From Role Model to International Bully in Three Short Years

[papau]

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-morton27sep27.story

From Role Model to International Bully in Three Short Years
In September 2001, Europe wept for us. Now it won't even play baseball.
By Frederic Morton
Frederic Morton is author of "A Nervous Splendor: Vienna, 1888-1889," among other works. His memoir "Waltzing With My Father" will be published by Simon & Schuster next spring.

September 27, 2004

<snip>"Well, not just for the season," he said, looking down to count again, rather unnecessarily, the dollar bills he had just counted. "Uh, it's in view of what's been happening. I mean, I guess we're over that (baseball) phase. We're going back to soccer. It's hard to explain."

It wasn't hard, though. It was embarrassing. He knew I was an American from the dollars I always exchanged. And from our earlier talks, I knew what he meant. As he once put it, "Wir waren alle so Amerika-narrisch." We were all so America-crazy.

Other America-crazies started jazz clubs or formed a Bruce Springsteen posse; these young bankers rigged up a baseball diamond where the Alserstrasse Yankees could suit up against the Schwarzenberg Platz Red Sox. Now, "that phase" being over, they'd packed away bats, caps, catchers' mitts.

"That phase" began some two centuries ago. Ever since George Washington thrilled the Marquis de Lafayette, the United States has excited Europe as the forward edge of the Western way, as the engine of its modernity, as the prophet of its future.

Before Iraq, America's formidable appeal continued largely unabated. I never saw it embraced more ardently, poignantly, than on Sept. 12, 2001. I happened to be in Vienna, where from my hotel window I watched the entire city cry a collective tear for the America it was still crazy about. At the stroke of noon, all traffic froze. Nothing moved except long, black mourning banners unfurling from every government building as well as from many private houses. And the "Pummerin," the great bell of St. Stephen's Cathedral — a bell of ancient tradition that is so huge its swinging stresses the 15th century tower and is therefore rung just once a year, during midnight Mass on Christmas Eve — tolled a special requiem. Unforgettable, those plangent, plaintive peals echoed across a thousand roofs. <snip>