The Zombies Among Us

Funny about all that Europhoria at the election of Barack Obama. The way it starts is that as soon as you respond to someone's question about being an American, they congratulate you. Then they dismissively lecture you after telling them that you didn't vote for the man.

Then, sooner or later, as if they let themselves not live in the third person for a moment, probably after the day's boozing has finally gotten to them, they spew some of the usual racist crap, or if they're sensitive, unwitting racist crap. All of this is, of course, supposed to be regarded as their divine illumination for our benefit.

The rest I leave to Denis Boyles

Le Monde seems to have wisely realized that the entire Obama campaign may have created a sky-high set of expectations that may result in "regrettable disappointments" — especially, the paper warns, if Obama is serious about adding troops to Iraq, or if he puts Europe in an "awkward" situation with Russia by helping Ukraine and Georgia join NATO, or if he slips into protectionism as an economic strategy — and that those who sing his praises loudest now may be howling loudest later.

Which along with a new myth which is forthcoming, probably something along the lines of what the CIA that controls AmeriKKKa will not let Obama do to remake us in the image they long since resigned, is the architecture of the next form of underlying hatred they will hold for all 300 million of us. As you know, we'll report – you decide. Further to that Boyles over-estimates the capacity at reason he sees in the "new realists" trying to talk the EUphorics down off of the ledge – their readers would be hard pressed to understand why in America a president could not simply declare socialization of health care, or as virtually everyone whom I've talked to about it seems to find of utmost national import, the doing away with having to fill out declaration forms on airliners entering the US – in other words, and as usual - them, which is the only kind of change they can believe in.

The gist here, if I'm not being clear, is that Le Monde, its readers, its bloggers, its coffee-drinking bureaucrats — the entire population of its small cosmos, in fact — are humming with an intensified version of the fervor that fills the tent just before the evangelist jumps to the pulpit. "With the 44th U.S. president, we reach the highest stage of worship, that accorded to God . . . Obama has already entered the pantheon. Soon, no doubt, he will perform miracles." Soon? Rousseau and Houdart must be kidding — and of course they are. This is meant to be arch humor, but something tells me not everyone gets the joke.

Funnier still at the fear of filling out a form, the same people who complain about this seem in abject ignorance their own casual references to "diese Schawrtzer" or the fact that a foreigner living in the EU faces a series of annual reporting requirements at the police station, and any other kind of window they can find. In the abstract, it's more akin to a round the clock rectal exam when you compare it to the "atmosphere" in America that they seem to so readily to whine about.

Nonetheless, they out that mask back on, and repeat what they think they should about the US just as they do in nearly every feature of their own lives as it relates to having an opinion heard by others.

There are only so many ways to say "I love you, Barry," so naturally a certain amount of contrarianism has already set in. Le Monde, in an editorial called "After the Euphoria," tried to dial back the rapture a little by wisely observing that in the election, race had been a secondary issue — at least for white voters — since Obama had been very careful during the campaign not to become "the candidate of blacks." Mostly because he didn't have to, but that's a salient point, since if he had run a campaign based on entitlement, he would have lost —

Which is funny, because between calling me a racist for voting McCain, having to listen to their own racism, and their childish inability to realize that race is not shorthand for any sort of ideology that they want it to be, I still wonder why the UR-Europeans can't get a life and stop trying to project their own internal social problems on the way they look at the rest of the world.