Strib - the Ugly Americans - Whilst eating at a cafe in sunny Toscano - oh, heh heh, excuse me, in English that's "TUS-cany", I'm sorry, I can hardly stop lapsing into Italian since my trip to Italy...did I mention I'd gone to Italy on holiday...er, that's "Vacation" in American? No? Oh, silly me! Yeeeesssss, Geoffrey and I went to Toscan...er, Tuscany for our anniversary! Oh, it was wonderful - everything we'd heard about on Splendid Table, and more!

And the locals? Soooo colorful. Not like in Rome - my goodness, what a tourist trap that was. Nooooo, TUScany was fabulous. Why, I even wrote about it in this week's editorial!

"Oh, don't mention that man to me," the woman in the restaurant said. "How he and his ilk got elected I'll never understand. He's a pure criminal. He certainly doesn't represent me. And to think that now the whole world is watching him!"

Another embittered Democrat, bewailing President Bush?

If it's on the Strib editorial page, the choices are pretty much:

1. Embittered Democrats bewailing Pawlenty,
2. Embittered Democrats bewailing talk radio,
3. Embittered Democrats bewailing any politician to the right of Martin Sabo,
4. Embittered Democrats bewailing George Bush.

But today, they go internazionale - er, I'm sorry, that's "international", in English...

Hardly. The speaker was Tuscan, the object of her ire Italy's Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. Just a few days into his half-year term as president of the European Union, the Italian leader was already aswim in controversy and calumny. To a person, Italians are rolling their eyes at the "honor" Berlusconi has claimed for their country. Some honor, to have Italy's chief bully and braggart, and conceivably its biggest crook, strutting on the European stage.

"To a person?" Polls, please?

And I'm trying to figure out which is funnier - that Italians, who are no more corrupt than any other people, but who institutionalized it more than any other western nation due to their rapacious trade unions and omnipresent Mafia connections, and whose flirtation with socialism and communism caused untold dislocation and misery, are complaining about Berlusconi any more than they did about any previous leader, or that the democratically elected Berlusconi is drawing the sort of universal excoriation the editoral claims.

That's how they seem to see it, and who can blame them? Italy's landscapes may be sunny, but its politics tell a dark story. No government seems able to hold on to power for more than a twinkling, and corruption in high places is almost de rigueur.

Take Berlusconi. Though the billionaire owns most Italian media outlets, his countrymen know very well their leader is a con man. They're well aware of his penchant for ducking taxes and pressing his thumbs on the scales of justice -- most recently by hectoring Italy's parliament into granting him immunity for pending bribery charges. Italians seem largely unsurprised. This bit of legerdemain, they know, was necessary to secure Berlusconi's opportunity to take over the rotating E.U. leadership.

"They"?

Who is this "They?" The Strib seems to think that a conversation in a Trattoria al Toscano...er, sorry, Tuscan cafe, gives them some broad mandate (and indeed, does the editorial source "they" at all?)

But of course it has also raised questions about his fitness to serve. And how has Berlusconi responded? Petulantly. One of his first moves was to make a Nazi jibe against a German parliament member.

Oh, dear. Those jibes again.

When the German labor minister made a Nazi "jibe" at President Bush, I don't recall this level of indignance. I guess only the jibee matters, huh?

The next part is where the Strib takes leave of its senses:

The E.U.'s new president has already said he'll focus his term on stemming immigration into Europe -- a pledge consistent with his xenophobic reputation.

And a pledge consistent with those of a large and growing part of the Euroean Electorate!

The Strib editorial board, driving from their offices high above downtown to their North Oaks ramblers, can not comprehend what immigration means in Europe. In America, immigrants move here, and after a generation or two, become Americans (despite the best efforts of the multiculturalists, whom the Strib supports). They can do that here - our culture is all about assimilation. You become American when you take the oath, learn the language, work at the job, and drop your ballot in the box.

It is impossible to become French, or German, or Italian. It's a connection passed on at birth. Immigrants do not assimilate - the cultures are not intrinsically equipped to accept them, and for the most part they do not want to be accepted. Immigrants in Europe live in neighborhoods apart from the rest of the society, speaking their own languages, eating their own foods, roaming the streets in their own gangs, reading their own newspapers. They form large, and increasingly disaffected, and unassimilable, minorities in many countries.

And across Europe, people are getting nervous - and electing more conservative governments who want to dial back the power and impact of immigrants. Italy, Hungary and Denmark have all elected more conservative governments; Germany's socialists held on by the skin of their teeth in the last elections, and state elections have been swinging consistently to the right. Some say only the murder of center-right Pim Fortuyn prevented his election last year in the Netherlands.

Across Europe, people are nervous about the power, the anger and the dissociation of immigrants.

But not, apparently, in the Strib's Tuscan cafe:

Berlusconi himself has said that "the West will continue to conquer peoples, even if it means a confrontation with another civilization, Islam."

Those aren't the words of a humanitarian or a democrat, nor of any sensible European.

One wonders if anyone who differs from the Strib's soft-left cant will ever be called "Sensible".

Europe teems with ethnic hatred; gangs of locals immolate families of Turkish workers; French skinheads torch synogogues; "Sensible" European intellectuals are condoning a rise in anti-semitism; and across the Adriatic from Italy, the inevitable end-result of multiculturalism has been playing out for the last decade, spattering the Balkans with blood (and sending refugees across the sea to Italy, yet again).

Who's sensible?

Europe's population is aging -- its birthrate dropping -- faster than that of any other continent. It desperately needs a thoughtful and continentwide immigration policy that welcomes young immigrant workers to join its enervated societies, underwrite its pension needs and advance its economic growth.

Right.

The Strib, however, misses the key fact that the European Union's "thoughtful, continentwide immigration policy" is that of the multiculti - bring in people, dump them in the cities, and let the hatreds keep on festering.

That's one way to "conquer peoples." Calling them Nazis is another. But neither approach appeals much to the ordinary Italian. And to the extraordinary experiment called the European Union -- a venture meant to strengthen and revitalize an innovation called democracy -- such vile volleys must surely be deemed a disgrace.

The EU is not meant to strengthen democracy; it's meant to strengthen bureaucracy. The elections of Berlusconi and the rise of the European center-right are what is "strengthening democracy", bringing two voices to the table even as the European Union tries to regulate which voices can say what.

Perhaps if the Strib's editorial board needs to spend a little more time in the Moslem ghettoes of Antwerp and Rotterdam and Milan and Vienna, and doing a little less time in cafes alla Toscano.

Er, sorry. That's "In Tuscany".

Laws of Physics, Part II - Some observations:

1. Gravity pulls downward.
2. Nature abhors a vacuum.
3. Systems will tend to conserve their energy.
4. In every Tom Clancy novel, every protagonist will have an unstoppable urge to resume a long-dormant smoking habit.

posted by Mitch Berg 8/18/2003 06:50:22 AM