Post-Anti-Americanism

From Newsweek.

You can still buy an American newspaper at the kiosk in Rome’s Piazza Colonna, but you have to ask the lady behind the counter. She turns from the window, paws through a stack on the floor, and produces an International Herald Tribune, holding it at arm’s length like a day-old fish. It’s the same availability and tone in Venice, the Greek islands, and Istanbul. The implicit question in the transaction is always the same: why would you want to read that thing about that place at this time?
And when you read about America in European newspapers, what you are likely to find is a tone bordering on pity. The U.S. is depicted as a fraying empire of obesity, ignorance, debt, gridlock, stagnation, and mindless war. Sure, the iPad is cool, but it is evidence of what America was, not what it will be again. The stories are not angry, accusatory, or even ideological. It’s worse: they are condescendingly elegiac...