I hang out a lot on OS X Audio, a site dedicated to audio on the Mac. The news aren’t updated often enough, but the forums are very active.
Anyway, just before and after the US November elections, there were many heated threads debating US politics, some of which I eagerly participated in. (They eventually got way out of hand and got locked.)
At one point in one of these threads, a (French) poster suggested that maybe Hollywood action movies and such dumbed down the American psyche, while Europeans still cared about and promoted « high culture, » and he went on to quote Woody Allen’s « Thank god for the French » (which is definitely a tongue and cheek assertion in the context of his « Hollywood Ending » film). Then a Chomsky-quoting self-proclaimed « far leftist » came down hard on the poster because he had quoted Woody Allen, the pedophile who slept with his daughter!
So there you have, in a nutshell, the essence of the Atlantic divide: Europeans see Woody Allen first and foremost as a good or great author and filmmaker, while Americans, from the far-right to the far-left can agree that Woody Allen is the pervert who slept with his [adopted] daughter.
Over here in depraved old Europe (where politicians’ private lives are off-limits, and where nudity and « profanity » are not censored on the public airwaves or advertising billboards, etc, etc,), since Bush got reelected, it is as if the US have dropped off the face of the earth. I think the Europeans hearts are broken in a sense, they are in shock, in mourning. They can’t believe that the US people could be so misguided.
Personally, I don’t think Americans were misguided, in the sense that I think they knew exactly what they were doing. America is a real democracy and the majority knew who and what they were voting for. As for the 40% of the electorate who didn’t vote, they tacitly approved too. Which leaves less than 30% of the electorate that opposes Bush, sometimes vehemently, but that also often sounds like the religious right to the untrained European ear (see above example).
I saw this happen already during the Reagan-Bush Sr. years during which I was still living in the US.
So sorry, but I don’t blame Bush for being Bush (or Reagan for being Reagan). I hold Americans (myself included) responsible for their actions. And I feel sad that my kids will have to live with the consequences.