Los Angeles Times
September 27, 2004
"How is your baseball team doing?" I asked my young bank teller friend in
Vienna recently.
A small pause. "Tomorrow is our final game."
"Finished for the season?"
"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 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.
That
day Vienna — along with much of Europe — trembled for the hope
breathed by the word "America." An elastic, robust hope, lasting through war
and peace, through irritations and disappointments.
America has meant
promise to just about every age group and political species. It could inspirit
the European left because the U.S., whatever its imperial peccadilloes, was born
of a revolution that cast an exemplary glow on thrusts for change elsewhere.
Conservatives loved America for its entrepreneurial genius. The old admired the
climate, the spryness, the optimism of cities like Miami. As for the young, the
answer was blowing in the wind: It blew from the blue-jeaned latitudes of rock,
rap and cool.
If this rainbow array of hopes is indeed dying now, it
is not the terrorists but the recent cumulative acts of the United States itself
that are the slayers. What previously could have been excused as wild oats sown
by a young superpower ha ve now, unmistakably, hardened into systematic global
bullying. To Europeans of nearly every stripe, the statue in New York harbor
brandishes not a torch but a tommy gun. Lady Liberty has transmogrified into an
ominous colossus. Here is the ultimate Godfather, enforcing with missile and
aircraft carrier a protection racket on all seven seas. Here is an America
shrugging armored shoulders at the ozone hole, at collateral damage, at its own
poor, an America practicing domination in the name of freedom. Here is the land
of milk and honey turned into the fortress of bottom line and bomb.
Darkness glowers from a once bright beacon. Can it still change to light the
way again? The question hangs over much of Europe as America's election day
approaches. Its outcome will reach beyond politics; it might affect the
Continent's spiritual health. At stake is the survival of a source of
deliverance. Yes, in Vienna some young men are abandoning their baseball bats.
But perhaps they are not quite ready yet to mothba ll an icon cherished for so
long.