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Europeans are just so… so… so Old World
: Nick Denton takes on Glenn Reynolds over European anti-Americanism.
I grew up with anti-anti-Americanism. My parents — in the only instance in life in which I can think that they ever sounded like or agreed with Howard Stern — said the French were ungrateful swine after the world wars and that’s why we kids didn’t see Europe until we were grown and paid for it ourselves. This is ingrained in the American DNA more than you know.
Here is something ingrained in the American DNA: An overwhelming sense of loss and the belief of my father’s generation, rarely spoken, that nothing in Europe was worth the lives of the sons, brothers, fathers, and friends who died there.
Colin Powell said America had no territorial ambitions in Europe and we asked only for enough land to bury our dead. It surprised me when he said that because I heard in that a bitterness and the deep regret of my father’s generation for all that was lost.
Twice in the last century Americans died sorting out the affairs of those alleged adults. Never again. Screw Europe.