the time has come to start finding ways to do the unthinkable and reach out to those parts of the American right have not completely traded away their once honorable conservatism for a cheap and bellicose Bushism. Just some thoughts...